Lavoisier; Fourier; Faraday by Michael Faraday
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m not sure why I read this. Read about half of it, although towards the end I got lazy. Whats interesting is that these three books are included as “great books” but they are in fact dated. If anyone were to read this, it wouldn’t be for the content in it. We have here, Fourier’s “Analytic Theory of Heat”, Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry” and Faraday’s “Experimental Researches in Electricity” all of which are founding books of modern science but definitely dated by contemporary standards.
Still, with this we get very intelligent men documenting what they did, what others did, what they found and the methods they used to explore their separate areas of interest. While they still call themselves “philosophers” of natural philosophy, not yet making the distinction between philosophy and science, we get very little conjecture about the materials they work with. (Faraday towards the end of one of his letters, can’t resist contemplating that atoms “touch” each other. He outlines this in a really interesting way.) Really they talk mostly about process.
So the lesson here, if there is one, is that material practice generates knowledge. What makes these books great aren’t merely their methodology in the lab but also their strict mental disciplines, to just stick with what they are doing and logically ponder, what if I do this? What do I find? What if I do this? What do I find? There are strange conclusions. For example, Lavoisier believes that all plants are made of charcoal, since that’s what’s always left when you burn them and remove other elements from the plants. So he thinks charcoal is already in the plants to begin with since he didn’t add it. Okay, we can see where he’s going with that. But this is what I mean. Despite not having the wealth of understanding we have today to back up what one needs to do, these men went ahead and forged a large part of that understanding. Their mechanical methods leads to the mechanical science we have today because the mehcanical manipulations are immanent to the knowledge that is produced.
A great example is Fourier’s relatively tiny book. Most of his analytical theory has to do with decomposing heat in its movement, dissipation and collection through solids, liquids and airs. As he states early on, such an examination wouldn’t be possible without MATH. So math he applies, and boy does he apply it. He uses analytic geometry with calculus to describe the rate of change point by point, atom by atom as a derivative in order to organize his theory. This is brilliant! You can see how this book was widely influential in how other natural philosophers could then objectively compare notes and make predictions. Fourier, however, does not mistake the metric for the material. He doesn’t claim that math is more real than the reality he measures, as some physicists might do today. He does end his book on the general implications of his analytics. This is basically a recasting of length, time, conductivity and so on in terms of each other. He relates them as functions of each other and in this pure mathematical sense, it’s hard to argue with the formalism. You can see how people might eventually construe that math is more real than the materials. But the analytics was measured in terms of these units (time, conductivity/specific heat, length) because that’s what we have here to figure out how fast heat can travel through material. The basic units are given so their relation is formalized to begin with.
Ah! Objectivity and specific experimentation give us the very building blocks we find later on, abstracted in a general sense to one another.
I will say this. It’s not exciting reading for the most part. And these guys do not know how to end a book. Their endings usually conclude with a finding, a small detail left trailing. I guess in a way, since knowledge is incomplete, this is as a good as any a place to stop.
