Vignettes from the history of natural philosophy
Roger Boscovich and the creation of the atom
The purpose of these Vignettes from the history of natural philosophy is to illuminate some lesser known episodes of the history of natural philosophy, the object of the present essay, accordingly, is natural philosopher Roger Boscovich (1711-1787).
In many ways the classroom has become the locale for modern mythmaking. Likewise produced by the classroom is doctrinal uniformity, which is never more apparent than in physics. Simple illustrations and models of the atom, the chemical bond, the magnetic field, and our very planet aim to create an impression that physics or natural philosophy has arrived at its terminus. Looking back into the past the schoolboy is greeted by a straight and narrow path, leading back to some Greek about whom little is known except that he believed some very silly thing. My contention is that such a path is an artifice, that a great wealth of thinking lies waiting to be uncovered, and that natural philosophy better resembles a labyrinth than a highway. Its successes are, contrary to popular belief, not a modern phenomenon. It is said that Ernest Rutherford, upon taking over the Cavendish Laboratory, was astonished to find that the new generation of scientists were convinced that science proper began in their day; I for one share his astonishment. Only stripped of our modern prejudices may we begin to appreciate what great scientific triumphs have been filtered out from the stream of western collective memory. There is therefore a need for an archaeology of ideas. Of these ideas there are perhaps none greater than the atom, which I shall use to anchor the present essay.
We thus depart towards the origin of the atom. Histories of the atom usually begin with the Greek ἄτομος (meaning indivisible) which as an idea is then somehow ascribed to Democritus. The ancient idea of the indivisible is typically interpreted to denote that which by virtue of smallness cannot be broken down. Historians are fond of pointing out that this definition is essentially still in use. Seeking out a definition of the atom today will likely yield some formula like the ancient one, with the addition that this breaking down must take place chemically or electrically.
These two contrasting definitions of the atom are then abused as a tool for abridging the history of philosophy, creating the impression that we only just now figured it all out. In jumping two and a half millennia from Democritus to Rutherford or Bohr, anyone is bound to be disoriented. Upon closer inspection these definitions, despite their shared formulaic structure, seem to lack family relation. The ancient atom came out of the idea of a quantitative limit to division, wherefrom it came to be asserted that large-scale phenomena are to be interpreted in terms of the small ones. This is quite different from the modern view where the atom is the limit of some electrochemical force. The limit to such a force hasn’t anything inherently to do with smallness, rather an assumption is made that smallness coincides with the inability of being divided. An atom is an atom because it cannot be divided by electrochemical force, strict causality implied. Looking backwards attempting to find the origin of this way of thinking about the atom we arrive at the work of Swedish chemist J. J Berzelius, to my knowledge the first to formulate this modern atom (admittedly it existed prior in some inchoate forms in the works of various writers, but these seem to lack an equivalent stringent conceptual base). He postulated that the mechanisms of chemistry may be the expression of a uniform electrical force. The question to ask is then: what was the atom after the ancient world and before modern expression? The answers to this are manifold, presently I shall endeavour to give a picture of an intermediate and now forgotten way of thinking the atom.
The Atom in Rome
Boscovich, a young Ragusan Jesuit scholar, would due to limited opportunities of education in the Balkans, venture to Rome, searching. He soon found himself at the Collegium Romanum, the headquarter of the Jesuits, and at the time one of the foremost places of learning. The majesty of his surroundings would leave a deep impression. One can see how an ambitious young man would be possessed by the Collegium Romanum. By the long halls topped by illustrated cupola depicting the wealth of organic life, the grandness of the celestial spheres, all under the precedence of the Lord. These great halls had in the fifty years since his death become intertwined with the legacy of Athanasius Kircher, the world-renowned scientist who had found traces of a lost Adamic language in ancient Egyptian obelisks. Who had built advanced instruments and machines for the study of light, mechanics, magnetism and more—now in a state of dusty disuse. Who had ventured into the insides of the earth and brought back bones of terrible dragons and giants—all now jealously guarded by cassocked curators. Where Kircher by use of a microscope had observed the tiny corpuscles responsible for the plague; and where he had shown the link between the force of magnetism and the movements of the celestial bodies. The workbenches where artisans had slaved away to produce the great multitude of copperplate illustrations needed for Kircher’s work were still occupied, interspaced by priceless artefacts from unknown ages and lands. The order of Jesus was at this time already perpetually educating some 200 000 pupils spread over more than 800 schools. In all of which Kircher was revered as a great scientist, and in many of them his works also served to instruct missionaries; telling them for instance how to cure the malaria of the godless jungles, and how to go about spreading the gospel to the mythical land of China, where the Christian king Prester John had once ruled—for it had at this time according to Kircher been proven by the Nestorian stele, that the nations of the far east had in fact been Christian in ancient days.
While Kircher was the most popular thinker of his day he had since the rise of Descartes begun to look aged, ancient even. His great folio-volumes which had been shipped all over the world and admired by the likes of Locke, Huygens, Leibniz, and Spinoza, had now become surrounded by the sniggering of shifting fashions. Leibniz especially had turned to harshly criticize Kircher, after as a young man writing him letters of admiration. Almost universal acclaim soured to almost universal scorn in a few years’ time, and only in the order of Jesus would he remain a celebrated man. Boscovich undoubtedly found great inspiration in the works of Kircher, whose writings on the atom we will now briefly examine.
Kircher argued that God, when he made that chaotic matter, that dark formless void of Genesis, must’ve brought about what is as a double negation. He says this void was embedded with an architectonic spirit, viz. the breath of God. It was to him clear that God’s breath would not enter the void, since God himself doesn’t occupy it. Rather it would displace chaotic matter. By this line of reasoning Kircher deduced that God continuously “draws creation out” of the void, creating corpuscles. The significance of this view for our purposes is that there is a centre point to matter which consists of divine architectonic spirit, which is inaccessible to us since it constitutes a relative negation. What is accessible to us, then, are the effects of the architectonic spirit manifested in chaotic matter. Chaotic matter is interpreted as the ontological barrier between the extant world and God. This might lead one to recall the formula of Kircher’s contemporary Pierre Gassendi: moleculae semina rerum—molecules (meaning atoms) are the seeds of things. What is meant by this Lucretian phrase is that atoms without extension by negation generate extension. The atom is the origin of matter, not what matter is made of. For Kircher the metaphor for understanding this convoluted creation of sensible matter was the magnet; the field representing extension, and the magnetized object representing the atom. This peculiar blend of Christian protology, research into magnetism, and Lucretian atomism would later supply Boscovich with a unique starting point, being partially liberated from the dominant intellectual presences of the time. Boscovich nevertheless had a desire to deal with Newton in much the same way that he perceived Kircher to have dealt with Descartes. He strove to reduce the forces of nature into a single principle, through which he would rehabilitate what was good (even brilliant) in Newton, while at the same time placing it on a sounder (essentially Leibnizian) metaphysical foundation.
The atom of Boscovich was a complex idea; at its most simple a mathematical point surrounded by a gradient of concentric spheres of alternating attractive and repulsive powers. These spheres are intended to account for inertia, impenetrability, extension, and gravity, thus enveloping Newton, and then going further, accounting for many more phenomena which Newton couldn’t. All while abstaining from (as Newton had done) breaking the established principles of natural philosophy—most notably the law of continuity. He managed to apply his framework to the explication of divisibility, penetrability, gravity, cohesion, composite particles, solidity, flexibility, fluidity, viscosity, elasticity, chemical reactivity, fire, light, heat, electricity and magnetism, albeit with varying success. It is difficult even to imagine a more ambitious theory of physics.
In Boscovich’s system the interaction of one atom and another are thus decided by their mutual action. If removed a certain distance they will attract, if brought within another distance they will repel each other, and so on. In the succession of spheres there are some number of limit points where the relative power or force (the Latin word used, vis, sadly lacks adequate translation in the English language) is zero. Thus if we were to reflect on the Newtonian law of gravity using Boscovichian theory, we would say that the force that attracts two metal spheres, and the stronger force that prohibit them from occupying the same area of space, are one and the same. And that the two spheres for that reason settle in a state where the two forces overlap, where gravity and mechanics meet. Likewise, something like the stable covalent chemical bond would also be interpreted as an intersection of two forces. Concerning the celestial bodies Boscovich speculated that they might very well reach a point where gravity is met by some other force of repulsion, as might account for the large-scale differentiation of the cosmos. He sets himself apart from the likes of Newton by fashioning the atom into a principle, and the powers into attributes. Unpolished as his theory is, Boscovich ought to be remembered and studied as the creator of the first unified structural interpretation of all known natural phenomena.
The sensible world becomes a mere effect of field interactions, making Boscovich a remarkable precursor to field theory. In so doing he also avoids the controversial absolute space posited by Newton, opting instead for an interpretation of space as another effect of field interactions, making him also a precursor of the later ether hypotheses of the 19th century. He yet also becomes a precursor of structural chemistry by claiming that two mutually repulsive corpuscles might enter a state of attraction under the influence of some external force. Finally, his assertions that extension precedes space (while not philosophically original) anticipate the later developments of the likes of Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein. Boscovich’s Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis has been recognized by Nietzsche, Mendeleev, Cassirer, Young, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, Thomson, Ampère, Hertz, Poynting, Tesla and many others as one of the crowning achievements in the history of science, yet one can scarcely find a single classroom or textbook where he is mentioned by name. Despite his apparently enormous originality and influence he is largely absent from the literature; something which I believe can be explained by the fact that he cannot be harmonized with, or dismissed by use of, the modern idea of the atom. His ideas don’t seem to fit on any propaganda posters. Even still forgotten as he is, he remains, in the words of Scottish physicist Lancelot Law Whyte, “the true creator of fundamental atomic physics as we understand it”. His works still stand as a great monument to the limitations of contemporary natural philosophy, specifically that brand of modern atomism which fails to acknowledge any distinction between being made of atoms or being composed by atoms. Finally, I should like to leave the reader with a quote from the article about Boscovich found in the fourth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
It is indeed very mortifying to humanity to be convinced, that for many, very many centuries, our forefathers have been unceasingly attempting to explain phenomena intellectual and material by a nullity, on principles which do not exist; but it would be still more mortifying to find, that though there is ground for such convictions, men calling themselves philosophers should persevere steadfastly in the fame invariable course of error and absurdity. In our own days, a light, clear and authoritative, has arisen to direct and to animate us in the search after truth; it is our own faults if we shut our eyes against its splendour, and suffer the interior man to be dark and unenlightened. Of this light the theory of Boscovich forms a part: it has succeeded and surpassed that of Newton; it will be the parent of a greater than either; it professes to conduct us to the interior veil of the temple of nature; but it has failed in this very sublime attempt, failed, however, only after it has conducted us beyond Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton.
Further study
Boscovich, Ruggiero Giuseppe, A theory of natural philosophy, M.I.T. P., Cambridge, Mass., 1966
Distelzweig, Peter, Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy, Springer, 2015
Emerton, Norma E., The scientific reinterpretation of form, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1984
Guzzardi, Luca, Ruggiero Boscovich's theory of natural philosophy points, distances, determinations, Birkhäuser, Cham, 2020
International Conference on the History of Alchemy and Chymistry, Chymists and chymistry: studies in the history of alchemy and early modern chemistry, Science History Publications/USA, Sagamore Beach, MA, 2007
Whyte, Lancelot Law (ed.), Roger Joseph Boscovich: 1711-1787 : studies of his life and work on the 250th anniversary of his birthday, London, 1961