Stepenson's Quicksilver
Posted here Sunday, October 19, 2003 at 10:18:54 PM 
I've started reading Stephenson's Quicksilver, a novel of the 1650's to 1720's, focus on the scientific characters as if they were in charachters in a science graduate school today. It has its charm but seems to avoid the full social implications of the rise of science and political power, and the weird thinking of a real mechanist like Hobbes. But it has promise. Here is an interesting quote from a review.
This may become a theme of Stephenson's next book, due out in April, for the alchemy of commerce is not unrelated to the alchemy that became science. Both transform object into number; both succeed only if the principles governing transformation can be established; both led to new worlds. It is no accident that a national currency crisis in the 1690s led to Newton's overseeing the manufacture of England's coinage and becoming master of the Mint.
.Since I am interested in the common beliefs that allow science and commerce to commingle, and the reduction of the world to number is one important strand (see Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact, and Mirowski, Machine Dreams: How Economics became a Cyborg Science), the book is helpful, if limited. To my ear the two histories just listed are better stories than Quicksilver.
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