Eye on the Present—The Whig History of Science

Steven Weinberg

It was the Cambridge historian Her-

bert Butterfield who described and
condemned what he called “the Whig
interpretation of history.” In a book
with that title, the young Butterfield
in 1931 declared that “the study of the
past with one eye, so to speak, upon
the present is the source of all sins and
sophistries in history. . . .”1 He spread
special scorn on those historians, in-
cluding Lord Acton, who subject the
past to contemporary moral judgments,
who for instance are unable to see the
Whig Charles James Fox as anything
but a savior of British liberties. Not that
Butterfield was personally unwilling to
make moral judgments; he just did not
think it was the business of historians.
According to Butterfield, the whig his-
torian studying Catholics and Protes-
tants in the sixteenth century feels that
some “loose threads are still left hang-
ing unless he can show which party was
in the right.”
Butterfield’s strictures were fer-
vently taken up by later generations of
historians. Being called “whig” came
to seem as terrifying to historians as
being called sexist, or Eurocentric, or
Orientalist. Nor was the history of sci-
ence spared. The historian of science
Bruce Hunt recalls that when he was
in graduate school in the early 1980s,
“whiggish” was a common term of
abuse in the history of science. To avoid
that charge, people turned away from
telling stories of scientific progress or
from giving “big picture” stories of any
kind, and shifted to accounts of small
episodes, tightly focused in time and
space.
Nevertheless, in teaching courses on ‘Scenography of the Copernican World System’; engraving from Andreas Cellarius’s Harmonia macrocosmica, 1660
the history of physics and astronomy,
and then working up my lectures into the working scientist’s understanding dards, not individuals. Above all, we because scientific history with an eye to
a book, I have come to think that what- of present science. On the other hand, must not imagine that our predecessors present knowledge is needed by scien-
ever one thinks of whiggery in other it must be admitted that a scientist like thought the way we think, only with tists. We don’t see our work as merely
sorts of history, it has a rightful place myself cannot match the professional less information. an expression of the culture of our time
in the history of science. It is clearly not historian’s mastery of source material. and place, like parliamentary democ-
possible to speak of right and wrong in So who should write the history of sci- racy or Morris dancing. We see it as the
the history of art or fashion, nor I think ence: historians or scientists? The an- It is Butterfield’s injunction against latest stage in a process, extending back
is it possible in the history of religion, swer seems to me obvious: both. presentism, “the study of the past with over millennia, of explaining the world.
and one can argue about whether it is I should disclose that I have a dog, one eye, so to speak, upon the present,” We derive perspective and motivation
possible in political history, but in sci- or at least a book, in this fight. In To that still represents a serious challenge from the story of how we reached our
entific history we really can say who Explain the World: The Discovery of to whiggish historians of science. In present understanding, imperfect as
was right. According to Butterfield, Modern Science, based on my lectures laying out maxims for a history of sci- that understanding remains.
at the University of Texas at Austin, I ence that emphasizes its internal devel- Certainly history should not ig-
we can never say that the ulti- acknowledged that “I will be coming opment, Thomas Kuhn in 1968 argued nore those influential past figures who
mate issue, the succeeding course close to the dangerous ground that is that “insofar as possible (it is never en- turned out to be wrong. Otherwise we
of events, or the lapse of time most carefully avoided by contempo- tirely so, nor could history be written if would never be able to understand
have proved that Luther was right rary historians, of judging the past by it were), the historian should set aside what it took to get things right. But
against the Pope or that Pitt was the standards of the present.” Reviews the science that he knows.”2 A more the story makes no sense unless we
wrong against Charles James Fox. were generally favorable, but one in uncompromising stand against using recognize that some were wrong and
The Wall Street Journal (by a profes- present knowledge was taken by sev- some right, and this can be done only
But we can say with complete confi- sional historian) took me to task for eral sociologists who study science as a from the perspective of our present
dence that the lapse of time has shown my attention to the present. The review social phenomenon, including the well- knowledge.
that, about the solar system, Coperni- was headed “The Whig Interpretation known Sociology of Scientific Knowl- Right and wrong about what? A
cus was right against the adherents of of Science.” edge group at the University of Bath. whig history of science that amounts
Ptolemy, and Newton was right against Now, some criticisms of whiggery, Meanwhile, whiggery in the his- just to a totting up of plus and minus
the followers of Descartes. by Butterfield and others, are either ir- tory of science has not lacked defend- scores for whatever facts a past scien-
Though the history of science thus relevant to the history of science or not ers. They are found especially among tist has gotten right or wrong would
has special features that make a whig controversial. Certainly we should not those, like Edward Harrison, Nicho- not be very interesting. Much more im-
interpretation useful, it has another as- oversimplify or pass moral judgments, las Jardine, and Ernst Mayr, who have portant, it seems to me, is to trace out
pect that makes the idea of keeping an designating some past scientists as worked as scientists. 3 I think that this is the slow and difficult progress that has
eye on the present troublesome to some spotless heroes or infallible geniuses, been made over the centuries in learn-
professional historians. Historians who and others as villains or fools. For in- 2
Thomas S. Kuhn, “The History of Sci- ing how to learn about the world: What
have not themselves worked as scien- stance, we must not gloss over Galileo’s ence,” in International Encyclopedia of sort of questions can we hope to an-
tists may feel that they cannot match getting it all wrong in a debate over the Social Sciences (Macmillan, 1968), swer? What sort of notions help us to
comets with the Jesuit Orazio Grassi, Vol. 14, p. 76. these answers? How can we tell when
1
In this essay, I will follow Butterfield or Newton’s fudging his calculations to 3
Edward Harrison, “Whigs, Prigs and
in capitalizing “Whig” when it refers to achieve agreement with observations Historians of Science,” Nature, Vol. 329 of Science, Vol. 41, No. 2 (June 2003);
a political party, and leaving the w in of the precession of the earth’s axis. (September 1987); Nick Jardine, “Whigs Ernst Mayr, “When Is Historiography
lower case when referring to an intel- In any case, it is ideas and practices and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and Whiggish?,” Journal of the History of
lectual tendency. that we should hold up to present stan- the Historiography of Science,” History Ideas, Vol. 51, No. 2 (April/June 1990).

82 The New York Review

an answer is correct? We can identify
which historical practices set future sci-
entists on the right path, and which old
questions and methodologies had to be
unlearned. This can’t be done without
taking account of our present under-
standings, so painfully acquired.
For an example of a whiggish judg-
ment of the past, take the ancient fun-
damental question: Of what substance
is the world made? Much credit is often
given to Democritus of Abdera, who
around 400 BC proposed that mat-
ter consists of atoms moving in the
void. One of the leading universities in
Greece today is named after Democri-
tus. Yet from a modern perspective,
the good guess of Democritus about
atoms represented no progress in the
methods of science. None of the many
surviving fragments of Democritus’s
writings describe any observation that
could suggest the existence of atoms,
and there was nothing that he or any-
one else in the ancient world could do
with this idea that would confirm that
matter really does consist of atoms.
Though right about matter, Democri-
tus was wrong about how to learn about
the world. In this he was not alone; no
one before Aristotle seems to have
understood that speculative theories
about matter need to be confirmed by
observation.
One’s judgment of Aristotle provides
a good test for one’s attitude toward
the history of science, for Aristotle
was in a limited sense the first scientist,
and much of the subsequent history of
science consisted of responses to his
teaching. Aristotle argued that the
earth is a sphere, not only on the theo-
retical grounds that this shape allows
the greatest amount of the element
earth to get closest to the center of the
cosmos, but also on the basis of obser-
vations: the shadow of the earth on the
moon during a lunar eclipse is curved,
and the starry night sky changes its ap-
pearance as one travels north or south.
However, Aristotle’s work shows no
understanding that mathematics should
be an important part of the study of na-
ture. For instance, he made no attempt
to use observations of the night sky at
different latitudes to estimate the cir-
cumference of the earth. His theory that
the planets ride on spheres pivoted on
other spheres, all with the earth at their
center, agreed only qualitatively with
their observed apparent motions; but
the failure to get quantitative agree-
ment with observation did not bother
him or many of his followers.
Mathematics began to be used con-
structively in scientific theories in the
Hellenistic Age and then in the Greek
part of the Roman Empire. Around
150 AD Claudius Ptolemy put the final
touches on a mathematical theory of
the solar system that agreed pretty well
with observation. (In the simplest ver-
sion of Ptolemy’s theory, planets travel
along circles called epicycles, whose
centers travel around larger circles that
have the earth at their center.) With
the benefit of present knowledge this
agreement is not surprising, because
in its simplest version Ptolemy’s theory
gives precisely the same predictions for
the apparent motions of the sun, moon,
and planets as the simplest version of
the later theory of Copernicus. Yet for
a millenium and a half there continued
a debate between followers of Ptolemy,
called astronomers or mathematicians,
84
and adherents of Aristotle, often called
physicists. Ptolemy was wrong about
actual motions in the solar system, but
right about the need for quantitative
agreement with observation.
It was one of the great achievements
of the scientific revolution of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries to
work out the modern relation of math-
ematics and science. Mathematics had
been important to the Pythagoreans
as a form of number mysticism, and to
Plato as a model for a purely deduc-
tive science that experience has shown
could never work. The modern rela-
tion between mathematics and natural
science was spelled out by Christiaan
Huygens, in the 1690 pref-
ace to his Treatise on Light: Albert Einstein
There will be seen in [this
book] demonstrations of
those kinds which do not
produce as great a certi-
tude as those of Geometry,
and which even differ much
therefrom, since whereas
the Geometers prove their
Propositions by fixed and
incontestable Principles,
here the Principles are
verified by the conclusions
to be drawn from them;
the nature of these things
not allowing of this being
done otherwise.
The remarkable thing is not
that Huygens understood
this, but that, well into the
seventeenth century, it still
needed to be said.
Aristotle saw no need for
experiment in the sense of
the artificial arrangement of
circumstances that are more
revealing than what we
encounter naturally. This
presumably was because
he thought there was a pro-
found difference between
the natural and the artifi-
cial, with only the natural world worth
study. Like Plato, he thought that it
is only possible to understand things
when one knows their purpose. These
ideas stood in the way of learning how
to learn about the world.
Such judgments on Aristotle and on
his followers are just the sort of thing
that is still often condemned by some
historians—keeping one eye on the
present in studying the past. For in-
stance, a distinguished historian of
science, the late David Lindberg, com-
mented that
it would be unfair and pointless to
judge Aristotle’s success by the de-
gree to which he anticipated mod-
ern science (as though his goal was
to answer our questions, rather
than his own).4
And in a second edition of the same
work: “The proper measure of a philo-
sophical system or a scientific theory is
not the degree to which it anticipated
modern thought, but its degree of suc-
cess in treating the philosophical and
scientific problems of its own day.”
4 standards, which it wasn’t. Likewise,
David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings
of Western Science: The European Sci-
entific Tradition in Philosophical, Re-
ligious, and Institutional Context, 600
BC to AD 1450 (University of Chicago
Press, 1992).
T o me this is nonsense. The point of
science is not to answer the questions
that happen to be popular in one’s
time, but to understand the world. Not
that we know in advance what kinds of
understanding are possible and satisfy-
ing. Learning this is part of the work
of science. Some questions like “What
is the world made of?” are good ques-
tions, but are asked prematurely. No
one could make progress in answering
this question until the advent of accu-
rate measurements of chemical weights
at the end of the eighteenth century. In
the same way, the effort at the start of
the twentieth century of Hendrik Lo-
rentz and other theoretical physicists
to understand the structure of the re-
cently discovered electron was prema-
ture: no one could make progress on the
electron’s structure until the advent of
quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Other
questions like “What is the natural
place of fire?” or “What is the purpose
of the moon?” are bad in themselves,
leading away from real understanding.
Much of the history of science has been
a matter of learning what sort of ques-
tions should and should not be asked.
I am not arguing that whig history
is the only interesting sort of history
of science. Even a whig historian may
be interested in exploring the impact
of general culture on developments in
science, or vice versa, without need-
ing to worry about the role that these
developments played in progress to-
ward modern science. For instance, the
atomic theory of Democritus offered
an illustration of how the world might
work without the intervention of the
gods, and thereby had a great influence
a century later on the Hellenistic phi-
losopher Epicurus and later still on the
Roman poet Lucretius, an influence
that did not depend on whether the
theory was well grounded by modern
you can feel the impact of the scientific
revolution on general culture in such
works as the poetry of Andrew Marvell
(I think particularly of his poem “The
Definition of Love”). The influence
also runs in the opposite direction. The
sociologist Robert Merton argued that
Protestantism had a major part in fos-
tering the great scientific advances of
seventeenth-century England. I don’t
know if that is true, but it’s certainly
worthy of interest.
But there is an element of whiggery
even here. Why should a historian of
science focus on the intellectual en-
vironment of, say, Hellenistic Greece
or seventeenth-century England, if it
were not that something was happen-
ing then that advanced science toward
the present? The history of science is
not merely a tale of intellectual fash-
ions, succeeding one another with-
out direction, but a history
of progress toward truth.
Though this progress was
denied by Thomas Kuhn, it
is felt strongly by working
scientists. Thus whig history
is not just one of several in-
teresting kinds of scientific
history. The evolution over
many centuries of modern
science is a great story, as
important and interesting as
anything else in the history
of human civilization.
Butterfield himself seems
to have had a sense of the
legitimacy of whiggery in
the history of science. In his
1948 lectures at Cambridge
on the history of science,
he attributed a historical
importance to the scientific
revolution that he would
never grant to England’s
Glorious Revolution, so be-
loved of the Whigs. 5 I found
his account of the scientific
revolution thoroughly whig-
gish, and that impression
was shared by others, in-
cluding A. Rupert Hall, a
student of Butterfield’s.6
Much earlier, in The Whig
Interpretation of History,
Butterfield had already
shown himself potentially receptive to
a whig interpretation of history under
some conditions. He acknowledged
that if morality were “an absolute sys-
tem, equally binding on all places and
times,” then the historian would “be
driven now to watch the story of men’s
growing consciousness of the moral
order, or their gradual discovery of
it.” Though a devout Methodist, But-
terfield did not believe that there is an
absolute moral order that is revealed
to us by history or religion or anything
else.7 But he did not doubt that there
are laws of nature, equally binding on
all places and times. It is precisely the
story of the growing consciousness of
the laws of nature that the whig his-
torian of physics hopes to tell, but the
story cannot be told without keeping
an eye on our present knowledge of the
natural world.
5
Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of
Modern Science (1950; revised edition,
Free Press, 1957).
6
See the closing lines of A. Rupert
Hall, “On Whiggism,” History of Sci-
ence, Vol. 21, No. 45 (1983).
7
For Butterfield’s religious views, see
Michael Bentley, The Life and Thought
of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science
and God (Cambridge University Press,
2011).
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