02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Davy Connects Science to Hope
But Davy wished to make even bigger, philosophical claims for the scientific spirit and imagination. Drawing on his previous exchanges with Coleridge about the ‘hopeful’ nature of scientific progress, he put before his audience a vision of human civilisation itself, brought into being by the scientific drive to enquire and create. Science had woken and energised mankind from his primal ignorance and ‘slumber’. This was in effect Davy’s version of the Prometheus myth: ‘Man, in what...
2 Science is Hope according to the former President of the Royal Society.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Davy's Poem Seeking to Inspire Other Scientists
He depicts himself watching in rapture the two adult grey-tailed eagles in the bright sunlight, followed by their young offspring. This moment is transformed into an image of Davy the man of science, hoping to inspire his young scientific protégés to ever greater discoveries.
The mighty birds still upward rose
In slow but constant and most steady flight.
The young ones following; and they would pause,
As if to teach them how to bear the light
And keep the solar glory full in sight.
So went... 1 
notes
notesEvokes images of prometheus, but also of triumph.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Davy Poem on Growing Old
Davy was now forty, and like every man of science and every poet, he hoped against hope that original work and ‘powers of inspiration’ still lay ahead in his maturity. His description of these longings was nakedly Romantic, and surely recalled his moonlit walks along the banks of the Avon some twenty years before.
Though many chequered years have passed away
Since first the sense of Beauty thrilled my nerves,
Yet still my heart is sensible to Thee,
As when it first received the flood of ... 1 notes
notesAnd hoping he still had discoveries ahead of him.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Davy On Science as a Force for Good
By relating the human predicament to the scientific solution, Davy produced one of the great demonstrations of scientific ‘Hope’. He showed that applied science could be a force for good previously unparalleled in human society, and might gradually liberate mankind from untold misery and suffering. Deliberately echoing Bacon — as Lavoisier had once done — he claimed that scientific knowledge was a disinterested power for good: ‘The results of these labours will, I trust, be useful t... 1 notes
notesScientific knowledge as a "disinterested power for good."
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Davy Refused to Patent His Safety Lamp
John Buddle, now entirely won over by Davy, was also concerned about a reward. By August there were 144 safety lamps ‘in daily use’ at Walls End, and they were rapidly spreading to all the other collieries in the North-East.91 Buddle urged Davy to take out a patent, pointing out that he could not only make his fortune but control the quality of the lamps issued to miners. Davy consistently refused, although he knew his colleague William Wollaston had made a fortune with a patent on proces... 1 notes
notesDespite the fact that it could have made him a fortune.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Cooleridge Describes Davy's Work as Methodical
This refusal to allow anything to chance, ‘accident’ or good fortune was exactly the same as Herschel’s insistence that chance played no part in his discovery of Uranus. Coleridge had taken this up as one of the key philosophical problems associated with science, in an essay provokingly entitled ‘Does Fortune Favour Fools?’, which he republished in The Friend in 1818. Here he described Davy, perhaps mischievously, as ‘the illustrious Father and Founder of Philosophic Alchemy’. B... 1 notes
notesHis discoveries were not the result of accidents or luck.
See Also: Coleridge, The Friend (1809 edition), no. 19, 1809; in The Friend, vol 2, edited by Barbara E. Rooke, Routledge, 1969, pp251-202 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Davy VS Gay-Lussac in the Race to Discover Iodine
He was warmly received by Cuvier, Ampère and Berthollet, but got into an awkward priority dispute with the gifted young chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac. Gay-Lussac, Davy’s exact contemporary, had made a popular name in France with his intrepid ballooning exploits, and had been hard on Davy’s heels with potassium and sodium experiments. Both were now given by the Académie des Sciences a newly isolated substance to analyse: a strange violet crystal recently found as a byproduct of gunpowder man... 1 notes
notesStill disputed as to who won the race.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Science is Performed With the "Passion of Hope"
Here Coleridge was defending the intellectual discipline of science as a force for clarity and good. He then added one of his most inspired perceptions. He thought that science, as a human activity, ‘being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was poetical’. Science, like poetry, was not merely ‘progressive’. It directed a particular kind of moral energy and imaginative longing into the future. It enshrined the implicit belief that mankind could achieve a better, happier ... 1 notes
notesIt is inspired by the idea that humanity can improve and create a better world.
See Also: Coleridge to Davy, 1 January 1800, Coleridge Collected Letters, edited by E.L. Griggs, vol 1; and see Treneer, p5802 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Worship of Nature is Worship of Light
Davy’s two main essays were far the most ambitious contribution to the anthology, and announced his intellectual arrival in Bristol. He set out to champion chemistry, and speculate about its future, on the grandest metaphysical scale. In a Penzance notebook he had exclaimed: ‘What we mean by Nature is a series of visible images: but these are constituted by light. Hence the worshipper of Nature is a worshipper of light.’38 In his Essay 1, ‘On Heat, Light and the Combinations of Lightâ...Folksonomies: naturalism laws of nature
Folksonomies: naturalism laws of nature
1 notes
notes...and other simple laws of nature.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Davy Sees Freedom in Human Fallability
The experience of ‘paralytic strokes’ (like his father’s), which destroyed ‘perception and Memory’ as well as physical motion, proved that the physical brain was the single centre of ‘all the Mental faculties’. Children were not magically endowed with intelligence and souls at birth. On the contrary: ‘A Child is not superior in Intellectual power to a common earthworm. It can scarcely move at will. It has not even that active instinctive capacity for Self-Preservation.’ Such... 1 notes
notesChildren are no more advanced than earthworms and strokes demonstrate how we are a product of our brains, and this shows Davy that we are capable of infinite happiness and science is indefinitely perfectible.
