Билл Брайсон – Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society (страница 3)
Clearly that didn’t happen. At every critical moment throughout its history there has always been an Isaac Newton, a Joseph Banks, a Humphry Davy, a T.H. Huxley, a Lord Rutherford to give the Society clout and lustre, and to keep it firmly attached to scientific endeavour at the highest level.
Today the Royal Society’s interests remain an inspiration to recite. It provides 350 research fellowships and its grants support the work of 3,000 scientists all over the world. It bestows great numbers of medals and prizes, maintains an active programme of lectures and debates, and holds a beloved Summer Science Exhibition, which no one who appreciates science and can get to London should miss. It acts as the scientific conscience of the nation. It publishes seven journals, and an endless stream of papers. It remains emphatically international in its outlook, maintaining close links with ninety-one science academies around the world. If we have an Earth worth living on a hundred years from now, the Royal Society will be one of the organisations our grandchildren will wish to thank.
Poke your head through any door in the Royal Society building and what you are likely to find is people in meetings. They meet endlessly at the Royal Society. My own involvement, like that of most outsiders, has been as a member of committees – in my case a committee to select the winners of the annual books prize and another involved with the 350th anniversary celebrations – and on almost every visit to the building I have opened three or four wrong doors to find other people meeting. For a long time I wondered what they could possibly all be meeting about. Then I was given a copy of an extraordinary volume – a sturdy hardback called the
Flick through it at random and you find that it is involved in an impossibly varied range of activities. There is a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships Committee, a Hooke Committee, a Trans-Antarctic Association UK Advisory Committee, a Darwin Correspondence Project, a Sir Harold Hartley Lecture Committee, a Scientific Unions Committee, a South East Asia Rainforest Research Committee, a Newton International Fellowships Committee, a Rosalind Franklin Award Committee, and dozens and dozens more. There is even an Anatomy, Physiology, Endocrinology and Pharmacology (Except Clinical Aspects) of Animal Systems, Neurosciences, Psychology and Reproductive Biology, and Relevant Agricultural Studies Committee (known informally, and perhaps a bit mercifully, as ‘Panel 8’).
Altogether at the Royal Society there are ninety-six committees, all devoted to promoting important research, honouring an achievement, improving education, badgering governments into behaving intelligently, or otherwise effecting an enhancement to what we know or an improvement to how we proceed.
The most important committees of all are the ten devoted to electing new Fellows. Today there are 1,400 Fellows, including 69 Nobel laureates, and it is they who run the Society. ‘It is,’ Stephen Cox tells me, smiling, ‘like a company with 1,400 non-executive directors. They set policy and identify key areas of concern. It’s
Because of all that it has achieved in its time, there is a tendency to equate the Royal Society with things like atoms and gravity and other bits of hard science, but what impresses me is the boundlessness of its range. Consider the contribution of John Lubbock, friend and neighbour of Charles Darwin. Lubbock was a banker by profession, but was in addition a distinguished botanist, astronomer, expert on the social behaviour of insects, politician and antiquarian. Among much else, he coined the terms
An entry in John Lubbock’s diary describing a crab which he intends to name after Charles Darwin, 24 November 1852.
many stone circles, tumuli and other historical features of the landscape would have vanished long ago. Lubbock also, not incidentally, invented the bank holiday. The Royal Society and its Fellows, you see, have long been at the heart of all kinds of things.
It is impossible to list all the ways that the Royal Society has influenced the world, but you can get some idea by typing in ‘Royal Society’ as a word search in the electronic version of the
And as you are about to see, it not only produces the best science, but also some of the very best science writing.
AT THE BEGINNING: MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH
James Gleick last visited the Royal Society when researching his recent biography
THE FIRST FORMAL MEETING OF WHAT BECAME THE ROYAL SOCIETY WAS HELD IN LONDON ON 28 NOVEMBER 1660. THE DOZEN MEN PRESENT AGREED TO CONSTITUTE THEMSELVES AS A SOCIETY FOR ‘THE PROMOTING OF EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY’. EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY? WHAT COULD THAT MEAN? AS JAMES GLEICK SHOWS FROM THEIR OWN RECORDS, IT MEANT, AMONG OTHER THINGS, A BOUNDLESS CURIOSITY ABOUT NATURAL PHENOMENA OF ALL KINDS, AND SOMETHING ELSE – A KIND OF EXUBERANCE OF INQUIRY WHICH HAS LASTED INTO OUR OWN DAY.
To invent science was a heavy responsibility, which these gentlemen took seriously. Having declared their purpose to be ‘improving’ knowledge, they gathered it and they made it – two different things. From their beginnings in the winter of 1660–61, when they met with the King’s approval Wednesday afternoons in Laurence Rooke’s room at Gresham College, their way of making knowledge was mainly to talk about it.
For accumulating information in the raw, they were well situated in the place that seemed to them the centre of the universe: ‘It has a large Intercourse
A record of the founding of the Royal Society and the first meeting, 28 November 1660.
Gresham College, home of the Royal Society, 1660–1710.
with all the Earth:…a City, where all the Noises and Business in the World do meet:…the constant place of Residence for that Knowledge, which is to be made up of the Reports and Intelligence of all Countries.’ But we who know everything tend to forget how little was known. They were starting from scratch. To the extent that the slate was not blank, it often needed erasure.
At an initial meeting on 2 January their thoughts turned to the faraway island of Tenerife, where stood the great peak known to mariners on the Atlantic trade routes and sometimes thought to be the tallest in the known world. If questions could be sent there (Ralph Greatorex, a maker of mathematical instruments with a shop in the Strand, proposed to make the voyage), what would the new and experimental philosophers want to ask? The Lord Viscount Brouncker and Robert Boyle, who was performing experiments on that invisible fluid the air, composed a list:
‘Try the quicksilver experiment.’ This involved a glass tube, bent into a U, partly filled with mercury, and closed at one end. Boyle believed that air had weight and ‘spring’ and that these could be measured. The height of the mercury column fluctuated, which he explained by saying, ‘there may be strange Ebbings and Flowings, as it were, in the Atmosphere’ – from causes unknown. Christopher Wren (‘that excellent Mathematician’) wondered whether this might correspond to ‘those great Flowings and Ebbs of the Sea, that they call the Spring-Tides’, since, after all, Descartes said the tides were caused by pressure made on the air by the Moon and the Intercurrent Ethereal Substance. Boyle, having spent many hours watching the mercury rise and fall unpredictably, somewhat doubted it.
Find out whether a pendulum clock runs faster or slower at the mountain top. This was a problem, though: pendulum clocks were themselves the best measures of time. So Brouncker and Boyle suggested using an hourglass.
Hobble birds with weights and find out whether they fly better above or below.
‘Observe the difference of sounds made by a bell, watch, gun, &c. on the top of the hill, in respect to the same below.’