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Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science
As Robyn Arianrhod shows in this new biography, the most complete to date, Thomas Harriot was a pioneer in both the figurative and literal sense. Navigational adviser and loyal friend to Sir Walter Ralegh, Harriot--whose life was almost exactly contemporaneous to Shakespeare's--took part in the first expedition to colonize Virginia in 1585. Not only was he responsible for getting Ralegh's ships safely to harbor in the New World, he was also the first European to acquire a working knowledge of an indigenous language from what is today the US, and to record in detail the local people's way of life. In addition to his groundbreaking navigational, linguistic, and ethnological work, Harriot was the first to use a telescope to map the moon's surface, and, independently of Galileo, recorded the behavior of sunspots and discovered the law of free fall. He preceded Newton in his discovery of the properties of the prism and the nature of the rainbow, to name just two more of his unsung
"firsts."
Indeed many have argued that Harriot was the best mathematician of his age, and one of the finest experimental scientists of all time. Yet he has remained an elusive figure. He had no close family to pass down records, and few of his letters survive. Most importantly, he never published his scientific discoveries, and not long after his death in 1621 had all but been forgotten. In recent decades, many scholars have been intent on restoring Harriot to his rightful place in scientific history, but Arianrhod's biography is the first to pull him fully into the limelight. She has done it the only way it can be through his science. Using Harriot's re-discovered manuscripts, Arianrhod illuminates the full extent of his scientific and cultural achievements, expertly guiding us through what makes them original and important, and the story behind them.
Harriot's papers provide unique insight into the scientific process itself. Though his thinking depended on a more natural, intuitive approach than those who followed him, and who achieved the lasting fame that escaped him, Harriot helped lay the foundations of what in Newton's time would become modern physics. Thomas A Life in Science puts a human face to scientific inquiry in the Elizabethan and Jacobean worlds, and at long last gives proper due to the life and times of one of history's most remarkable minds.
"firsts."
Indeed many have argued that Harriot was the best mathematician of his age, and one of the finest experimental scientists of all time. Yet he has remained an elusive figure. He had no close family to pass down records, and few of his letters survive. Most importantly, he never published his scientific discoveries, and not long after his death in 1621 had all but been forgotten. In recent decades, many scholars have been intent on restoring Harriot to his rightful place in scientific history, but Arianrhod's biography is the first to pull him fully into the limelight. She has done it the only way it can be through his science. Using Harriot's re-discovered manuscripts, Arianrhod illuminates the full extent of his scientific and cultural achievements, expertly guiding us through what makes them original and important, and the story behind them.
Harriot's papers provide unique insight into the scientific process itself. Though his thinking depended on a more natural, intuitive approach than those who followed him, and who achieved the lasting fame that escaped him, Harriot helped lay the foundations of what in Newton's time would become modern physics. Thomas A Life in Science puts a human face to scientific inquiry in the Elizabethan and Jacobean worlds, and at long last gives proper due to the life and times of one of history's most remarkable minds.
- GenresScienceNonfictionHistory
376 pages, Hardcover
First published April 4, 2019
About the author
Robyn Arianrhod
5 books316 followersRobyn Arianrhod is an Australian science writer historian of science known for her works on the predecessors to Albert Einstein, on Émilie du Châtelet and Mary Somerville, and on Thomas Harriot.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 2, 2023
Thomas Harriot was an extraordinary person and this suprisingly mathematically, philosophically, and astronomically, and scientifically dense text still makes Harriot's character pop out of the period as what we have come to think of as a "Renaissance man".
He was quite simply...extraordinary. He was what we look back and call "genius". He was devoted to study and uninterested in the political landscapes of the day, he was insatiably curious, a wonderful interlocuter in letters and a profoundly loyal teacher, researcher and intellectual for both Walter Ralegh and The Wizard Earl of Northumberland. He continued their friendship and patronage, settling and managing each of their household accounts throughout their long sojourns within the tower. You get a richly embroidered life of Ralegh alongside that of Harriot who rose together in their twenties and through each others insatiable thirst for knowledge. Harriot was amongst the first to land in the New World, meet the indigenous Carolinian Algonquins, and learn their language, transcribe it and converse while working alongside them in the first Roanoake colony. Even years later, he uses the phonetic language he created for Algonquin to make comment about scientific thoughts in a period where his own intellectual philsophizing was deemend atheist by an anti-intellectual suspicion that permeated the period of transition between Tudor and Stuart monarchies.
This book was a joy to read in that it didn't just give you the life and thoughts of Harriot, but really laid out his entire life in the context of his moment, his patrons, his monarchs and all (literally ALL) of his scientific affiliations and aquaintances. You walk away from the book with a picture of a period.
My favourite section as I spent the last months toiling to complete a (what I consider to be) long dead dissertation topic that simply required my completion of it:
"It is hard to image at least some of the lords remaining unmoved by his ingenuous sincerity, or by his touching evocation of the toll taken by his arduous labor in the name of science:
'The present misery I feel, being truly innocent in heart and thought, presses me to be a humble suitor to your lordships for a favourable respect. All that know me can witness that I was always of honest conversation and life. I was never any busy meddler in matters of state. I was never ambitious for preferments. But contented with a private life for the love of learning that I might study freely. Wherein my labours and endeavours, if I may speak it without presumptions, have been painful and great. And I hoped, and do yet hope by the grace ofGod and your Lordships' favour, that the effects [of this study] will show themselves shortly, to the good liking and allowance of the state and common weal.'
So it would seem Harriot did intend to publish his results, if only he could bring all his work to fruition..."
Same, Harriot. Same.
He was quite simply...extraordinary. He was what we look back and call "genius". He was devoted to study and uninterested in the political landscapes of the day, he was insatiably curious, a wonderful interlocuter in letters and a profoundly loyal teacher, researcher and intellectual for both Walter Ralegh and The Wizard Earl of Northumberland. He continued their friendship and patronage, settling and managing each of their household accounts throughout their long sojourns within the tower. You get a richly embroidered life of Ralegh alongside that of Harriot who rose together in their twenties and through each others insatiable thirst for knowledge. Harriot was amongst the first to land in the New World, meet the indigenous Carolinian Algonquins, and learn their language, transcribe it and converse while working alongside them in the first Roanoake colony. Even years later, he uses the phonetic language he created for Algonquin to make comment about scientific thoughts in a period where his own intellectual philsophizing was deemend atheist by an anti-intellectual suspicion that permeated the period of transition between Tudor and Stuart monarchies.
This book was a joy to read in that it didn't just give you the life and thoughts of Harriot, but really laid out his entire life in the context of his moment, his patrons, his monarchs and all (literally ALL) of his scientific affiliations and aquaintances. You walk away from the book with a picture of a period.
My favourite section as I spent the last months toiling to complete a (what I consider to be) long dead dissertation topic that simply required my completion of it:
"It is hard to image at least some of the lords remaining unmoved by his ingenuous sincerity, or by his touching evocation of the toll taken by his arduous labor in the name of science:
'The present misery I feel, being truly innocent in heart and thought, presses me to be a humble suitor to your lordships for a favourable respect. All that know me can witness that I was always of honest conversation and life. I was never any busy meddler in matters of state. I was never ambitious for preferments. But contented with a private life for the love of learning that I might study freely. Wherein my labours and endeavours, if I may speak it without presumptions, have been painful and great. And I hoped, and do yet hope by the grace ofGod and your Lordships' favour, that the effects [of this study] will show themselves shortly, to the good liking and allowance of the state and common weal.'
So it would seem Harriot did intend to publish his results, if only he could bring all his work to fruition..."
Same, Harriot. Same.
June 10, 2019
If you are really, really, really interested in math and mathematic formulas this would be an interesting book. So many times I felt my eyes glazing over all the very detailed formulas, graphs and equations explaining the work of this mostly forgotten mathematician. I gave three stars to this book because it was fascinating to read about how Harriot was utterly engrossed in finding out the why of so many different subjects such as why a rainbow has the shape it does and how to sail by the stars. He read voraciously and improved on the ideas of others and came up with new ways of writing out algebraic ideas. His obscurity was caused mainly by the fact that he never got around to publishing any of his work and many times others got the credit for something he was the first to put down on paper. Also the period of time he lived was not welcoming or conducive to scientific and mathematical inquiry. In conclusion, this book, while a bit interesting, is definitely written with those with a math degree in mind.
August 7, 2020
Because Thomas Harriot published only a small portion of his immense scientific output, and much of that only circulated in manuscript form, the fact that he was so far ahead of his time was not recognized until recently. This book is full of incidents of independent contemporary discoveries and later rediscoveries. But even more than a mathematician and a physicist, Harriot was a pioneering ethnologist and linguist working with natives neighboring the earliest English colony in North America. Arianrhod’s book makes Harriot’s scientific discoveries accessible to the general reader while placing them in the context of the history of science, going back to the ancient Greeks. At the same time the book tells the story of Harriot’s life as it is woven in with the dramatic lives of Walter Ralegh and other Elizabethans, Kepler, and King James I. The book is an important contribution to understanding the dawn of modern science when “…many religious folk found mathematics and experimental science so mysterious that they linked them to magical codes and spells.”
February 1, 2020
I wanted to love this but, but I didn't finish it. Thomas Harriot is an interesting person - in the late Elizabethan period, in the orbit of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Duke of Northumberland. Brilliant mathematician, with most of his work not published, so he is not famous. Created practical tables for sailors to locate their position at sea. Learned a Native American language, and created a system for notating languages by sound.
So why didn't I finish? The author clearly loves the math astronomy, and geography that Harriot was playing with. Each time Harriot introduces a new refinement of some principle, the author provides a history of various past scholars who contributed to that principle. For me, that bogged down eventually. At first I enjoyed learn the origins of various ideas, but eventually I felt it disrupted the narration too much.
I feel conflicted - the details and research in this are very fine.
So why didn't I finish? The author clearly loves the math astronomy, and geography that Harriot was playing with. Each time Harriot introduces a new refinement of some principle, the author provides a history of various past scholars who contributed to that principle. For me, that bogged down eventually. At first I enjoyed learn the origins of various ideas, but eventually I felt it disrupted the narration too much.
I feel conflicted - the details and research in this are very fine.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews