Volume 34, Number 18 · November 19, 1987
Off to a Bad Start
By David Joravsky
The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876
by Robert V. Bruce
Knopf, 446 pp., $30.00
Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology
by Philip J. Pauly
Oxford University Press, 252 pp., $24.95
Enlightenment should be possible anywhere, and sometimes is. Benjamin Franklin in colonial Philadelphia created theories of electricity that excited admiration and fruitful argument in the intellectual centers of Europe. But somehow in the century after Franklin a self-limiting provincialism stifled creative science in America. The exception that appears at the end of the century, Willard Gibbs, accentuates the prevailing dullness. In the late 1870s, when European scientists acclaimed Gibbs's foundational work in physical chemistry, his colleagues at the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, who published the work, could not understand it. They were provincials in mentality, separated from the creative centers of scientific thought not by the Atlantic Ocean but by their unwillingness to learn the mathematical physics that Gibbs had mastered.
Review, 4408 words
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