The Hindu Business Line : When science moved into public arena

Until the first quarter of the 18th century, science had been a hobby or an eccentricity which no sensible person chose as a career. But from about then, this changed..

The benefits, wonders and eventually the miraculous aspects of applied science took hold by the middle of the 19th century.

T. C. A. Srinivasa-Raghavan

Given how many hundreds of books have been written on the history of science, browsers in a bookshop or a library may well hesitate to pick up this book. Yet, as we often discover, the value of a book lies not in the whole but a part of it. Trouble is, until you have leafed through it you don’t get to find out which that part is.

This is true of this book as well. Much of it goes over well-trodden ground, and not in an especially entertaining way. Journalists do a better job of such books.

But there are seven chapters in it, contained in a section called ‘Institutions’, that are a must-read for every thinking Indian. They provide some pointers to where India may have failed in becoming a major contributor to science.

The first of these tells us what happened in England middle of the 17th century. Scientific enquiry, and the activity that accompanies it, began moving from the private into the public sphere. But the author fails to explain adequately why this happened, what impelled it.

Into public sphere

It seems prior to the mid-17th century, scientific enquiry and discussions were mostly confined not only merely to the Oxford and Cambridge colleges but to just the rooms of the men who found science worth the trouble. It couldn’t get more private than that.

But for unexplained reasons, from then on, in a gradual but inexorable movement, science moved into the public sphere. The first major development was the formation of the Royal Society in 1660, the year monarchy was restored in England after the disastrous experimentation with republicanism in the previous 11 years.

By mid-18th century, in what turned out to be a pan-European movement, science had firmly moved into the public arena which means that even though much of its funding came from private sources — why? — debates and results came out in the public domain. From then on, increased public funding was only a matter of time even though Kings and Queens could be notoriously stingy.

The author, however, fails to tell us how much of this money was well spent and how much of it wasted. This is important because it has now been shown that as much as 95 per cent of the money that goes into funding scientific research never yields any direct results but that it does have a huge positive impact on the remaining 5 per cent, the bit that changes the world. AIDS research is a good example of this, as is the Internet.

Organising knowledge

As the body of scientific knowledge increased in the years and decades that followed, the need to classify and categorise it came to be increasingly felt. The next chapter in the section is devoted to this.

It describes how the process started, developed, took hold, and eventually became the guiding principle of the Western approach to knowledge. Unorganised knowledge was no knowledge at all. This was also the time when not just classification and categorisation but also measurement came into its own.

Observe, measure, classify, and categorise — that became the formula. The English scientists led the way. By the end of the 18th century, England was as ahead of the others as the US is today, at least a generation from the closest competitor.

The next chapter tells us of the completely unexpected consequence these developments had. Until the first quarter of the 18th century, science had been a hobby or an eccentricity which no sensible person chose as a career. But from about then, this changed. People actually started to choose science as a career.

That, says the author, had another interesting consequence. As the number of scientists grew, and their findings and views came more and more into the public domain, the old Establishment, its concerns and views were increasingly challenged. By the end of the 18th century, science had become the way to test long-held social views.

Era of technologists

But if careers had to be paid for, there had to be someone to pay for what science produced. This is the subject matter of the next chapter where the author describes how science began to be applied to commercial uses.

Progress was slow to start with, but as the benefits, wonders and eventually the miraculous aspects of technology — applied science — took hold by the middle of the 19th century, applied science had overtaken pure science in the popular imagination. The era of the technologist was born, and still dominates the world.

All this had enormous social implications. People began to ask for scientific methods to be applied to the branches of governance. No longer would traditional wisdom do; decisions had to be based on reason, not faith, rationality, not convention.

All this happened in the latter half of the 19th century. India benefited from it in the sense that a large body of opinion grew that science, not custom, should form the bedrock on which the principles by which India would be governed were based.

India dozes

Any Indian who reads this book, let alone writes about it, will inevitably turn to the index to see how often India is mentioned. Only twice, is the answer.

That may be a little unfair but not entirely so. From about the 15th century onwards, scientific enquiry in India ceased. The last in the line was the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics, of which Madhava was the leading light. The members were mostly mathematicians and invented calculus long before Newton and Leibnitz did. The book does not mention them, or many other similar Indian achievements.

Be that is it may, the fact does remain: from then until the 20th century, when science was taking off in a big way in Europe, India dozed. Some science historian should find out why.

This is a new, fortnightly column of reviews of books on economics, history, politics, science and current affairs. Publishers may send their books to the Chief of Bureau, The Hindu Business Line, PTI Building, 3rd Floor, Parliament Street, New Delhi 110001.

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