Robert Hooke, Biological Physicist

In Homework Problem 20 of Chapter 1 in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I refer to Hooke’s law, which relates the tension in a spring to how much it’s stretched from its relaxed state. In that problem, we don’t actually deal with a spring, but instead model the elastic properties of an arterial wall. The law is named after Robert Hooke (1635–1703), an English biological physicist.

Did biological physicists exist four hundred years ago? I would argue yes. Let’s learn a little about Hooke and see if you agree.

Robert Hooke is sometimes called “England’s Leonardo.” In the breadth of his interests, Hooke resembles the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci. However, despite being a scientific and engineering genius, Leonardo rarely published his discoveries so he had little impact on future generations of scientists. Hooke, on the other hand, did publish and was a major contributor to the scientific revolution.

Hooke attended Oxford, the oldest university in England. His family was not wealthy, and he obtained free tuition by serving as an organist. He began his career as an assistant to Robert Boyle, and helped build the vacuum pumps needed in Boyle’s chemical research. London’s Royal Society was founded in 1660 and the 25-year-old Hooke was appointed its experimental curator. Just what does an “experimental curator” do? He was in charge of designing, constructing, and demonstrating experiments at the Royal Society’s weekly meetings. These experiments could be in physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, or medicine. He must have been a versatile and skilled experimentalist. I can hardly imagine a job that would provide a better liberal education across all the sciences.

During the middle and late 17th century, London was a leading center of science. The most famous scientist was Isaac Newton (arguably the greatest scientist anywhere, ever). But also contributing at this time were Boyle, Hooke, and astronomers John Flamsteed (who established the Royal Greenwich Observatory) and Edmund Halley (of “Halley’s comet,” who convinced Newton to finally publish his Principia).

Hooke was himself an astronomer, and with a telescope he observed the rotations of planets Mars and Jupiter. But he’s best known for his work using the microscope. Whereas the Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek—who worked at the same time as Hooke—used single-lens microscopes, Hooke adopted and improved the compound microscope having two lenses: an objective and an eyepiece. Many of his results, including the first observations of biological cells and spectacularly detailed drawings of tiny insects, were published in his 1665 book Micrographia. It’s because of this book that I claim Hooke was a biological physicist. After all, he introduced the word “cell” into biology’s vocabulary. Hooke was a fine illustrator and he drew the pictures for his book, like that of the flea shown below.

Hooke was brilliant but argumentative. He developed Hooke’s law relating the force to the extension of a spring, but then engaged in a heated argument about priority with Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens for the invention of the spiral hairspring used in watches. He was also a bitter rival of Newton’s, and they argued about who was the true discoverer of the inverse square law that Newton used in his universal law of gravitation. In Volume 8 of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant wrote that Hooke “was probably the most original mind in all that galaxy of geniuses that for a time made the Royal Society the pacemaker of European science; but his somber and nervous nature kept him from the acclaim that he deserved.”

After the 1666 Great Fire of London, Hooke—just barely 30 years old—set aside most of his scientific work to help architect and scientist Christopher Wren rebuild the city. 

For his contributions to physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, microscopy, and architecture, Robert Hooke deserves to be known as England’s Leonardo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chtxPnS1_GQ