Seeing Further Read Free Page A

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
their
society.’
    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
palaeolithic, mesolithic
and
neolithic
in 1865. But his real contribution to life was to push through Parliament the first Ancient Monuments Protection Act, which became law in 1882. People forget how much of Britain’s historic fabric was nearly destroyed in the past. Before Lubbock’s intervention, half of Avebury was nearly cleared away for housing, and at one point it was even threatened that Stonehenge, then still in private hands, might be dismantled and shipped to America. Without Lubbock, 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
Dictionary of National Biography.
That produces 218 pages of results – 4,355 entries, nearly as many as for the Church of England (at 4,500) and considerably more than for the House of Commons (3,124) or House of Lords (2,503). It is more central to the life and history of Great Britain than most people realise.
    And as you are about to see, it not only produces the best science, but also some of the very best science writing.

1 J AMES G LEICK
A T T HE B EGINNING : M ORE T HINGS IN H EAVEN AND E ARTH
    James Gleick last visited the Royal Society when researching his recent biography
Isaac Newton.
His first book,
Chaos,
was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist and an international bestseller, translated into more than twenty languages. His other books include
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
and
What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier.
    T HE FIRST FORMAL MEETING OF WHAT BECAME THE R OYAL SOCIETY WAS HELD IN L ONDON ON 28 N OVEMBER 1660. T HE DOZEN MEN PRESENT AGREED TO CONSTITUTE THEMSELVES AS A SOCIETY FOR ‘THE PROMOTING OF EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY’ . E XPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY ? W HAT COULD THAT MEAN ? A S J AMES G LEICK 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 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