Science and social welfare in the age of Newton,

by George Norman Clark

This essay is intended to show how scientific matters stood and what was thought of them, especially in England, in one of the periods in which western civilizations was most rapidly moving towards its present state--the age of Newton. science and technology; the economic incentives to invention; social and economic aspects of science; social control of technological improvement; social science; the occasion of Fleetwood's "Chronicon Preciosum."

8 pages, Hardcover

First published January 22, 1970

About the author

Note: also published as G.N. Clark.

Sir George Norman Clark was a 20th century British historian. Educated at Manchester Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford, he became the inaugural Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford in 1931 (with the accompanying Fellowship at All Souls), a post he held until 1943. From then until 1947 he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Between 1947 and 1957, he was Provost of Oriel College, Oxford.

Reviews

[Ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

The metadata here is mistaken (or at least, not a reference to the book I read.) This is a short monograph (~150 pages) about, well, the relationship between science and society 1650 - 1750 -- the period after the renaissance and before the industrial revolution.

The author's thesis is that a large number of people were interested in applying science to social problems, but were limited by the state of scientific knowledge. As evidence, he shows that many prominent scientists -- including the people organizing institutions like the Royal Society -- talked about how scientific knowledge would be useful throughout the practical arts and would lead to prosperity and well-being.

Mostly, 18th-century science wasn't up to the job. In most fields, researchers knew very little of value that practitioners didn't also know. But there were a few domains in which "technology transfer" actually happened -- particularly, in the fields of inquiry that had the greatest amount of scientific knowledge as we recognize it today. Astronomy, for instance, did some good in solving practical problems of surveying and navigation; abstract knowledge of hydraulics was genuinely useful to mine engineers; theoretical results in optics really helped improve scientific instrument design. And one particularly striking example I hadn't thought about -- highly knowledgeable botanists had much to do with the reshuffling of crop plants as part of the Columbian Exchange.

This is not a particularly prominent book but if you should run across it, it is a short and thought-provoking read.