Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson
By TIM RADFORD - GUARDIAN.CO.UK
Added: Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:00:00 UTC
In November 1660, the world was a mysterious place. There was no explanation for the rise and ebb of the tides. Air was a puzzling, invisible fluid with unexplained properties. There was no known way to measure the height of a mountain. Minerals were produced by "certain subterranean juices through veins of the earth".
A small group of men who began meeting at Gresham College that month and formed a society to promote experimental knowledge (the royal charter came in 1662; the first women fellows were elected in 1945) listened to strange reports from Iceland of smoking lakes and fire in the sea. They wondered why winter was colder than summer, and they speculated on the spontaneous generation of life in the absence of "certain seminal principles".
They did more than wonder: they experimented. They choked chickens, gagged fish, strangled dogs and dissected living cats. They transfused blood from a sheep to a human. They tried to imprison a spider inside a circle of powdered unicorn's horn. They also suffocated mice; but according to their first chronicler, they themselves breathed "a freer air" and conversed quietly "without being ingag'd in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age". These men lived in a world of plague, fire, war, public execution, witchcraft, alchemy, religious hatred, political ferment and precarious patronage: but they made it a rule to discuss neither God nor politics, nor news "other than what concern'd our business of Philosophy".
Dave Mosher - National Geographic Comments
The sun is the roundest natural object ever precisely measured, astronomers say.
Geraint Jones - The Guardian Comments
Scientists who encoded the book say it could soon be cheaper to store information in DNA than in conventional digital devices
Ed Yong - Nature News Comments
Under the supervision of guards and graduate students, a small group of prisoners is breeding the beautiful orange-and-white insects in a greenhouse outside the prison. They have even carried out research to show what plants the butterfly prefers to lay its eggs on.
- - Scientific American Comments
Teachers, scientists and policymakers have drafted ambitious new education standards. All 50 states should adopt them
John Roach - NBC News Comments
An artificial “brain” built by a 17-year-old whiz kid from Florida is able to accurately assess tissue samples for signs of breast cancer, providing more confidence to a minimally invasive procedure.
MORE BY TIM RADFORD
Tim Radford - The Guardian 44 Comments
A brilliant introduction to science for children