The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [117]
The Grand Design. The plan of Versailles perfectly expressed the late-seventeenth-century view: symmetrical, ordered and complete.
Fit to Rule
Outside Los Angeles International Airport recently stood a billboard advertising a product with the words: ‘Beautiful. Because it’s new’. This eagerness for change is entirely modern. We live with an expectation that science and technology will continue to enhance the material quality of life just as they have for the past hundred years.
The rate at which this continues to happen has led to the remark that if you understand something today, it must already be obsolete. The modern thirst for novelty is an expression of optimism reflecting confidence in our ability to control nature. At any moment in the modern world we are better equipped to deal with the world than man was at any previous time.
We live in the best of all possible worlds. We feel, in some way, that history has been a series of purposeful events leading to this latest statement of man’s advance, the world of today. We tend to view those who lived in the past, or contemporary societies which lack the materialistic sophistication of our own, as less intelligent than ourselves. By the same token the future will, for similar reasons, be more advanced.
We trust our own abilities because for most of us there is no supernatural being to take responsibility for our existence. We alone shape our destiny and that of everything on the planet, because we are the highest form of life in existence. From this position of temporary perfection we view the unending discoveries of science with equanimity, for while we recognise the immensity of the cosmos we are confident in man’s own equally unlimited curiosity to understand it.
The self-confidence of modern society is rooted in a belief in progress which came to us in relatively recent times. While man has always hoped that in some way the quality of life might improve, the present expectation that it will do so arose principally as a result of events at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the thought first arose that God might have made a mistake at the time of Creation.
The Bradshaw family in the late eighteenth century. Nature serves only as a backdrop to the ordered, urban existence of this comfortable upper-middle-class English family.
When this possibility became evident it seemed as if everything might fall apart. The ruling view of the cosmos at the time was Newtonian. His universe was one of order and symmetry. God had initially set the world in motion and its continued existence was proof of the inherent balance in all things. As the English theologian William Paley put it, everything was in its place and there was a place for everything.
In the eighteenth century this sense of underlying balance expressed itself in Palladian façades, in the serenity of Haydn’s sonatas, in the secure, middle-class portraits of Joshua Reynolds, and in Charles Bridgeman’s ordered gardens. Man, the social animal, lived an orderly existence. Society was neatly graduated. Self-interest and the social contract gave purpose and structure to life. As for nature, its apparent lack of discipline was only superficial, part of a grander design in the mind of God.
It was to reveal this design that a young Swedish naturalist called Carl von Linn (generally known by his pen-name of Linnaeus) began the first great catalogue of animals and plants which culminated in the publication in 1752 of Philosophia Botanica, written in Latin, in which he classified all plants according to class, genus and species. He used a binomial system: the first name identifying the genus, the second the species. Linnaeus spent most of his life teaching natural history at the university of Uppsala, and