As recently as 2005, the study of the scientific method centered on the writings of scholars such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, and Thomas Kuhn, as was discussed by Alan Chalmers in his superb introductory book What is This Thing Called Science? (1976 [2013]).

The discovery of useful scientific knowledge depends primarily on the scientist. A scientist’s research can be greatly aided by research assistants, advisors, reviewers, journals, and all those fostering a creative environment. Nevertheless, we believe that the primary responsibility for conducting useful scientific research usually falls on individual scientists, sometimes two scientists, but rarely more than two.

The scientific method is largely responsible for improving life expectancies and the quality of life over the past 2000 years. Individual scientists, in their efforts to discover how things work and how to make them better have used the method on their own or in collaboration with others to make the world a better place.

In this chapter, we are concerned with how to inform those who could use your findings. There is little point in doing useful scientific research if potential users of the findings are not aware of them, or if they cannot understand the findings or how to use them.

Researchers who have been applying the scientific method to important problems for over 20 centuries are responsible for saving lives and improving our quality of life. Their efforts have provided us with the comforts and the myriad of opportunities that we have to live fulfilling lives that could barely be imagined in earlier times.

In this chapter, we raise making a useful contribution as a motive for university researchers, discuss some of the recent history of government involvement in science, and examine the evidence on whether or not government funding and regulation of research is beneficial.

Publishing important and useful papers has been a fulfilling role for the founding editors of journals, and scientists were thankful to be able to publish research on topics that they regarded as important. The process seemed to work well for centuries.

Objectivity underlies all of the criteria for complying with the scientific method. Only an objective description of an objective study and its findings can be considered scientific. Yet objectivity does not come naturally, and so scientists must struggle to overcome a tendency to advocate for subjectively preferred hypotheses when they practice science.

In September 1618, when he was almost 30 years old, Isaac Beeckman made some biographical entries in his notebook. From the age of 21, he recollected, he had devoted himself ‘more than a little’ to mechanical operations. During the 1610s, having set up shop as a candle maker in Middelburg and Zierikzee, Beeckman was engaged in all kinds of projects involving conduits, pumps, and fountains. First assisting his father, he soon took on work of his own. These activities turn up in his notebook in reflections upon hydrological machines, but also chimneys and stoves. After he moved to Utrecht and Rotterdam and became a schoolmaster, the waterworks did not disappear from the notebook, but the emphasis shifted from technical installations to curious apparatus like thermoscopes and perpetual motion machines.

This chapter focuses on Beeckman's engagement with such atmospheric instruments in his Rotterdam period (1620-1627). Both the contents and the epistemic significance of his notes on these topics have not been studied in much detail. They shed an interesting new light on his learned persona and put him in a new historical context related to late-sixteenth-century meteorology. The notes on atmospheric instruments show a kind of reasoning that I call ‘artefactual’: getting a conceptual grip on matters by tinkering with and reflecting upon artefacts like thermoscopes and stoves. This aspect of Beeckman adds, I maintain, to our understanding of his learning and his place in the early-seventeenth-century history of science.

In the last 30 years, historians of science have shown an increased interest in Isaac Beeckman's physical-mathematical approach to mechanism in the context of the ‘Scientific Revolution’. What we know about Beeckman comes from his notebook that reports his thoughts about experiments, tools, and scientific theories, which he discussed with his circle of friends including Descartes, Gassendi, and Mersenne, among others. However, Beeckman was not only a learned engineer, he was also trained in medicine, and obtained a medical degree from the University of Caen in Normandy in September 1618. He began to study medicine in 1616 in preparation for the dissertation defence at Caen, mostly by reading medical treatises at his hometown, Middelburg. At that time, Beeckman likely had access to these books through the library of his friend Philippus Lansbergen (1561-1632), a Dutch astronomer and Calvinist minister who lived in Middelburg from 1613. Among Beeckman's early medical sources, one can find – aside from Galen – a significant number of Dutch and French authors. In fact, Beeckman's first mention of a medical treatise points to the Universa medicina of the French physician Jean Fernel in 1613-1614, which he continued to study until at least 1621.

Beeckman's first inclination for French medical literature – as evidenced by the references to Fernel, Joseph du Chesne, Jean Tagault, Jean Riolan the Elder, and Guy de Chauliac – might have prompted his choice to obtain a medical degree in France.

The study of Isaac Beeckman's mechanical philosophy began in the early twentieth century in the margins of the study of Descartes and Mersenne. It also began in the context of the early professionalization of the history of science. Beeckman's editor, Cornelis de Waard, after all belonged to the first generation of specialized historians of science. In the second half of the twentieth century the study of Beeckman's work was emancipated from the study of Descartes. Beeckman emerged as a pioneering contributor to the new mechanical philosophy in his own right, and this volume shows that the study of his ideas about nature is by no means exhausted. Yet, in the context of the social history of science and the newer history of knowledge, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century Beeckman has gained more significance as a crucial witness not only to revolutionary developments in natural philosophy. His Loci communes have also become testimony for the ‘otherness’ of the local, regional, and trans-European knowledge cultures that preceded the new science that emerged with Descartes and Newton. His lack of interest in communicating his work in print has long had a marginalizing effect on the role awarded to him in the shaping of the new science, that is, in the lineage from the well-published Descartes to Newton. Ironically, it is precisely because of his manuscript book that Beeckman is emerging as an interesting case in the new history of knowledge. The Loci provide great material for those interested in ‘knowledge-in-the-making’ rather than ‘ready-made-knowledge’, to quote Bruno Latour. They bristle with notes that allow us to peak into knowledge-making practices, the evolution of rules for such practices, and the interactions of a wide range of ‘knowledge-makers’ that often remain invisible or difficult to trace. Several contributions to this volume show how the Beeckman studies can be expanded beyond the big questions related to the rise of the new science, using those notes. Building upon those contributions, Beeckman's Loci can become crucial evidence in writing cultural and social histories of the world before the new science emerged.

Of course, the study of these wider cultures of knowledge through Beeckman's testimony should not divert from the study of the man, his work and his legacy, which is also far from exhausted.

Introduction

Isaac Newton (1642/1643-1727) owes his principle of inertia to René Descartes (1596-1650), who owes his principle of conservation of motion (PCM for short) to Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637). Thus, if the importance of Descartes for the history of physics is immense, that of Beeckman is no less significant. But, just as Newton hid his debt to Descartes, so Descartes hid his debt to Beeckman. This is the story of the principle of inertia that is currently being told by historians of science. I intend to show that it is possible to tell another one. This chapter will not look at Newton's debt to Descartes. It will look at Descartes’ debt to Beeckman. Indeed, after having examined the reasons why historians of science currently think that Descartes owes his PCM to Beeckman, I intend to show why Descartes may rather owe it to the Coimbrans, whose commentaries on Aristotle's Physics and On the Heavens – in which the PCM is several times explicitly used – he studied at La Fleche in 1612-1613.

Definition

Before I begin, I would like to make a few remarks concerning the PCM: 1) by PCM, I do not mean the Cartesian principle according to which God conserves the same quantity of motion in the world; 2) by PCM, I do not mean the principle of inertia:

Introduction

Sometime in the winter of 1618-1619, the 30-year-old philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who was staying in Breda to help an uncle and court a young woman, turned this topic of conversation into a ‘problem’ of natural philosophy by logging it in his Loci communes and reflecting upon its causes. This notebook, which according to humanist pedagogical practice he had been keeping since the age of sixteen, had by then developed from a compilation of reading notes (commonplaces) into a set of comments on problems that he encountered while reading, engaging in conversations or in observations of all sorts. Regularly, when he theorized about causes, the note taking became fully-fledged philosophizing in the sense of developing a philosophical theory on causes of natural phenomena.