Author: Jonathan Powers

We will be exhibiting at the Derby Book Fair in St Peter’s Church Hall on 9th June during the 2018 Derby Book Festival. There will be four new volumes on sale written since the Fair last year. They are

(1) The third edition of ‘Henry Cavendish – the Man who ‘weighed’ the Earth‘, with a new extensive Appendix on Measurement in Physics, the importance of ‘Universal Constants’, and over two centuries of efforts to improve on Cavendish’s implied result for the Gravitational Constant ;

(2)’Nature, Power, and Liberty – Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury and Derbyshire’, placing his natural and political philosophy in its historical context;

(3) ‘The Many Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish – a Seventeenth Century Woman’s struggle to be taken seriously as a ‘Philosopher’;

(4) ‘ΑΤΟΜΟΣ – Inventing the Ultimate Constituents of ‘Matter’‘ – this began as an Appendix to the Margaret Cavendish book but quickly took on a life of its own.

Quandary Books will be exhibiting again at the Derby Book Festival on 9th June at St Peter’s Church (in St Peter’s Street in the middle of Derby). Several new volumes are in preparation, in addition to a new little book on Thomas Hobbes. Watch this space for further news.

Thomas Hobbes spent most of his long life (1588-1679) connected with the Cavendish family. He lived through the turbulence of the English Civil War and the European Thirty Years War. This little monograph reclaims the author of the most important work of political philosophy in the English language for Derbyshire, and examines how his radically mechanistic approach to reality led to clashes with the both clergy and the emerging scientific establishment.

The recent Joseph Wright volumes in the Enlightenment Series seem to have been flying off the shelves. This has recently forced a reprint of ‘Searching for the Philosopher’s Stone’ which now includes some slightly alarming additional information about the chemical compounds implied by the enticing aromas recorded during the alchemical process of extracting Phosphorus from vast quantities of of urine. ‘Experimentising the Bird in the Air Pump’ is now sold out, and a reprint is scheduled for the end of this month. The new volume on Thomas Hobbes (who had links with the Cavendish family and hence Derbyshire for over 70 years) entitled ‘Nature, Power and Liberty’ is now also ready for printing at the same time. More news to follow.

The third of my mini-monographs on Joseph Wright’s scientific paintings is now with the printer. The curious title ‘Experimentising the Bird in the Air Pump’ is taken from the writings of someone I suggest could have been the distressed young girl in the picture. However, unlike with the Orrery painting, I do not have overwhelming confidence in my proposal for the identity of the lecturer. Nevertheless much that was unexpected has come to light in the course of the search. For those who want material which is securely demonstrated the book traces the use of live animals  – and attempts to find alternatives – in air pump demonstrations from the time of Robert Boyle onwards. The first creature to die in this way was a lark whose wing had been broken by a musket ball. The cover design imagines the spirit of this poor bird, inside an air pump made by Boyle’s successor, soaring towards the light of the moon. Wright’s picture seems to ask what price sentient creatures should pay for our Enlightenment.

An enlarged edition of the Henry Cavendish volume has now gone to print. It includes an extended Appendix on Gravitation, as a homage to Cavendish’s extraordinary diligence and accuracy in determining the Mean Density of the Earth, which in modern terms fixes the Gravitational Constant (‘Big G’). The Appendix explains the significance of this, and provides a pictorial introduction to Einstein’s relativistic theory of gravitation. Despite the overthrow of previous concepts of space, time and matter, ‘Big G’ remains central. Of all the Fundamental Constants of Nature it is the one whose value has been least improved upon since the work of Henry Cavendish in the 18th century.

On Saturday 18th March at 11 am I am giving a talk in the Joseph Wright Gallery at Derby Museum and Art Gallery. This will be my third talk on on of Wright’s ‘scientific paintings’. This time it is on ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’ (exhibited in 1668).

Once again I shall be drawing attention to the significance of little details which seem to have been overlooked by other commentators. If the reception to my talk is sufficiently positive – and I can secure all the permissions I need – I will complete and publish a new mini-monograph. This will explain the origin of the curious word in the title of this post, found in a hostile reference to such demonstrations in the writings of a woman who might have been the little girl in the picture. Whether my hypothesis about the identities of most of those depicted will continue to survive critical scrutiny, I have quite a number of new things to say about this picture.

The mini-monograph arising from my lecture on Joseph Wright’s picture of an Alchymist discovering Phosphorus, which I gave at the Derby Museum on 23rd November last year, is now available.