My title, “The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier,” is a double entendre. The modern meaning of passion, “overmastering zeal or enthusiasm,” is a latecomer. The word entered our language from the Latin verb for suffering, particularly for suffering physical pain. The Saint Matthew and Saint John Passions of J. S. Bach are musical dramas about the suffering of Jesus on the cross. This essay, therefore, focuses upon the final and literal passion of Lavoisier. (Anyone who has ever been disappointed in love—that is, nearly all of us—will understand the intimate connection between the two meanings of passion.)
But I also wanted to emphasize Lavoisier’s passion in the modern meaning. For this supremely organized man—farmer-general; commissioner of gunpowder; wall builder; reformer of prisons, hospitals, and schools; legislative representative for the nobility of Blois; father of the metric system; servant on a hundred government committees—really had but one passion amidst this burden of activities for a thousand lifetimes. Lavoisier loved science more than anything else. He awoke at six in the morning and worked on science until eight, then again at night from seven until ten. He devoted one full day a week to scientific experiments and called it his jour de bonheur (day of happiness). The letters and reports of his last year are painful to read, for Lavoisier never abandoned his passion—his conviction that reason and science must guide any just and effective social order. But those who received his pleas, and held power over him, had heard the different drummer of despotism.
Lavoisier was right in the deepest, almost holy, way. His passion harnessed feeling to the service of reason; another kind of passion was the price. Reason cannot save us and can even persecute us in the wrong hands; but we have no hope of salvation without reason. The world is too complex, too intransigent; we cannot bend it to our simple will. Bernard Lacépède was probably thinking of Lavoisier when he wrote a closing flourish following his passage on the great asymmetry of slow creation and sudden destruction:
Ah! Never forget that we can only stave off that fatal degradation if we unite the liberal arts, which embody the sacred fire of sensibility, with the sciences and the useful arts, without which the celestial light of reason will disappear.
The Republic needs scientists.
25 | The Godfather of Disaster
LEMUEL GULLIVER, marooned by pirates on a small Pacific island, lamented his apparently inevitable fate: “I considered how impossible it was to preserve my life, in so desolate a place; and how miserable my end must be.” But then the floating island of Laputa appeared and he rode up on a chain to safety.
The Laputans, Gulliver soon discovered, were an odd lot, with an ethereal turn of mind well suited to their abode. Their thoughts, he noted, “are so taken up with intense speculation” that they can neither speak nor hear the words of others unless explicitly roused. Thus, each Laputan of status employs a “flapper” who gently strikes the ear or mouth of his master with an inflated bladder full of small pebbles whenever his lordship must either attend or answer.
The Laputans are not catholic in their distractions; only music and mathematics incite their unworldly concentration. Gulliver finds that their mathematical obsession extends to all spheres of life; he obtains for his first meal “a shoulder of mutton, cut into an equilateral triangle; a piece of beef into rhomboides; and a pudding into a cycloid.”
But mathematics has its negative side, at least psychologically. The Laputans are not lost in a blissful reverie about the perfection of circles or the infinitude of pi. They are scared. Their calculations have taught them that “the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet…and that the next, which they have calculated for one and thirty years hence, will probably destroy [them].” The Laputans live in fear: “When they meet an acquaintance in the morning, the first question is about the sun’s health; how he looked at his setting and rising, and what hopes they have to avoid the stroke of the approaching comet.”
Jonathan Swift, as usual, was not writing abstract humor in reciting the Laputans’ fear of comets. He was satirizing the influential theory of a political and religious enemy, William Whiston, handpicked successor to Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. In 1696, Whiston had published the first edition of a work destined for scientific immortality of the worst sort—as a primer of how not to proceed. Whiston called his treatise A New Theory of the Earth from its Original to the Consummation of all Things, Wherein the Creation of the World in Six Days, the Universal Deluge, and the General Conflagration, as laid down in the Holy Scriptures, are shewn to be perfectly agreeable to Reason and Philosophy.
Whiston has descended through history as the worst example of religious superstition viewed as an impediment to science. Whiston, we are told, was so wed to the few thousand years of Moses’ chronology that he had to postulate absurd catastrophes via cometary collisions in order to encompass the earth’s history in so short a time. This dismissal is no modern gloss but an old tradition in scientific rhetoric. Charles Lyell, conventional father of modernity in geological thought, poured contempt upon Whiston’s extraterrestrial and catastrophic theories because they foreclosed proper attention to gradual, earth-based causes. Lyell wrote in 1830:
[Whiston] retarded the progress of truth, diverting men from the investigation of the laws of sublunary nature, and inducing them to waste time in speculations on the power of comets to drag the waters of the ocean over the land—on the condensation of the vapors of their tails into water, and other matters equally edifying.
But Whiston did not only suffer the abuse of posthumous reputation; he became an object of ridicule in his own time as well (as Swift’s satire indicates). His contemporary troubles did not stem from his cometary theory (which resembled several others of his day and did not strike fellow intellectuals as outré) but from his religious heterodoxies. Whiston’s public support of the Arian heresy (a denial of the Trinity, and the consubstantiality of Christ with God the Father) led to dismissal from his Cambridge professorship (as Newton, his erstwhile champion, and a quieter, more measured exponent of the same heresy, remained conspicuously silent). Resettled in London, Whiston was tried twice for heresy and, though not formally convicted, lost most of his previous prestige and lived the rest of his long life (he died in 1752 at the age of eighty-four) as an independent intellectual, viewed as a prophet by some and as a crank by most. In the eighth plate of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, set in the mental hospital of Bedlam, an inmate covers the wall with a sketch of Whiston’s scheme for measuring longitude.
Despite continual rejection of Whiston, from his own time to ours, we must still grant him a major role in the history of science. The French historian Jacques Roger ended his article on Whiston (in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography) with these words:
His writings were much disputed but also widely read throughout the eighteenth century, and not just in England. For example, Buffon, who summarized Whiston’s theory in order to ridicule it, borrowed more from him than he was willing to admit…. It may be said that all the cosmogonies based on the impact of celestial bodies, including that of Jeans, owed something, directly or indirectly, to Whiston’s inventions.
Moreover, we must not forget the early acclaim of his contemporaries. The greatest figure in all the history of science, Isaac Newton, personally chose Whiston as his successor. In my copy of Whiston’s New Theory (the second edition of 1708), a Mr. Nathaniel Hancock, who bought the book in 1723, has inscribed on its title page, in a beautiful, flowing hand, the following judgment of Whiston and his book by John Locke:
I have not heard any one of my acquaintance speak of it, but with great commendations (as I think it deserves)…. He is one of those sort of writers that I always fancy should be most encouraged; I am always for the builders.
Comets were in the air in late seventeenth century Britain. In 1680, a great comet brightened the skies of Europe, followed two years later by a smaller object that sent Edmond Halley to the drawing boards of history and mat
hematics. Moreover, the seventeenth century had been a time of extraordinary change and tension in Britain—the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution to mention just a few of the tumultuous events of Whiston’s age. These happenings fostered a revival of millennial thought—a scrutiny of the prophecies in Daniel and Revelation, leading to a conclusion that the end of this world lay in sight, and that the blessed millennium, or thousand-year reign of Christ, would soon begin. Since comets had long been viewed as harbingers or signals of great transitions and disasters (literally, “evil stars”), Whiston chose a propitious time to implicate comets as the prime movers of our planet’s history.
Whiston’s New Theory tried, above all, to establish a consistency between the two great sources of truth, as defined by his countrymen: the infallibility of Scripture and the mathematical beauty of the cosmos, so recently revealed by Newton. Whiston began his account of our planet’s history by summarizing his method of inquiry in a single page, entitled Postulata. The first two statements illustrate his attempt to join Moses with Newton:
1. The obvious or literal sense of scripture is the true and real one, where no evident reason can be given to the contrary.
2. That which is clearly accountable in a natural way, is not, without reason, to be ascribed to a Miraculous Power.
Comets became Whiston’s deus ex machina for rendering the cataclysmic events of Genesis with the forces of Newton’s universe.
Consider Whiston’s descriptions of the earth, from cradle to grave, with each of its five principal events tied to cometary causes:
1. The Hexameron, or Moses’ six days of creation. Whiston prefaced the body of his work with a ninety-four-page “Discourse Concerning the Nature, Stile, and Extent of the Mosaick History of the Creation.” Here, he attempts to preserve the literal sense of Scripture (first postulate above) in the light of Newton’s nearly infinite universe. How could all this vastness be made in six days, and how could our earth, one tiny speck in one corner of the cosmos, be the focus of such infinitude? Whiston devotes his preface to a single argument: Moses described the origin of the earth alone, not the entire universe; moreover, he tailored his words to describe not the abstract properties of nature’s laws, but the visual appearance of events as an untutored observer might have witnessed them on the congealing surface of our planet. With these provisos, everything happened exactly as Genesis proclaims.
The earth began as a comet, and the chaos described in Genesis 1 (“and the earth was without form and void”) represents the original swirling atmosphere. Whiston’s contemporaries did not know the true size of comets, and many assumed, as he did, that comets might be of planetary dimensions, and therefore suitable for transformation into a planet. Whiston wrote:
Tis very reasonable to believe, that a planet is a comet formed into a regular and lasting constitution, and placed at a proper distance from the sun…and a comet is a chaos, i.e., a planet unformed or in its primaeval state, placed in a very eccentrical [orbit].
To transform this comet, with its highly elliptical pathway, into a planet, God needs to render its orbit more nearly circular. The chaotic atmosphere will then clear and precipitate to form the solid surface of a planet. Whiston’s attitude toward miracles (temporary suspension by God of his own natural laws) remained ambiguous. His second postulate stated a preference for natural explanations, but only when possible. He never did resolve whether the change in orbit that converted our cometary ancestor into the present earth had been a true miracle (accomplished by the immediate agency of God’s own hand) or a natural event (the result of gravitational influences exerted by another body moving through the heavens according to Newton’s laws). But since Newton’s laws are God’s laws, Whiston attached only limited importance to the distinction—for the transition from comet to planet occurred either by God’s direct action or by laws that God had established in full knowledge of the later, desired result.
In any case, once the comet’s orbit had been adjusted to its planetary pathway, the events of Genesis 1 would proceed naturally, as viewed by an observer on earth. The creation of light on the first day represents an initial clarification of a formerly opaque atmosphere (so that a brightness always present could finally be perceived). Similarly, the “creation” of the sun and moon records a further lightening of atmosphere.
This fourth day is therefore the very time when…these heavenly bodies, which were in being before, but so as to be wholly strangers to a spectator on earth, were rendered visible.
Meanwhile, the products of this former atmosphere settled out by order of density into a series of concentric layers—solid at the center, water above, and a solid froth on top—to form the earth.
If all this activity still seems a bit much to compress into a mere six days, Whiston added an argument to increase our confidence. The original earth underwent no diurnal rotation on its axis but maintained a constant position as it revolved around the sun. The nearly equatorial Eden therefore experienced a year divided into halves: one of day; the second of night. Since we define a “day” as a single alternation of light and darkness, the days of Genesis 1 were all a year long—not a vast span for the work accomplished, but a big step in the right direction.
2. The Fall, and expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. The pristine earth stood bolt upright with no seasons, tides, or winds to disturb its primeval bliss. But “as soon as Man had sinned…and as God Almighty had pronounced a curse on the ground, and its production, presently the earth began a new and strange motion, and revolved from west to east on its own axis.” This axis tilted to its present inclination of some 21 degrees, and the earth began its diurnal rotation, with days, nights, winds, and seasons. Whiston ascribed this change to a cometary collision:
Now the only assignable cause is that of the impulse of a comet with little or no atmosphere, or of a central solid hitting obliquely upon the earth along some parts of its present equator.
3. Noah’s flood. All the great works of this late seventeenth century vogue for “theories of the earth” (notably Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth and Woodward’s Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth) regarded an explanation of the Deluge as their central test and focus. Events of the Creation were too distant and shrouded in mystery, phenomena of the coming millennium too tentative. But the Flood was a relatively recent incident, begun (or so Whiston deduced) precisely “on the 17th day of the 2nd month from the autumnal equinox…in the 2349th year before the Christian era.” Any proper theory of the earth must, above all, render this cardinal and precisely specified event of a history remembered and recorded in the ancient chronicles.
The comet that unleashed the Flood did not strike the earth directly but passed close enough for two great effects that combined to produce the Deluge. First, the earth passed (for about two hours) directly through the “vaporous tail” of the comet, thus absorbing by gravity enough water to unleash forty days and nights of rain. Second, the tides generated by close passage of such an enormous body stretched the round earth into an oblate spheroid and eventually cracked the solid surface, allowing the underlying layer of water to rise and contribute to the great flood (Genesis, remember, speaks not only of rain from above, but also of upwelling from the “fountains of the deep”).
(In a rather uncomfortable bit of special pleading, even in his own terms, Whiston argued that the cometary impact at the Fall had not unleashed a similar flood because this previous comet had no atmosphere. If we then ask why this earlier impact, more direct after all than the near miss that made the Flood, did not tear the surface and raise the waters from the abyss, Whiston responds that such a fracturing requires not only the gravitational force of the comet itself but also the pressing weight of waters from its tail.)
Above all, Whiston took delight in his cometary theory because it had resolved this cardinal event in our history as a consequence of nature’s divinely appointed laws, and had thereby removed the need for a
special, directly miraculous explanation:
Cometary action as illustrated by Whiston in 1696. A passing comet (large object in the center) induces Noah’s flood. The earth (upper right), entering the comet’s tail, will receive its 40 days and nights of rain. The comet’s gravity is stretching the earth into a spheroid. Under this gravitational tug, the earth’s outer surface will soon crack, releasing water from below (the light, middle layer) to contribute to the deluge.
Whatever difficulties may hitherto have rendered this most noted catastrophe of the old world, that it was destroyed by waters, very hard, if not wholly inexplicable without an Omnipotent Power, and Miraculous Interposition: since the theory of comets, with their atmospheres and tails is discovered, they must vanish of their own accord…. We shall easily see that a deluge of waters is by no means an impossible thing; and in particular that such an individual deluge…which Moses describes, is no more so, but fully accountable that it might be, nay almost demonstrable that it really was.
4. The coming conflagration. The prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation speak of a worldwide fire that will destroy the current earth, but in a purifying way that will usher in the millennium. Whiston proposed (as the Laputans feared) that a comet would instigate this conflagration for a set of coordinated reasons. This comet would strip off the earth’s cooling atmosphere, raise the molten material at the earth’s core, and contribute its own fiery heat. Moreover, the passage of this comet would slow the earth’s rotation, thus initiating an orbit so elliptical that the point of closest approach to the sun would be sufficient to ignite our planet’s surface. Thus, Whiston writes, “the theory of comets” can provide “almost as commensurate and complete an account of the future burning, as it already has done of the ancient drowning of the earth.”