ABSTRACT
Posterity has not been kind to Robert Hooke. In 1987, on these very premises (The Royal Society of London), the first-ever conference devoted to Robert Hooke took place. Scheduled to coincide (more or less) with the tercentenary of the publication of the Principia, the organizers of the conference set themselves the task to deliver Hooke from the ‘invidious comparison with Newton which had bedevilled his reputation ever since his own time’.1 It is ironic, therefore, that the very conference that was intended to rehabilitate Hooke actually inaugurated another insidious comparison, this time with Robert Boyle, which has proved far more pernicious to Hooke’s reputation. Both comparisons were informed by the same agenda, conscious or otherwise: to aggrandize Newton or Boyle at the expense of Hooke. But whereas it was possible to acknowledge Hooke’s genius and stature while still denying him a position equal to Newton, the comparison with Boyle precipitated a denuding of not only Hooke’s professional identity, but his personal integrity as well. It boggles the mind to comprehend the willingness of so many historians of science to be duped into embracing such a merciless – not to say spurious – representation, grounded on misinterpretation of the evidence and on gross misunderstanding of the nature of seventeenth-century science and its cultural milieu. Perhaps a future historian of our profession will manage to explain this. For my part, I intend to revisit the formative period in Hooke’s life and offer a more credible portrait of his character and standing in the scientific community.
