‘A tiny sliver of Earth’s history’ – Seeing Further – The Story of Science & The Royal Society (edited & introduced by Bill Bryson)

One damp weekend in late November in 1660, a dozen men gathered in a room in Gresham College London to hear a twenty-eight year old give a lecture on astronomy. New ideas fascinated this group and they decided to form a ‘Society’ to assist and promote the accumulation of useful knowledge. Some of them, like the initial lecturer of that first meeting, Christopher Wren, would become famous, and some of the ideas they accumulated would have change the way we understand the world. Two years later the Society became ‘Royal’ when Charles II granted it a charter, and soon it was publishing scientific papers and invented the concept of ‘peer review’ as a means of conferring validity. The Royal Society has now been going for 350 years and this book is part of the celebration. Bill Bryson says in his introduction that the Royal Society not only produces the best science but the best science writing. I’m not sure how you’d attempt to support such a statement – and indeed if there is any point in doing so – but I have to agree with Bill Bryson that what follows is very good indeed.

Reading Seeing Further is quite an undertaking. There are close to 500 pages (although not all is text), and some of them, especially the philosophical chapters are challenging. There are some gorgeous illustrations and these are generously scattered throughout the book. The scope is huge – from Margaret Atwood’s appealing take on how books like Gulliver’s Travels helped to formulate the B-movie stereotype of ‘mad scientist’ through Steve Jones’s thought-provoking chapter on what drives biodiversity to Stephen H Schneider’s technical chapter on communicating the uncertainties involved in predicting climate change and Neal Stephenson’s consideration of Liebnitz’s weird metaphysical theory of Monadology.

Some of my favourite chapters deal with specific incidences and personalities associated with the Royal Society, for instance James Gleik’s description of Colonel James Long’s enthusiastic ‘gabbing’, and Simon Schaeffer’s involvement in determining what really happened when lightning struck a Norfolk workhouse. There are also original takes on some of the more famous fellows, for example Richard Dawkins’s explanation of how Darwin’s discovery of natural selection and evolution was so much more significant than the ideas of his peers, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s look at how Newton and his Mathematical Principles depended partly on the fusion of the ideas of the British experimentalists (or empiricists) and the continental theoreticians (or rationalists); and Richard Holmes’s description of the influence of Calvallo on Joseph Banks. Joseph Banks, an early stalwart of the Society, is considered again in Richard Fortey’s illuminating chapter of the involvement of the Royal Society in the establishment of the British and Natural History Museums. This chapter also deals with another theme ie how science is done, and John A Barrow later extends Fortey’s discussion on the importance of classification with a great discussion on the more modern concept of science as the search for mathematical patterns. The importance of mathematics to science comes in again with Ian Stewart’s detailed and impressive description of the JPEG in a digital camera.

Like everything else ‘science’ is subject to the vagaries of fashion and Henry Petroski shows, with the help of an unexpectedly fascinating history of bridges, how engineers and practical science had greater esteem during the nineteenth century. This theme is taken up again, but this time with respect to other applied sciences by Philip Ball as he describes the no longer glamorous but still fascinating topic of how ‘stuff’ is made. Another important change is that the Royal Society, after about two hundred years, was persuaded to admit women, and Georgina Ferry’s chapter on the women involved in X-ray crystallography and the consequent elucidation of chemical structure makes inspiring reading as she describes the obstacles they overcame.

The ways in which ideas within science have changed are also described, and these together form one of the most satisfying and all-encompassing themes within the book: Gregory Benford looks at time, for instance, and Margaret Wertheim looks at how science has changed with our concept of ‘self’ and everything else, including spirituality. Newton allowed for God, she says, but since Locke proposed a science of mind as well as body this has had new implications for the post-Copernicus world. Paul Davies gives a comprehensive review of the Copernican Principle and considers if we are, after all, unique, while Oliver Morton in a lyrical and majestic chapter on earth cycles encourages a reconsideration of concepts such as the ‘balance’ of nature and our tendency to treat our planet as something it is not.

One of the the best feature of the book is that it serves a sampler for the various writers: for instance I have never read anything by Maggie Gee, but since reading how end of the world scenarios feature in her own fiction and that of others’ I know I need to watch out for her books, and Martin Rees’s conclusion, with its alien viewpoint and assessment of this ‘tiny sliver of Earth’s history’ was so evocative that it made me want to order his other books on the spot.

Any Cop?: If you are at all interested in science it will make you think again at what you think you know (and blow away your mind in the process).

Clare Dudman