Билл Брайсон – Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society (страница 1)
Seeing Further
THE STORY OF SCIENCE & THE ROYAL SOCIETY
EDITED & INTRODUCED BY BILL BRYSON
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR JON TURNEY
Table of Contents
BILL BRYSON INTRODUCTION
1 JAMES GLEICK AT THE BEGINNING: MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH
2 MARGARET AT WOOD OF THE MADNESS OF MAD SCIENTISTS: JONATHAN SWIFT’S GRAND ACADEMY
3 MARGARET WERTHEIM LOST IN SPACE: THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS OF NEWTONIAN COSMOLOGY
4 NEAL STEPHENSON ATOMS OF COGNITION: METAPHYSICS IN THE ROYAL SOCIETY, 1715-2010
5 REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN WHAT’S IN A NAME? RIVALRIES AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN SCIENCE
6 SIMON SCHAFFER CHARGED ATMOSPHERES: PROMETHEAN SCIENCE AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY
7 RICHARD HOLMES A NEW AGE OF FLIGHT: JOSEPH BANKS GOES BALLOONING
8 RICHARD FORTEY ARCHIVES OF LIFE: SCIENCE AND COLLECTIONS
9 RICHARD DAWKINS DARWIN’S FIVE BRIDGES: THE WAY TO NATURAL SELECTION
10 HENRY PETROSKI IMAGES OF PROGRESS: CONFERENCES OF ENGINEERS
11 GEORGINA FERRY X-RAY VISIONS: STRUCTURAL BIOLOGISTS AND SOCIAL ACTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
12 STEVE JONES TEN THOUSAND WEDGES: BIODIVERSITY, NATURAL SELECTION AND RANDOM CHANGE
13 PHILIP BALL MAKING STUFF: FROM BACON TO BAKELITE
14 PAUL DAVIES JUST TYPICAL: OUR CHANGING PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE
15 IAN STEWART BEHIND THE SCENES: THE HIDDEN MATHEMATICS THAT RULES OUR WORLD
16 JOHN D. BARROW SIMPLE REALLY: FROM SIMPLICITY TO COMPLEXITY – AND BACK AGAIN
17 OLIVER MORTON GLOBE AND SPHERE, CYCLES AND FLOWS: HOW TO SEE THE WORLD
18 MAGGIE GEE BEYOND ENDING: LOOKING INTO THE VOID
19 STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER CONFIDENCE, CONSENSUS AND THE UNCERTAINTY COPS: TACKLING RISK MANAGEMENT IN CLIMATE CHANGE
20 GREGORY BENFORD TIME: THE WINGED CHARIOT
21 MARTIN REES CONCLUSION: LOOKING FIFTY YEARS AHEAD
INTRODUCTION
Bill Bryson is the internationally bestselling author of
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
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
‘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
Engraving of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek by Verkolje.
A letter from Antoni van Leeuwenhoek to the Royal Society regarding observations of duckweed, its roots and reproduction, 25 December 1702.
Quite as remarkable as its cosmopolitanism was a second distinctive characteristic of the Royal Society – namely, that it wasn’t necessary to be well born to be part of it. Having wealth and title didn’t hurt, of course, but being scientifically conscientious and experimentally clever were far more important. No one better illustrated this than a retiring linen draper from Delft named Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Over a period of fifty years – a period that began when he was already past forty – Leeuwenhoek submitted some two hundred papers to the Royal Society, all accompanied by the most excellent and exacting drawings, of the things he found by looking through his hand-wrought microscopes. These were tiny wooden paddles with a little bubble of glass embedded in them. How he managed to work them is something of a wonder even now, but he achieved magnifications of up to 275 times and discovered the most incredible things: protozoa, bacteria and other wriggling life where no life was thought to be. The idea that there were whole worlds in a drop of fluid was a positive astonishment.