Science: Attempting to summarise the vast sweep of contemporary science would be enough in itself, but Gribbin, the veteran British science writer, has set himself the task of writing its history from 1543. This begs a hugely syncretic, Diderot-esque imagination, and, while Gribbin has written a large, provocative and fascinating tome, he does not exactly provide it, writes Mic Moroney.
Gribbin is not really concerned with history (which he derides as "subjective"), nor the development and percolation of ideas through Empire and society, but rather with an almost school-curricular sense of the progress of science and "scientific method". The result is a highly orthodox roll-call of discoveries, through biographies of the usual great men of science; and, by chopping backwards and forwards to pursue each inquiry, often across two centuries.
The seemingly arbitrary starting point of 1543 marks the publication of Copernicus's On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies and Vesalius's On the Structure of the Human Body, signalling two major shifts in our view of the universe: first with ourselves deposed from its dead centre; and, second, turning the scalpel of reason on ourselves, enabling a mechanistic view of the body, with all its tubules, hinges and levers.
Gribbin charts the famliar route from Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler - "transitional figures" - to Galileo Galilei - although Gribbin, with recurring chauvinism, credits Englishman William Gilbert as "the first true scientist" whose methodology in investigating magnetism inspired Galileo.
Then there's Robert Boyle, seventh son of the Earl of Cork (the "richest man in the British Isles" until the 1641 Rebellion), who became "the father of modern chemistry" at Oxford. Boyle revisited Ireland in 1652 with physician/map-maker William Petty, who taught him anatomy, dissection and the "method".
Boyle's assistant was Robert Hooke, the great pioneer of microscopy. Gribbin sees Hooke's speculations on gravity as very closely foreshadowing Newton, having formulated Newton's First Law of Motion, and in a 1679 correspondence with Newton, suggested the inverse square law.
According to Gribbin, Newton was "a nasty piece of work" whose famous line, "standing on the shoulders of giants", was actually an insult to Hooke. When Hooke complained that Newton hadn't credited him enough, Newton purged him from the Principia in 1687, and waited for Hooke to die before he published Opticks in 1704.
Gribbin traces Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood to the 17th-century "founding father of comparitive anatomy", Edward Tyson, governor of Bethlehem Hospital, who dissected everything from patients to porpoises. But human anatomy fades from Gribbin's tale of the life sciences up to Linnaeus's obsessive classification of 7,700 plants and 4,400 animals, or later, a rather familiar account of Darwin's well-thumbed career.
Unlike some, Gribbin characterises the English Enlightenment as an era of invention and scientific expansion: listing Thomas Newcomen's steam engine, improved by James Watt, or chemists like Henry Cavenish, a giant of chemistry who rarely published his physics (he independently discovered Ohm's and Coulomb's Laws).
However, after Antoine Lavoisier, the French academician and tax collector executed by the Jacobins in 1794, Gribbin's account becomes breathless as 19th-century science catapulted forwards. Chemistry leapt from John Dalton's atomic weights to the Periodic Table of the Elements nailed by Mendeleyev, Mayer and others in the 1860s.
Spectroscopy arrived with Joseph von Fraunhofer at the Philosophical Instrument Company in Munich, and Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchoff mapped the spectra of the elements. Thermodynamics unfurled from Lord Kelvin's work to James Clerk Maxwell's kinetic theory of gases and Ludwig Boltzmann's statistical mechanics.
Michael Faraday's work with electric currents and magnetic fields led to his visionary paradigm, revealed in 1844, of a web of forces underlying reality with atoms as local concentrations - concretised by Maxwell's four equations in 1864, which united electricity, magnetism and light. Gribbin characterised these as "the greatest piece of physics since the Principia".
The atom was sundered by the turn of the 20th century - J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron; Rontgen's X-rays; Henri Becquerel's radioactive uranium salts; Marie Curie - "one of the few role models for girls in science", chirrups Gribbins (her notebooks are still so radioactive, they are kept in a lead-lined safe); Ernest Rutherford's model of the nucleus, let alone his alchemy of bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles to produce oxygen.
Meanwhile, black-body radiation led Max Planck to introduce discrete energy packages or quanta into his equations. Einstein did the same with radiation - using Maxwell's equations and a constant speed of light as cornerstones to his Theory of Special Relativity in 1905 - closely preceded by Irish maths-physicist George Fitzgerald's, and Hendrik Lorentz's, suggestion that the earlier Michelson-Morley experiment apparatus and Earth had shrunk tinily in the direction of motion.
Rutherford and Bohr's atomic model, bodged together from classical and quantum logic, sets Gribbin briefly galloping through the paradoxical thickets of quantum mechanics, before very gingerly touching on quantum electrodynamics and string theory.
He is stronger on the history of genetics from Gregor Mendel's rigorous, statistical methods to the well-worn tale of DNA's discovery. On the Earth sciences, he trips from Alfred Wegener's continental drift model to plate tectonic theory in the 1960s. He neatly explains how the Earth's elliptical, nodding, spinning-top orbit around the sun contributes to Ice Epochs and Ages, and in a good, final chapter, he charts his own discipline, cosmology.
Gribbin is an old hand at summarising the Big Bang cooling off into "a sea of protons and neutrons"; nuclear fusion processes within stars (most made up mainly of hydrogen and helium as demonstrated by, among others, the late Irish astronomer William McCrea); while heavier elements are blasted out of collapsing supernovae.
Gribbin mentions some 1997 work he did with a team that included Martin Hendry, which re-estimated the age of the universe upwards to about 14 billion years. Otherwise, he steers clear of controversies such as dark matter, variable speed of light theories, etc. - while the universe's expansion rate is one of those "works in progress" which are "outside the scope of this book".
Instead, Gribbin livens up his tales with the odd historical spat over priority or gossipworthy death (did you know that Boltzmann hung himself on a family holiday?), while he has a beady eye for the proclivities of long-dead bachelors. Hooke enjoyed carnal relations with maidservants and his niece Grace, he reports. Newton was gay, he reckons, unlike Boyle - on the unscientific grounds that Boyle once recoiled at two friars he met, shrieking "gowned sodomites" with "goatish heats".
Several truisms emerge: the sheer range of the great, early, quasi-aristocratic scientists; and the gradual professionalisation and extreme specialisation of science since the mid-19th century.
Then there is the eternal chicken-and-egg relationship between technology and science, from the lenses which sparked modern science to the cascade of subatomic discoveries triggered by Heinrich Geissler"s blessed vacuum pump.
Inevitably, there are significant omissions. Thomas Huxley gets only a footnote because, although a populariser, he didn't contribute much to science. There is nothing on Babbage or Turing, John von Neumann or Norman Wiener; no modern medicine, meteorology, environmental science, complexity theory and none of the newsworthy Big Science from nuclear bombs to cloning.
And, despite nature being written in the langauge of mathematics, Gribbin constantly steers clear of maths, merely mentioning Gauss, Riemann, Fourier, Euler or Lagrange for their 20th-century applications, while there is nothing at all on Gödel.
Generally, there is little sense of how science weaves into history, little of the interplay between science and theology after Galileo; no philosophy, not even Hobbes, Kant, Russell or Popper and certainly not Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Gribbin snarls: "The idea of scientific revolutions is essentially a myth beloved by sociologists who have never worked at the scientific coal face." (This, despite the fact that he titles two chapters as the Newtonian and Darwinian Revolutions!) Freud, meanwhile, is beneath comment.
Gribbin is a dyed-in-the-wool evangelist for the physical sciences. For him, science is an implacably accumulating, impersonal body of proven, absolute, objective truths. "Historians and sociologists," he chafes, "sometimes suggest that scientific truth is no more valid than artistic truth, and that (to put it crudely) Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity might go out of fashion." Instead, relativity will be contained within future theories, just as Newtonian mechanics are within relativity. Meanwhile, science is the "driving force of Western civilisation" and "arguably the greatest achievement of the human mind".
One has to agree on many levels, but it's still a crusty, narrow "scientistic" view which reinforces the old Two Cultures chasm, and the appeal to infallibility has more in common with authoritarian religion than scientific enquiry and argument.
Interestingly, the history of science is opening up as a new academic discipline, and this title might provide an interesting skeleton on to which to hang some meatier material, say, scientific epistemology and the role of "heuristic" models, or the history of ideas - particularly those concerning ourselves.
Mic Moroney is a journalist and writer
Science: A History, 1543-2001. By John Gribbin. Allen Lane, 647 pp. £25