The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [56]
New natural sciences sprang up, born of this ability to standardise the image and description of the world. The earliest examples took the form of reprints of the classics. Soon, however, Europeans began describing the contemporary world around them. In Zurich Gesner began compiling his compendium of all the animals ever mentioned in all the printed texts he knew. He published four books in 1557. Meanwhile, in 1530, Otto Brunfels had produced his book on plants, Herbarum vivae eicones. In 1535 Pierre Belon of Le Mans published Fish and Birds. In 1542 came the Natural History of Plants by Leonard Fuchs. Four years later Georg Bauer’s work on subterranean phenomena was published under his pen-name of Agricola. In 1553, Bauer, who was inspector of mines in Bohemia, produced the great De Re Metallica (On Metals).
Gesner’s Historia Animalium was one of the first of the new definitive texts describing aspects of nature. This illustration is of an aurochs, or wild ox.
An illustration from Brunfels’ Herbarum. The illustrations were, for the first time, taken from nature rather than from previous authors’ works. Note that though the text is in Latin, the name of the plant is the more commonly known German version.
Printing changed the entire, backward-looking view of society, with its stultifying respect for the achievements of the past, to one that looked forward to progress and improvement. The Protestant ethic, broadcast by the presses, extolled the virtues of hard work and thrift and encouraged material success. Printing underlined this attitude. If knowledge could now be picked up from a book, the age of unquestioned authority was over. A printed fifteenth-century history expressed the new opinion: ‘Why should old men be preferred to their juniors when it is possible, by diligent study, for young men to acquire the same knowledge?’
The cult of youth had begun. As young men began to make their way in the new scientific disciplines made possible by standardisation of textual information, it was natural for them to explore new areas of thought. Thus was born the specialisation which is the lifeblood of the modern world. The presses made it possible for specialists to talk to specialists and enhance their work through a pooling of resources. Researchers began to write for each other, in the language of their discipline: the ‘gobbledegook’ of modern science. And with this specialised interchange came the need for precision in experiment. Each author vied with his fellow-professionals for accuracy of observation, and encouraged the development of tools with which to be more precise. Knowledge became something to be tested on an agreed scale. What was proved, and agreed, became a ‘fact’.
Printing gave us our modern way of ordering thought. It gave us the mania for the truth ‘in black and white’. It moved us away from respect for authority and age, towards an investigative approach to nature based on the confidence of common, empirical observation. This approach made facts obsolete almost as soon as they were printed.
In removing us from old mnemonic ways of recall and the collective memory of the community, printing isolated each of us in a way previously unknown, yet left us capable of sharing a bigger world, vicariously. In concentrating knowledge in the hands of those who could read, printing gave the intellectual specialist control over illiterates and laymen. In working to apply his esoteric discoveries the specialist gave us the rate of change with which we live today, and the inability, from which we increasingly suffer, to communicate specialist ‘facts’ across the boundaries of scientific disciplines.
At the same time, however, the presses opened the way to all who could read to share for the first time the world’s collective knowledge, to explore the minds of others, and to approach the mysteries of nature with confidence instead of awe.
The immensities of intergalactic space