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In The Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder pins the rise of science as we know it on the weekly meetings of four great 19th-century thinkers

ON THE night of 14 July 1830, British astronomer John Herschel nearly discovered Neptune. Charting stars with his large reflector telescope, he swept within half a degree of the planet, but he didn鈥檛 realise what he had missed until October, when the German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle caught the orb passing near Capricorn.

Nonetheless, Herschel was delighted. While Uranus had been found by pure luck five decades earlier by Herschel鈥檚 father, Galle had located Neptune based on mathematical predictions. Discovering Uranus had been a personal victory, but discovering Neptune was a victory for science. And, as Laura Snyder relates in her masterful portrait of science in the 19th century, science鈥檚 triumph was Herschel鈥檚, too.

Herschel came of age in a time of transition. When he began studying at the University of Cambridge in 1809, the sciences were largely the domain of natural philosophers, whose theories about the universe were logically deduced from ancient Greek principles, and of country parsons, who haphazardly amassed fossils and beetles.

Herschel was put off, and not alone in his despair. At Cambridge he met Charles Babbage, William Whewell and Richard Jones, men who bonded over a shared allegiance with an earlier pupil: the 17th-century philosopher Francis Bacon, who had envisioned a future for science as visionary and elusive as Utopia.

From late 1812 to the spring of 1813, the four students met each Sunday for 鈥減hilosophical breakfasts鈥�. They consumed ham, tongue and 鈥渁udit ale鈥�, and digested Bacon鈥檚 Great Instauration. The tome argued for a new scientific method based on induction rather than deduction, one that relied on disciplined observation. Bacon also asserted that science ought to be a public enterprise, supported by public funds and working in the interest of the people. The four men spent their careers pursuing Bacon鈥檚 directive. 鈥淎nd to an amazing extent, they succeeded,鈥� Snyder writes. 鈥淎fter their labours, science 鈥� and scientists 鈥� began to look much as they do today.鈥�

For instance, Jones introduced the use of empirical research and inductive reasoning into the nascent field of economics, challenging platitudes about self-interest with history and statistics. Whewell pioneered big science, using connections in the British Admiralty to organise the first international survey of the oceans鈥� tides. And Babbage conceived the era鈥檚 most ambitious technological effort: a 30-metre-long mechanical computer that promised to do for mathematics what the cotton gin had done for agriculture.

That Babbage鈥檚 鈥渁nalytical engine鈥� was never built for want of government support shows what Bacon failed to foretell. No matter how clever its instigators, science is never exempt from economics. A more profound problem also emerged, hinted at by Neptune鈥檚 discovery. The coup could have gone to Britain instead of Germany, had the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy, followed the directive of a young British mathematician who had been first to compute the planet鈥檚 orbit. But the calculations had been too abstruse for Airy. Invigorated by induction, 19th-century science grew increasingly specialised. The inner workings became ever more alien to the public, and hostile to a generalist such as Herschel, who mapped the southern hemisphere鈥檚 stars, co-invented photography and translated The Iliad in hexameter.

Snyder is attentive to this consequence of Baconian science, noting that 鈥渢here would be justice in looking back at the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club for guidance on how to knit the [sciences and humanities] back together again鈥�. She is right, and though she declines to offer specific advice, the boundless curiosity the four shared throughout their lives 鈥� about absolutely everything 鈥� is surely a beginning.

鈥淲e might look to the Philosophical Breakfast Club to knit the sciences and humanities together鈥�