Sir Humphry Davy vs. the Grand Theory

by Asa Boxer

Dec 17, 2023

Science satirist **Douglas Adams** (1952-2001), in his famous **The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy** (1978-1992) explains that engineers designed a giant supercomputer to answer and settle for all time the great question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Due to the vagueness of the question, the answer eventually delivered is 42. Baffled by the response, philosophers and scientists query the great supercomputer, which explains that it requires an even greater supercomputer to formulate the question. The new computer in question is the planet Earth, which eventually reveals the question to be “what do you get if you multiply six by nine?”

This is the last instalment of my Humphry Davy show-and-tell series. I’ve been focused on Davy because he was both poet and scientist. As I put it last week, Davy didn’t take up science because he sucked at literature. And this balanced education and facility made him one of the greatest, most innovative scientists to ever live. He truly ought to be more well known than any of the famous scientists we worship today. Last week I talked about Davy being among the first to come up with the terms of ecological thinking. In addition, the laughing gas experiments he performed on himself were the sort of thing that inform our notions of heroic science to this day. But there’s still more to Davy. He soberly rejected grand theorising… but I’m getting ahead of myself. So without further ado. . .

Historian and literary scholar, Richard Holmes credits Davy with pioneering “the ‘blind’ experimental method,” informing readers that “He deliberately did not tell his subjects what concentration of nitrous oxide they were breathing, or whether they were in fact inhaling ordinary air (which they sometimes were).”1

So profound was Davy’s commitment to the pursuit of truth, he struggled deeply with the problems of scientific methodology, and in a Preface to his treatise, noted his efforts to avoid drawing any general conclusions, and his care to make no medical claims.2 Holmes reveals that in his notebooks from late 1799, Davy wrote critically about the evolution of his ideas on this subject, coming to the same conclusions as Lavoisier that “the true philosopher” distanced himself from “theories,” because “It is more laborious to accumulate facts than to reason concerning them.” Furthermore he surmised that “one good experiment is of more value than the ingenuity of a brain like Newton’s.” Holmes quotes more from the Preface:

I have endeavoured to guard against sources of error; but I cannot flatter myself that I have altogether avoided them. The physical sciences are almost wholly dependent on the minute observation and comparison of properties of things not immediately obvious to the senses … I have seldom entered into theoretical discussion, particularly concerning light, heat and other agents … Early experience has taught me the folly of hasty generalization. We are ignorant of the laws of corpuscular motion … Chemistry in its present state, is simply a partial history of phenomena, consisting of many series more or less extensive of accurately connected facts.3

How opposite to the arrogance of popular science today! If only this spirit of humility were still so central to the scientific mode of expression. And I trust it would be were it not for that will to incorporation and administration, as the ranks of our scientific schools swelled and the funding poured in.

Theories sell because they package ideas in stories that appeal to our sensibility. Sober philosophical appraisals of the true state of our knowledge don’t cut cheques at gala events. Patrons want to feel like they are the Medicis of their times; they want to be counted among those who sponsored something equal to the Renaissance. You simply don’t get that kind of sell by presenting science cautiously. Grand Theories on the other hand boost the authority of scientists and collect enough cheques to build university wings and establish technological institutes.

Indeed as noted earlier, this was the project in Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century, led by figures like Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). Such men of science worked relentlessly to establish educational projects and institutions dedicated to the promulgation of a scientific ethos, its study and practice. Science advocates like Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Richard Owen (1804-1892) and Charles Darwin believed that science was about more than just collecting facts. Indeed the data collected from observations had to serve a philosophy.

Another science figure and dissenting journal editor of the period, George Lewes, writing in 1851 expressed criticism of those “men of specialties” (specialists) who were chary of generalizing and theory building. As X Club historian, Ruth Barton summarizes his words, “They ‘amass facts’ but forget that facts should be ‘stepping stones’ to a philosophy that deals in processes and causation.”4 I find it hard to blame them for their enthusiasm, especially at the time in question, when such thinking represented a challenge to the predominant orthodoxy. Culturally speaking, the proliferation of theories was essential to the development of pluralism. But from an objective standpoint, the elaboration of theories was not itself science; it was a form of politics meant to displace the prevailing, chiefly religious orthodoxy.

Now back to Davy. To put a fine point on his analogical genius, I will round off this tale with one last quotation of his from 1807 that influenced the poets Coleridge and John Keats:

The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michel Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful.5

The truly great thinkers, those innovators, explorers and pioneers who have brought to humankind those frameshifts that change our perspective, have all come to this very same conclusion. Because they have pursued truth with an honest commitment, they soberly discover where they stand in the cosmos, and they are humbled by the experience. That ability to locate themselves and to properly judge the work they do requires an elevated level of consciousness comprising both heart and brains, both imagination and intellection, both analogical and analytical thinking, both right and left lobes of the brain under the leadership of the contextualizing agent, that faculty which is satisfied with open-ended conclusions. . . the analogical mind.

Sir Humphry Davy vs. the Grand Theory

by Asa Boxer

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