Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society
Bill Bryson

Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, with contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, Richard Holmes, Martin Rees, Richard Fortey, Steve Jones, James Gleick and Neal Stephenson amongst others, this beautiful, lavishly illustrated book tells the story of science and the Royal Society, from 1660 to the present.On a damp weeknight in November, 350 years ago, a dozen or so men gathered at Gresham College in London. A twenty-eight year old – and not widely famous – Christopher Wren was giving a lecture on astronomy. As his audience listened to him speak, they decided that it would be a good idea to create a Society to promote the accumulation of useful knowledge. With that, the Royal Society was born.Since its birth, the Royal Society has pioneered scientific exploration and discovery. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, John Locke, Alexander Fleming – all were fellows. Bill Bryson’s favourite fellow was Reverend Thomas Bayes, a brilliant mathematician who devised Bayes’ theorem. Its complexity meant that it had little practical use in Bayes’ own lifetime, but today his theorem is used for weather forecasting, astrophysics and stock market analysis. A milestone in mathematical history, it only exists because the Royal Society decided to preserve it – just in case.The Royal Society continues to do today what it set out to do all those years ago. Its members have split the atom, discovered the double helix, the electron, the computer and the World Wide Web. Truly international in its outlook, it has created modern science. ‘Seeing Further’ celebrates its momentous history and achievements, bringing together the very best of science writing. Filled with illustrations of treasures from the Society’s archives, this is a unique, ground-breaking and beautiful volume, and a suitable reflection of the immense achievements of science.

Seeing Further

THE STORY OF SCIENCE & THE ROYAL SOCIETY

EDITED & INTRODUCED BY BILL BRYSON

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR JON TURNEY

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u2a380fa6-bbd2-5224-bf8f-3c1c578effd8)

Title Page (#u7290d824-100d-5457-b6c6-caf253fa5da7)

BILL BRYSON (#u9ed0c2f1-5b58-5221-9ae8-be79f1d4257a) INTRODUCTION

1 JAMES GLEICK (#uf2f93d5e-4502-5db5-b143-a141cc66af14) AT THE BEGINNING: MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH

2 MARGARET AT WOOD (#u8bb31dd1-9cad-5025-871e-ffcd547d965e) OF THE MADNESS OF MAD SCIENTISTS: JONATHAN SWIFT’S GRAND ACADEMY

3 MARGARET WERTHEIM (#u37d3b8e0-58a8-5d82-aead-ebab28af47fa) LOST IN SPACE: THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS OF NEWTONIAN COSMOLOGY

4 NEAL STEPHENSON (#u9949d3c8-9fd9-59af-90d2-4e9320f6a6d3) ATOMS OF COGNITION: METAPHYSICS IN THE ROYAL SOCIETY, 1715-2010

5 REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN (#u03d702ae-9264-5b52-8d3a-80d3ed458280) WHAT’S IN A NAME? RIVALRIES AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN SCIENCE

6 SIMON SCHAFFER (#litres_trial_promo) CHARGED ATMOSPHERES: PROMETHEAN SCIENCE AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY

7 RICHARD HOLMES (#litres_trial_promo) A NEW AGE OF FLIGHT: JOSEPH BANKS GOES BALLOONING

8 RICHARD FORTEY (#litres_trial_promo) ARCHIVES OF LIFE: SCIENCE AND COLLECTIONS

9 RICHARD DAWKINS (#litres_trial_promo) DARWIN’S FIVE BRIDGES: THE WAY TO NATURAL SELECTION

10 HENRY PETROSKI (#litres_trial_promo) IMAGES OF PROGRESS: CONFERENCES OF ENGINEERS

11 GEORGINA FERRY (#litres_trial_promo) X-RAY VISIONS: STRUCTURAL BIOLOGISTS AND SOCIAL ACTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

12 STEVE JONES (#litres_trial_promo) TEN THOUSAND WEDGES: BIODIVERSITY, NATURAL SELECTION AND RANDOM CHANGE

13 PHILIP BALL (#litres_trial_promo) MAKING STUFF: FROM BACON TO BAKELITE

14 PAUL DAVIES (#litres_trial_promo) JUST TYPICAL: OUR CHANGING PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE

15 IAN STEWART (#litres_trial_promo) BEHIND THE SCENES: THE HIDDEN MATHEMATICS THAT RULES OUR WORLD

16 JOHN D. BARROW (#litres_trial_promo) SIMPLE REALLY: FROM SIMPLICITY TO COMPLEXITY – AND BACK AGAIN

17 OLIVER MORTON (#litres_trial_promo) GLOBE AND SPHERE, CYCLES AND FLOWS: HOW TO SEE THE WORLD

18 MAGGIE GEE (#litres_trial_promo) BEYOND ENDING: LOOKING INTO THE VOID

19 STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER (#litres_trial_promo) CONFIDENCE, CONSENSUS AND THE UNCERTAINTY COPS: TACKLING RISK MANAGEMENT IN CLIMATE CHANGE

20 GREGORY BENFORD (#litres_trial_promo) TIME: THE WINGED CHARIOT

21 MARTIN REES (#litres_trial_promo) CONCLUSION: LOOKING FIFTY YEARS AHEAD

Picture Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

BILL BRYSON (#ulink_86fb93b8-0bb5-588b-a8a1-f25ff4a84f3c)

INTRODUCTION

Bill Bryson is the internationally bestselling author of The Lost Continent, Mother Tongue, Neither Here Nor There, Made in America, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Big Country, Down Under, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and A Short History of Nearly Everything, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Aventis Prize for Science Books in 2004, and was awarded the Descartes Science Communication Prize in 2005.

I CAN TELL YOU AT ONCE THAT MY FAVOURITE FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY WAS THE REVEREND THOMAS BAYES, FROM TUNBRIDGE WELLS IN KENT, WHO LIVED FROM ABOUT 1701 TO 1761. HE WAS BY ALL ACCOUNTS A HOPELESS PREACHER, BUT A BRILLIANT MATHEMATICIAN. AT SOME POINT – IT IS NOT CERTAIN WHEN – HE DEVISED THE COMPLEX MATHEMATICAL EQUATION THAT HAS COME TO BE KNOWN AS THE BAYES THEOREM, WHICH LOOKS LIKE THIS:

People who understand the formula can use it to work out various probability distributions – or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called. It is a way of arriving at statistical likelihoods based on partial information. The remarkable feature of Bayes’ theorem is that it had no practical applications in his own lifetime. Although simple cases yield simple sums, most uses demand serious computational power to do the volume of calculations. So in Bayes’ day it was simply an interesting but largely pointless exercise.

Bayes evidently thought so little of his theorem that he didn’t bother to publish it. It was a friend who sent it to the Royal Society in London in 1763, two years after Bayes’ death, where it was published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions with the modest title of ‘An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances’. In fact, it was a milestone in the history of mathematics. Today, with the aid of supercomputers, Bayes’ theorem is used routinely in the modelling of climate change and weather forecasting generally, in interpreting radiocarbon dates, in social policy, astrophysics, stock market analysis, and wherever else probability is a problem. And its discoverer is remembered today simply because nearly 250 years ago someone at the Royal Society decided it was worth preserving his work, just in case.

The Royal Society has been doing interesting and heroic things like this since 1660 when it was founded, one damp weeknight in late November, by a dozen men who had gathered in rooms at Gresham College in London to hear Christopher Wren, twenty-eight years old and not yet generally famous, give a lecture on astronomy. It seemed to them a good idea to form a Society – that is all they called it at first – to assist and promote the accumulation of useful knowledge.

Nobody had ever done anything quite like this before, or would ever do it half as well again. The Royal Society (it became royal with the granting of a charter by Charles II in 1662) invented scientific publishing and peer review. It made English the primary language of scientific discourse, in place of Latin. It systematised experimentation. It promoted – indeed, insisted upon – clarity of expression in place of high-flown rhetoric. It brought together the best thinking from all over the world. It created modern science.

Nothing, it seems, was beneath its attention. Society members took an early interest in microscopy, woodland management, architectural load bearing,

Letter from Thomas Bayes to John Canton concerning logarithms, 24 November 1763.

the behaviour of gases, the development of the pocket watch, the thermal expansion of glass. Before most people had ever tasted a potato, the Royal Society debated the practicality of making it a staple crop in Ireland (ironically, as a hedge against famine). Two years after its formation, Christopher Merret, one of the founding Fellows, demonstrated a method for fermenting wine twice over, endowing it with a pleasing effervescence. He had, in short, invented champagne. The next year John Aubrey contributed a paper on the ancient stone monuments at Avebury, and so effectively created archaeology. John Locke contributed a paper on the poisonous fish of the Bahamas. And so it went on, decade after productive decade. When Benjamin Franklin flew his kite in a thunderstorm it was for the Royal Society that he very nearly killed himself. When a gas holder in Woolwich exploded with devastating consequences or gunpowder repeatedly failed to ignite or the navy needed a cure for scurvy, the Royal Society was called in to advise.

At least three things have always set the Society apart. First, from the outset, it was truly international. In 1665, Henry Oldenburg, himself German born, became editor of the Society’s first journal (now one of seven), which was given the full and satisfying name Philosophical Transactions: Giving some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies and Labours of the Ingenious in many Considerable Parts of the World. No words from the Society’s early annals have more significance than that phrase ‘many Considerable Parts of the World’.

‘The international aspect was clearly a central part of what made it a success so early,’ says Stephen Cox, the Society’s genial chief executive. ‘Right from the start we were getting papers from people like Marcello Malpighi and Christiaan Huygens, so very early on it had become a place where ideas from all over could be exchanged – a kind of early version of the Internet really.’ As Cox likes to note, the Royal Society had a foreign secretary a hundred years before the British government did.

In an age when sabres hardly ever ceased rattling, the Society became the least nationalistic of national institutions. The name itself is telling. Royal Society of London describes a location, not an allegiance. Had it been the Royal Society of Great Britain it would have been a very different organisation whether it wished it or not. So throughout its history it has been the most admirably neutral and cosmopolitan of entities. When Benjamin Franklin was a voice of revolution against Great Britain, he was still an esteemed and welcome member of the Society; and when Captain James Cook circumnavigated the globe in British ships in the name of knowledge he did so with perfect assurances that he would not be molested by any American vessels he encountered. During the Napoleonic wars, Humphry Davy was able to travel on scientific business across Europe thanks to a letter of dispensation from Napoleon that he carried in his pocket. The Société Philomathique gave him a dinner in Paris and drank the health of the Royal Society, if not the king. In like spirit, the Society refused to expel Fellows from enemy nations during either of the world wars, and was one of the first bodies to re-establish links after them.

Engraving of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek by Verkolje.