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Book Review: The Birth of Physics

On an international flight, the steward announces that you should fasten your seatbelt because a little turbulence is expected. This scarcely interrupts your reading of The Birth of Physics, until you realise that the two are connected. Serres’s book is all about chaos and order, and so you wonder about the plane and the contingent event of the expected turbulence. After all, what were the primary and enabling conditions of your flight: stability and the order of a linear trajectory, or the immense vortex of power sucking through the engines combined with the mathematics of aerodynamic lift, as produced by the angle of incidence of airstream on the curve of the wings? Turbulence comes first. We learn that turbulence is at the birth of physics, as Serres re-reads Lucretius and Archimedes. These two physicists, ignored by the historians of modern science, were obsessed by the powers of water and human capacity to travel across it—obsessed because of water’s scarcity in the dry summers of the Mediterranean. But enough historical determinism; Serres is against that kind of thing, for it is what has separated humanists from scientists, a separation Bruno Latour interrogated Serres about in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: