The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World

A wall was slowly being constructed between art and science, a wall that still stands today.

More than ever before, it was assumed that the methods of natural science could be—and should be—used to understand and solve the problems facing society. This ideal—though it has had a checkered history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—remains at the heart of much modern scientific work, and is part of the public’s conception of science,

As both Herschel and Whewell would remark in their writings on science, the scientific process is inevitably a social one. Discoveries are not made in a vacuum, but in the midst of whirling currents of politics, rivalry, competition, cooperation, and the hunger for knowledge and power. And the scientist does not work in isolation. Geniuses there may be, but even these require the interplay of other creative minds in order to discover, create, invent, innovate.

Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell are a strange breed: the last of the natural philosophers, who engendered, as it were with their dying breath, a new species, the scientist.