over there. i am pleased to introduce edward dolnick. he grew up near boston and

dreamed of being a basketball player or a sayler. sailor. kind of sounds like my daughter. instead, he became the chief science writer for the boston globe. he later wrote for a number of magazines and then began to focus on books. he has written a number of award-winning books including "the rescue artist," "down the great unknown," which led to his selection to barnes & noble's discovery of great new writers, and a new york times bestseller. his latest book, "the clockwork universe," immerses us in be 17th century london, a dirty and what dangerous place with a few bright men who opened their minds to new ways of thinking about the world. they believed that a world well designed by god would follow simple, elegant rules, and they set out to find them. the work was done by robert hook, ed hand haley, robert boyle and most of all, isaac

newton. at the same time, they had competitors. newton was one of the most well known and the hardest to get along with. his feud with look in its -- they both discovered calculus -- lasts decades. newton hated sharing his discoveries, and when he did publish them, he did nothing to make his writing easy to read or to understand. lucky for us, edward dolnick does just the opposite, showing the reader the culture and thought of the period thereby making clear the workings and impact of the new discoveries. at the beginning of this book, the residents of london are afraid the end of the world is just around the corner, especially in 1666. but in the end their world improved. perhaps we can hope the same will happen in our century. welcome, edward dolnick. [applause]

>> well, thanks for that, and thanks for coming out on the last day of the world and sharing that with me. that's -- [laughter] a generous thing to do. it turns out, actually, that this business of the world coming to an end is going to be incredibly relevant. this is a book about the 1600s, but nonetheless, to my surprise, to my delight it turns out that that's a theme that comes into play. so we'll get to that. what i'm going to do is talk for about 20 minutes, and then i hope there'll be some questions. um, i want to talk about one of the strangest periods in human history. it was a time when the world lurched from something that would have bewildered us to something that we could just about begin to recognize. in the -- can you hear? can everybody hear? in the year 1600, an italian philosopher and mystic named bruno declared that the earth

was one of infinitely many planets. the inquisition threw him in jail, dragged him from his cell, paraded him through the streets, tied him to a stake and set him on fire to make sure that he didn't manage to utter any final heresies. they first drove a metal spike through his tongue. that was 1600. almost exactly a century later in 1705, the queen of england bestowed a knighthood on isaac newton. when newton eventually died, dukes and earlies carried his casket, and he was given what amount today a royal funeral. -- amounted to a royal funeral. among the achievements that won him universal fame was this: he had convinced the world of the doctrines that cost brew know his life. -- bruno his life. so sometime between those two events, the burning alive of bruno, and the hailing as a secular saint of isaac newton, somewhere between those two

events the world changed. i think it was around 1660 when the modern world was born. so i want to talk about history and science and new ideas. i want to talk about what it was like to look through a microscope or a telescope for the first time when nobody had ever done it, no one knew what you would see. but i don't want to talk about those ideas in the way that you usually hear about them because i think that the conventional way of talking about these ideas gets things wrong in an important way. when people talk about the scientific geniuses of past centuries, when they talk about isaac newton and galileo and these people, they tend to talk about them as if they were, they were time travelers. they were people who happened to wear funny wigs, but they thought just like us. they were like us, but they lived a long time ago. they were not just like us. take robert boyle.

boyle was perhaps the most eminent scientist in england in the generation just before isaac newton. he was immensely rich, a tall, skinny, kind-hearted man curious about nearly everything in the world. one of the things he was curious about was hangings. hangings in london in the 1600s were a big crowd pleers, a popular event. there were hanging days, eight of them a year. you'd get 20,000 spectators gathered around to see. rich people would sit in the bleachers, the poor would have to stand and jostle for space. the gallows could hold 24 swaying bodies at a time. nobody had any qualms about hangings, i should say. in this era there already were liberals and conservatives, but nobody was against hanging. the difference came to be that the liberals thought that if someone was being hanged, it was okay for his friends to rush up and grab him by the legs and tug

him down to speed up his death, to make for a merciful death. but the conservatives thought that was much too soft. they didn't, they didn't go for that. i thought this was supposed to be a punishment. so that's how things broke down. for most people the spectacle of a hanging was lure enough. but robert boyle knew better. one of the hangman's perks was the right to auction off souvenirs. the best souvenir of all was an executed man's severed hands because hands held death sweat, and death sweat had the power to heal. robert boyle, one of the titans in the pantheon of science, believed that death sweat was one of the most valuable weapons in the physician's arsenal. boyle and newton and all these other early scientists shared a mental landscape. they all lived precariously

between two worlds, the medieval one they'd grown up in, and a modern one that they had just begun to glimpse. these were brilliant, confused, conflicted, ambitious men. they believed in angels and alchemy and the devil, and they believed at the same time in a universe that was governed by precise mathematical law. if we could travel to the 1600s, a huge number of things would startle us; the piles of human waste blocking the streets, the body parts of executed criminals tacked up around town to keep in line -- [inaudible] with what you would see so much as what people believed. and one of the crucial differences between then and now was how our forebearers thought of god. this affected everything. the 1600s was a god-drenched

society. god was everywhere. nowadayses when something tragic happens, we try to console ourselves by saying everything happens for a reason. but for our forebearers, it was literally the case that everything happened for a reason. and the reason was always the same, god willed it so. everything, great or small, reflected god's will. even today our insurance policies talk about earthquakes and floods as acts of god, but for our forebearers everything was an act of god. scientists believed that just as deeply as everyone else. the expression, it just so happens, wouldn't have made any sense to them. so that was one aspect of this all-pervasive belief in god, there couldn't be anything that just happened. but there was another side of things that was just as important if we're to understand the mental world that our ancestors lived in. and that was this: this was a god-fearing society in the most

literal sense of the word. the world was a terrifying place. we live with such watered-down versions of these doctrines that you can hardly picture what it was like way back for our forebearers. for us damn and hell are the mildest of oaths, it's seuss bl to -- suitable to stubbing your toe, to spilling a drink. for our ancestors hell was a real, terrifying place, and to be damned was to suffer the most gruesome fate imaginable. every detail had been thought up for maximum horror. the point of burning eternally, for instance, wasn't simply that you burned alive, but that you did burn eternally. your flesh was never consumed, so the pain would never ease. god watched over every sparrow that falls, and he watched over each of us, and he wasn't too pleased with what he saw. some of you will remember jonathan edwards'er sermon,

sinners in the hand of an angry god. edwards would look down at his cowering congregation -- you may play the cowering congregation -- [laughter] the god that holds you over the pit of hell much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire abhors you and is dreadfully provoked. his wrath towards you burns like fire. he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. he is of pure eyes than to bear to have you in his sight. you are 10,000 times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful serpent is in ours. now, that was standard doctrine. what did it have to do with science? what it had to do with science was this, the mission of science was to study god's handy work, to pay homage to his creation. every feature of the world -- why there's one sun and not two, why the ocean is salty, why lobster is delicious, why one

person died of plague and another survived -- everything represented an explicit decision by god. since he had fashioned the universe in its every aspect, to do science meant to read the mind of god. thatthere was no separating scie from religion. and that meant, among other things, that the job of a scientist was to study the bible just as much as it was to study the natural world. both were the works of god, both offered up clues to his meaning just as every twig in the natural world was a symbol of something if you could interpret it correctly. so was every word in the bible. the bible wasn't a literary work to be interpreted according to your taste, but a cipher, a code book with one meaning that could be decoded by an analyst who was sufficiently brill yafnlt -- brilliant. isaac newton spent as much time decoding the bible looking for concealed messages in the things like the dimensions of the temple of solomon or the tower

of babel, that kind of thing, as he ever did studying the gravity of light. and he thought his biblical work was at least as important as his science. here's newton, for instance, trying to match up the book of revelations we vents in world history. the fourth beast had great iron teeth. that's newton quoting revelation, and devoured and breaking pieces and stamped the residue with his feet. in this newton tells us this was the roman empire. to us it sounds crazy, but that's not the point. the point is that newton and all his peers believed that the universe was a cosmic code, and their task was to break that code. in the 1660s newton and all his fellow scientists were poring over their bibles, and what they saw terrified them. everybody knew that the bible talked about a day of judgment. the question wasn't if world was going to end, but when.

the answer, it seemed, was soon. very soon. maybe today. [laughter] one difference i should, i should emphasize is that this was isaac newton and other absolute titans of science announcing these beliefs. this was not fringe stuff. this was not merely mainstream, but the absolute vanguard, the best and the brightest were proclaiming these truths, the world is about to end. i should say that one reason this was so plausible was that nobody at the time believed in the idea of progress. the very sign terrorists -- scientists whose work would transform the world didn't believe in it. what everyone did believe was that the world had been falling apart ever since adam and eve and, lately, that fall had begun picking up speed. newton and his peers had done all sorts of numerical calculations based on passages in the bible, and they all seemed to come up with a date of

around 1660 for the end of the world. and that fear, as i say, was widespread, spread for the most part by intellectuals, but pervading the entire culture. the bible talked about the signs that would foretell the last days; war and misery on earth, it said, and chaos in the heavens. and people looked around. you had the 30 years' war in germany. it's a bland name, but 30 years is an astonishing event. you had plague rampant in europe, devastating one city after another. in england there were reports of all sorts of strange, monstrous birds, hideous, misshapen creatures, and everyone knew that was a surefire sign of god's wrath. and then in the fall of 1664 a comet appeared overhead. this was disaster. literally, disaster. the word disaster, the dis part,

the root dis is the same as your disfavor, and the aster a star or comet. a comet was cosmic bad news. it was a messenger like a lightning bolt except longer lasting, supposedly kindled by god's red-hot anger. night after night, week after week this comet hung in the sky, people panicked. finally, the comet disappeared, and then in march 1665 only a couple of months later a second comet appeared. a month later a young bureaucrat, english bureaucrat named samuel peeps made a curious entry in his diary. first, he described his dinner which was delicious, and then the state of his finances which was cheery. and then he added a somber note: great fears of the sickness here in the city, god preserve us all.

the sickness was bubonic plague, the black death. for a thousand years, it had raged up and then died down. london had been spared for nearly 50 years, now it had jumped the channel from europe. peeps kept a record. in june in london about 100 deaths a week, in the july a thousand. by the end of august, 6,000 a week. whole families died overnight, priests in perfect health went to comfort dying men and died next to them. doctors keeled over next to their patients. there were too many deaths for individual burials. death carts rattled along empty streets in search of bodies. mournful cries of bring out your dead rang out. the english recalled the words of ing edward iii -- king edward iii, eyewitness to an earlier epidemic. a just god now visits the sons of men and lashes the world. by the time it ended late in

1665, the plague had claimed about a fifth of london's population, 100,000 lives. now it was 1666. this was an especially ominous year because of the 666 in the date, the mark of the beast. and in 1666 another calamity, the great fire of london. the fire burned out of control for four days, 100,000 people were left homeless, scores of churches burned to the ground, iron bars in prison cells melted. the stunned survivors stumbled through the ruins and gazed about in horror where a great city had stood just days before, one eyewitness lamented, there is nothing to be seen but heaps of stones. and so you can hardly blame england's trembling citizens for thinking that the end of the world was nigh. but we now know that they had the story exactly backwards. the 16660 -- 1660s didn't mark

the end of time, but the beginning of the modern world. in the midst of chaos and calamity, a handful of geniuses looked around and saw perfect order, looked at and worked in the right way, they insisted the universe was not only a machine, but a perfect machine, an intricate clockwork. as i say, all this came to a head around the year 1660. in that year a group of men gathered at a mansion in london, pushed their way into a big room with a big fireplace, a big table and several wooden benches. this was a grab bag collection of geniuses and eccentrics -- often the same person -- but they had a grand name. this was the royal society of london, today renowned -- [laughter] we have admirers of the royal society of london.

>> oh, sorry. so these strange men were the royal society. actually, despite the august title the group bore a striking resemiblens to a bunch of very smart, very rowdy cub scouts. they were always mixing things together and throwing them into the fireplace in the hope something would explode, make a lot of noise. one of the leaders of the group, robert hook, who was a small, twisted, bad-tempered, brilliant man who could build anything. and hook figured out a way that you could pump the air out of a bell jar. the bell jar was a gigantic hit. the men of the royal society were perpetually putting candles and then more excitingly snakes

and mice and chicken inside the jar and seeing what would happen when you pumped out the air. to their bewilderment, some animals died right away, some animals took a while longer to die. what was the magic ingredient that animals needed in order to live, and how come some animals needed more of it than others? the bell jar was a guaranteed crowd pleaser. hook managed to make such a giant version that he could climb into it i'm sorry. it malfunctioned. it broke down before he could manage to kill himself, but he did, he did stagger out dizzy and deaf, and that was considered the next best thing. [laughter] all the experiments had this anything-goes quality. one day everybody gathered around the table at the royal society to see if it was true that if you took powdered unicorn horn and spread it in a circle and then dropped a spieder in the middle of the circle, would it be true that

the spider wasn't able to make his way out as everyone knew? to their disappointment, it turned out not to be true. they chased the spider around the room, gathered him up, put him back. but time after time he managed to escape. the point is that brilliant ideas and crackpot schemes were all mixed together. a meeting of the royal society might start with a lecture on spiders and unicorns, and then the next speaker would be christopher wren talking about sat turn and astronomy -- saturn and astronomy. there's a couple of features to note here. one is that almost nothing was settled. this was an era when nearly any question you could ask was new and bewildering. why do flames burn? why do rocks fall? nobody knew. we tend to underestimate just how revolutionary the royal society's approach to these questions was. the society adopted a latin motto that meant roughly don't take anyone's word for it. to us it sounds like the merest common sense.

but in its day that wasn't just a new idea, but a positively bizarre idea. of course you took someone's word for it. the way to learn something was defined what an expert had said about it before. to seek to investigate a question for yourself made no sense. it would be as if you were on an ocean voyage, and your plan was to grab the wheel from the captain and steer your own course. for us new is a word of praise, and new and improved are practically a team. in the 1600s new meant untried and dubious. people in the 1600s felt about new ideas the way we feel about a parking place right in front of a restaurant that we want to go to. that can't be right, that can't be legal, there's got to be trouble. worse than that, to look for yourself and to think for yourself was to verge on heresy. the mark of a devout person was

that he literally took things on faith. for a thousand years the church had said so explicitly. the reason god was called almighty was that he could do things that seemed impossible. so curiosity and skepticism weren't virtues, they were signs of bad character. one theologian at the time delivered a furious condemnation of these impossible-to-please scientists. if wisest men in the world tell them that they see it, if christ and his apostles tell them that they see it f god himself told them that he sees it, yet all this does not satisfy them unless they may see it for themselves. one reason that scientists of the day were willing to stand up to attacks like that was that they had seen something astonishing. they'd caught on to god's true nature. not only was god the creator, but he was a particular kind of creator. god was a mathematician. this was new. the greeks had honored

mathematics above all other forms of knowledge because mathematical truths are indisputable and eternal. the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees today, and they did a thousand years ago, and they will a thousand years from now. no other knowledge has that certainty. and besides that, the greeks found mathematics beautiful. beautiful, not useful. in a society based on slavery, to call an idea useful would have been to sully it because manual labor was not the domain of intellectuals. to call an idea useful would have been like praising a sculpture by saying it would also make a good doorstopper. so for greeks this had nothing to do with religion. the greek gods weren't mathematicians. zeus was too busy chasing hera to bother with geometry. but when the scientists of the 1600s looked around them, they

found geometry turning up in the places that the greeks had never managed. if you shoot an arrow into the sky or throw a rock, scientists found it travels in a pair ab la. if you trace a planet's path, you get an i ellipse. those were euclid's shapes, but he had never imagined they would turn up in this concept. it was as if someone had flung a gigantic diagram from a geometry textbook across the sky. newton and his peers looked at those discoveries, and they made a giant leap. in the some of its aspects, nature follows mathematical laws. therefore, in all of its aspects nature follows math mathematical laws. newton and galileo and the others found a handful of golden threads, and they inferred the existence of a golden tapestry. the astonishing fact is that that unfounded faith, that

presumptuous belief about what god was up to would, in time, transform the world. let's stop there. thank you. [applause] if there are questions, that would be a good thing, and can i'm told that questioners ought to use the mic. >> obviously, scientists today have to be more specialized. no one can know as much about everything as the people did in the 17th century. but do you think scientists are still making great leaps, or was there something special about that time where people could just be more thoughtful and imaginative? >> well, it's an awfully good question. it so happens that this group of talents, there was a small band of astonishingly brilliant men,

newton and the others, kind of like the founding fathers in american history. i wouldn't, on the other hand, finish that comparison and say that today's scientists are like today's politicians. today's scientists are awfully able as well. but early on one of the astonishing features was that it was still possible, as you say, to know everything or just about. and the same scientist would be an astronomer and a mathematician and a biologist and an oceanographer. for better or worse, you probably can't do that today. there isn't anyone who could claim to know everything. is there another -- >> um, i was wondering about the religion of the scientists. it seemed like in that time rome didn't particularly encourage

scientific thought, and i wondered how that affected their processes and how they managed to untether themselves from that if they needed to. >> well, that's a terrific question. the question was about religion and science. um, galileo is the great italian scientist. remember, he runs afoul of the inquisition. he dies inhouse arrest for proclaiming -- in house arrest for proclaiming truths that the church found unpalatable. as a mnemonic device, the year that galileo dies in prison in italy is the year that newton is born in england. and it so happens -- and not by coincidence -- that italy which had been in the vanguard of science now becomes a back water. and england which has been on the fringe now becomes front and center, the heart of the scientific revolution. and the reason for this, as much as you can give a reason to such

sweeping change, is that in italy science had set itself up -- or the church had set itself up as the enemy of science. these were two different messages about what was true, and you had to pick one or the other. in england the church took a much smarter approach that it would ally itself with science, the great truths of science were not, were not contradictory, were not hostile to religious truths but merely showed the greatness of god's creation. and to in england all the -- and so in england all the scientists were terribly devout men. they absolutely were fervent believers, and the church was fine with that because the effect was to demonstrate the magnificence of the creation. is there another question? >> um, how much would you say that the, um, that the beginning

of colonies in the new world and the exploration -- the age of exploration had to do with influencing these, these men to look further than what they had been taught? >> um, it's a terrific question. what did the age of exploration have to do with the scientific explorations? and what they had to do was that people at the time took them to be, to be underlining exactly the same moral. if you get a ship, if you get in a ship and sail beyond the seas, you find whole, undreamed of continents. and if you look through a microscope at the humblest drop of pond water, you find new worlds, new lives, unimagined discoveries at every hand. so, so the explorers of the 1600s, the scientists of the 1600s thought that the same message was coming from their work. no matter where you looked, there were more things in the universe than had ever been dreamed of. and one curious feature is that

makes to our mind some of the most hard-headed scientists in the world were incredibly credulous and naive. they believed in mermaids, they believed in life on other planets, they believed in lock necessary monster -- loch ness monster kind of things. why not? they'd seen more astonishing thing in every day's newspaper. >> um, i've just finished reading several books that seem like your book is almost a basis for these. recent books on priestly and the discovery of air and the age of wonder and those books like that who talk about the things after your, after your situation where priestly came along. it seems they were just based on coming out of the era that you're talking about. i just wonder if this whole

genre of books is popular now, and is this an era that you see is really lifting you up? because you can, you can, you can explain this very well for the layman. >> well, there are these peculiar trends in books as well as everything else, you know? certain colors become terribly in or ties are skinny or fat. [laughter] it's hard to explain just what it is in this a particular era that makes people interested in one thing or another. you're certainly right, there is a resemblance about these books of, which try to tie science together with what was going on in the greater world. um, historically what happens is that these men like newton were so successful in what they say

if you look at the world in my way things that seem chaotic now make perfect sense. for the next two or three hundred years, people were so carried away by that. someday there will be a newton of psychology and of economics and of sociology, we will fine the laws of human behavior, we will make -- instead of having armies and crazy arguments, we'll sort things out from first principles, and things will make sense, and everyone will be able to agree. it's because of newton's success that that idea which now seems ludicrous to us had a 200 or so year run. and the people that you talk about, the summits of these other -- subjects of these other books were the intellectual descendants of newton inspired by his example whose aim was to take what he had cone in physics -- done in the physics and broaden it to new fields. we have time for one last question if there is one. >> hi. i've been read ago lot about

alchemy recently, and i was interested in newton's involvement with alchemy and how much you think it might have affected his way of seeing the universe. >> the question was about newton and alchemy. a lot of people when they talk about things like this, it's a bit embarrassing because newton is the great exemplar of pure rationality, and yet he believed in -- if you took eye of newt and ear of bat and mixed them together, you would create a potion that would make you immortal. the wonderful thing is he did believe it. newton was this centaur, this half and half creature, half medieval and half modern. he believed in alchemy. to modernize, this was work that -- except to the extent that it led to chemistry -- was a complete dead end, the eye of bat stuff, year upon year of experiment never yielded anything. but he thought he was after the greatest secrets of them all.

um, to modern eyes nothing came of it. to newton, this was a crucial part of his investigations of nature. let's stop this. thanks very much. let's stop there. thank yous very much. [applause]????