Riskin - The Restless Clock A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

Jessica Riskin

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Jessica Riskin is professor of history at Stanford University and author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2016 by Jessica Riskin

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30292-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30308-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226303086.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Riskin, Jessica, author.

The restless clock : a history of the centuries-long argument over what makes living things tick / Jessica Riskin.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-30292-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-226-30308-6 (ebook) 1. Vitalism. 2. Mechanism (Philosophy) 3. Life (Biology) 4. SciencePhilosophy. I. Title.

Q175.32.V65R57 2016

147dc23

2015019941

Published with the support of the Susan E. Abrams Fund

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Madeleine and for Oliver, my vis viva, my pouvoir de la vie

In German, the name for the balance of a clock is Unruhethat is to say disquiet. One could say that it is the same thing in our body, which can never be perfectly at ease: because if it were, a new impression of objects, a little change in the organs, in the vessels and viscera, would change the balance and make these parts exert some small effort to get back to the best state possible; which produces a perpetual conflict that is, so to speak, the disquiet of our Clock, so that this appellation is rather to my liking.

G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais (1704)

Now, to make the comparison of a watch better suited to a living body and less imperfect, one must compare the exciting cause of organic movements with the spring of the watch; and consider the supple containing parts as well as the essential fluids contained by them as the works of the movement of the instrument in question. Then one can see, first of all, that the spring (the exciting cause) is the essential motor, without which, in fact, everything would remain inactive, and that its variations in tension must cause variations in the energy and rapidity of the movements.

J.-B. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique (1809)

Let us analyse the motion of a real clock accurately. It is not at all a purely mechanical phenomenon. A purely mechanical clock would need no spring, no winding. Once set in motion, it would go on forever. A real clock without a spring stops after a few beats of the pendulum, its mechanical energy is turned into heat. This is an infinitely complicated atomistic process. The general picture the physicist forms of it compels him to admit that the inverse process is not entirely impossible: a springless clock might suddenly begin to move, at the expense of the heat energy of its own cog wheels and of the environment. The physicist would have to say: The clock experiences an exceptionally intense fit of Brownian movement.

E. Schrdinger, What Is Life? (1944)