Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk" letter to Gottfried Leibniz

Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture. It’s usually associated with the early days of computer hackers and AI. This is the first in a series of blog posts about how high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture were just as much a part of the rapid progress of 17th century natural science as they were of the rapid progress of 20th century computer science; and about what we can learn by drawing this comparison.

"If I were to choose a patron saint for cybernetics... I should have to choose Leibniz"

-Norbert Wiener

"if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines, we could in all subjects in so far as they are amenable to reasoning accomplish what is done in arithmetic and geometry."

-Gottfried Leibniz

"...especially in all those subjects where use of [such a language] may be free and where interest and authority do not intercept, the regular exercise thereof which I conceive to be the great antagonists which may impede its progress..."

-Robert Hooke

The last quote is from an archival text which I've been trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months. It comes from a scan of a letter which Robert Hooke wrote to Gottfried Leibniz in 1681. I am fascinated by this letter for a couple of reasons:

• I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Hooke and Leibniz had exchanged any letters at all. I found the letter by chance, when browsing through the Royal Society's online archives.
• The letter is about one of my favourite topics: Leibniz's project to create a universal language of science, which could be mechanically applied to automate any piece of scientific reasoning (apart from the collection of new experimental data).

For these reasons, this letter from Hooke to Leibniz has become one of my favourite pieces of niche archival material. (The other two are this popular science article which Alan Turing wrote to introduce computational undecidability to a general audience, and this speech which Ove Arup gave to his employees to reassure them that the new industrial computer his engineering firm had bought wasn't going to replace them in their jobs).

I think my transcription is about 90% accurate so far. Hooke's handwriting is quite hard to read. The original section quoted looks like this:

But from what I have transcribed, I think this letter is a particularly nice example of the originality and prescience of Hooke's way of thinking about the world. Almost as fascinating as the letter itself, are the events surrounding the time in which it was written. I hope to write more soon about Hooke's life, about his relationship with cryptography, and about the way in which he bridged the gap between technician and scientist.

A common thread I find myself drawing across much of Hooke's work - albeit anachronistically - is an early expression of the hacker mindset which flourished among computer scientists in the second half of the 20th century, coincided with the explosion of computing innovations that took place during that period, and came to be romanticised in cyberpunk science fiction. And I think that if I had to pick one piece of Hooke's writing that expresses this attitude most clearly, I would have to pick this letter. To explain why, I'll first talk a bit more about why Hooke was writing to Leibniz in the first place.

You likely know Robert Hooke from studying his laws about the motion of springs in high-school physics, for his role in the foundation of the Royal Society, or for his beef with Isaac Newton. You likely know about Gottfried Leibniz from hearing about his philosophy of monads, for his role in the invention of calculus, or for his beef with Isaac Newton.

It turns out that, aside from their common interest in antagonising Isaac Newton, Hooke and Leibniz also shared an interest in mechanising scientific reasoning through the invention of a universal language for science. Leibniz called his project the "Characteristica Universalis". The philosopher Norbert Wiener credited this idea as a precursor to his own notion of “cybernetics” – which, incidentally, is the word he coined from which we get the “cyber” in "cyberpunk". One thing I took away from reading Wiener was that you can think of the Characteristica Universalis as a kind of proto computer programming language. Hooke liked Leibniz’ ideas on this topic so much that he sent him the above letter just to say so.

What makes Hooke’s letter cyberpunk as opposed to just cybernetic is that it adds to Leibniz’s worldview an explicit (and perhaps naively optimistic) hope that individual freedom might be enabled by rather than stifled by the proliferation of this early programming language. In particular he saw the effect of a language for mechanised scientific reasoning as especially useful when used by individuals to express, explore and test ideas freely, without interference from unjust authorities who might seek to censor or interfere with their work. In 1681, Hooke was already imagining the countercultural edge of cybernetic systems.

This should not be surprising, given Hooke's own politically uneasy upbringing, his tendency to skip lectures at university in order to tinker (in Robert Boyle's lab) with designs for experiments and novel instruments that went on to occupy his scientific career, or his habit of falling out with the interfering authorities of his time.

If my reading of this letter is accurate then - just as Wiener calls Leibniz the patron saint of cybernetics, we should call Hooke the patron saint of cyberpunk.