Circle of Knowledge

The word encyclopedia comes from the Greek enkyklios paideia which refers to “learning within the circle” or “all-round education”. I’m learning these interesting facts from Simon Garfield’s new book All the Knowledge in the World, subtitled “The extraordinary history of the encyclopedia”. The famous Encyclopaedia Britannica features prominently in many of the chapters (there are 26, with titles from A to Z), and I learned that Wikipedia plundered much from the prominent and possibly the most popular 11^th edition (conveniently no longer in copyright) to use as a starting base. A Guardian article from a decade ago pays homage to its magic and appeal.

 

But Britannica had competitors. I learned that Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought it was a travesty to publish each volume in alphabetical order over a period of years. He called it a “huge unconnected miscellany… a worthless monster”. His vision, realized in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana “emphasized the systematic relationships within knowledge bases, presenting the sciences, the arts and other subjects as a rational and unified progression rather than a scattered constellation.” This reminds me of the strange palette of college core curricula; in most schools students are offered a grab-bag (take a course in Group A, two in Group B, etc). There are regular attempts to update the core curriculum meant to make it more “coherent” but it’s hard to agree what exactly that means. And it’s a time-consuming process. I speak from experience having gone through it twice!

 

Collecting knowledge into some authoritative volume has been going on for a long time. Information explosion is not a new thing. But with the industrial revolution and the rapid advances in scientific knowledge, staying up-to-date became more challenging. There was a proliferation of encyclopedias that were geared to specific topics, for example there’s an Encyclopaedia of the Arctic. I can’t imagine an encyclopedia of chemistry today – the explosion of knowledge is exponential. I can hardly keep up with my own field; I suppose that’s why going to a focused conference is helpful because organizers usually invite good speakers that have breadth and depth. As an attendee, I can just soak in the material without having to go looking for it.

 

Who were the knowledgeable people writing entries for the encyclopedia? In the early years of Britannica, many of these were experts in their field. That, unfortunately, doesn’t necessarily make them readable. Experts often wrote for other experts, going deep into the weeds of their cherished subject matter. Entries were uneven in length, detail, readability, and more. Some writers were polemical, one-sided, and took the opportunity to demean their opponents. Some were tardy. I learned that Lord Rayleigh was supposed to “contribute the entry on the physical properties of Light for [the] ninth edition” but he missed the deadline. He then missed the deadlines on Optics and Undulating Light, but made up for it in the Wave Theory of Light (Volume 24).

 

Reading about the challenge of selling encyclopedias was interesting to me, not having grown up in what was then known as a “third-world” country where encyclopedias weren’t present. The showrunners and editors needed to constantly adapt to customer interests. This meant more standardization among entries, and ensuring that it was more readable to the lay public. Garfield includes a list of guidelines; #2 reads: “Be interesting, be lively, be picturesque. Do not antagonize, do not repel the reader by a dull, forbidding style.” There were appeals to write to a broader international English-speaking audience. And of course the sales pitch was that you were buying a high quality education by investing in Britannica, especially for your children to get ahead and be citizens of the world.

 

Today, bound volumes of such encyclopedias go for pennies. All sellers want is for you to come pick it up. Garfield was probably one of the few buyers. Why would anyone want these huge paperweights when you have Wikipedia and more in The Cloud? For researchers and historians, reading these old entries and comparing them from one edition to another illuminates the state of knowledge in the past and how it evolved. Garfield scatters such examples throughout his book. I also learned that the largest ever knowledge collection, much of which has been lost (fire, theft, rodents), was commissioned by the third emperor of China’s Ming Dynasty, Zhu Di, in the early fifteenth century. He tried to be comprehensive and encircle knowledge, but to no avail.

 

Every year, I take my students through a circuit of knowledge in my chemistry courses. Each cohort enters the circle and exits, hopefully gaining some knowledge in the process. In the two courses that I teach most years, General Chemistry and Physical Chemistry, there isn’t much new fundamental knowledge to add. I try to provide contemporary examples, and I regularly update my courses. But I keep going round and around. And as the fall semester approaches, I approach the beginning of the circle once again.