Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy

Robert Hooke was England’s first professional scientist, and a pioneer in the field of science communication. He was also one of the few early scientists to leave a detailed manual describing how others could follow his lead and become ‘experimental philosophers’ themselves. This new biography takes Hooke’s scientific method as its starting point, exploring what Hooke himself saw as the key aspects of a scientific life. It follows Hooke through the shops of instrument makers and craftsmen, into coffee-houses and bookshops, onto building sites and into the king’s audience chamber at Whitehall Palace. It uses new evidence to explain how Hooke’s observations and conversations with workmen, philosophical colleagues, craftsmen and London’s wealthy elite underpinned his scientific research in unexpected but significant ways. Hooke emerges as a champion of the mundane, whose greatest gift was to see the potential for new knowledge in the least promising aspects of everyday life.