Bubbles, Popguns, Lizards’ Tails: Play as Experiment

This chapter argues that if, in the seventeenth century, experiment was thought of a form of childish play, the converse was also true: play was thought of a form of experiment. The pervasive framing of the natural sciences as play in the work of seventeenth-century experimental philosophers, moreover, is not merely rhetorical hot air: actual, real-life children were active participants in the natural philosophical world of seventeenth-century England, both in semi-professional roles, as assistants and apprentices, and in more informal, domestic settings. In particular, children’s games were treated as a kind of spontaneous, generatively erratic, imaginatively fertile, ad hoc experimentation, from which quite sophisticated theories about the natural world might eventually develop. Notably, bubble-blowing played a critical role in the development both of Francis Bacon’s ideas about the nature of fluids and of Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking theories of light and colour. The final part of the chapter discusses the presence of putti in contemporary scientific illustration, suggesting these indicate the varied roles played by children in the early modern natural and experimental sciences.