Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Author:Johnjoe McFadden [MCFADDEN, JOHNJOE]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Footnotes

i The order in which I present the principles is not Boyle’s.

ii Even more simply, it can be expressed as the equation P1V1 = P2V2 indicating that the product of pressure (P) and volume (V) of a gas at times 1 and 2 is constant: if one goes up, the other must go down.

11

The Notion of Motion

Three scientists walk into a (coffee) bar

Following a meeting held at Gresham College on the north bank of the Thames on the evening of Monday, 24 January 1684, Robert Hooke, together with two of his Royal Society fellow members, Edmund Halley and Christopher Wren, made their way to a local coffee house.

This was thirty years after Hooke and Boyle had shown their revolutionary vacuum demonstrations to members of the Invisible College in Oxford. Since then, Hooke had become experimental curator to the Royal Society and had performed many ground-breaking experiments, including demonstrating capillary pressure and, after building his own microscopes, discovering the incredible diversity of microbial life. The two other scientists with him were equally eminent. The fifty-two-year-old mathematician, anatomist, astronomer and geometer Christopher Wren had, with Boyle, been one of the founding members of the Royal Society. After the Great Fire destroyed much of London in 1666, Robert Hooke was appointed surveyor and he recruited his childhood friend Christopher Wren to set about rebuilding the city, including its magnificent St Paul’s Cathedral. Aged only twenty-eight, Halley was the youngest of the group, yet he had already established his reputation as one of the cleverest men in the country. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he had published papers on the moon and sunspots. In 1676, he abandoned his lectures to sail to the island of St Helena in the south Atlantic to observe an eclipse of both the sun and the moon and to catalogue stars in the southern sky. On a day predicted by Kepler’s laws, 7 November 1677, Halley made one of the first observations of a transit of Mercury across the face of the sun.

The name of the coffee house that hosted this historic meeting has, sadly, not been recorded but the Turk’s Head on Exchange Alley, Joes or the Vulture are all possible venues as they were close to Gresham College and frequent haunts of Robert Hooke.1 This was in an age before regular newspapers so, as they walked into a fog of tobacco smoke mingled with the aromas of roasted coffee, chocolate, and human sweat, they would have been greeted with cries of ‘What news, sirs?’ Hooke, in particular, was well known to the clientele of the London coffee houses and had even conducted experiments on their premises, including dropping a bullet from the ceiling to the floor of Galloways to demonstrate, so he claimed, the rotation of the earth. The new arrivals would have faced several rows of well-dressed men in periwigs – popular headgear since the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 – sitting around rectangular wooden tables strewn with pamphlets, leaflets, ballads, a few candlesticks and the occasional spittoon.

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