Tag Archives: Royal Society

Bill Bryson: A champion of science and science communication

Posted on by
A passionate science advocate: best-selling US author Bill Bryson. Image courtesy of the Royal Society

A passionate science advocate: best-selling US author Bill Bryson. Image courtesy of the Royal Society.

Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods and Notes from a Small Island, which in a national poll was voted the book that best represents Britain.

His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union’s highest literary award.

He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, and on his own childhood in the memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

His last critically lauded bestseller was At Home: a Short History of Private Life and his most recent book, One Summer: America 1927 chronicles a forgotten summer when America came of age and changed the world for ever.

He was born in the American Midwest, and lives in the UK.

It is over a decade since popular US author Bill Bryson embarked on his eye-opening journey of research for the acclaimed science book ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. At that time, he could never have envisaged the popularity and esteem his book would be held in today.

With Bryson’s impeccable wit, charm and honesty, he managed to open up a world of science that was accessible and revealing in equal measure. And yet, in writing the book, Bryson was faced with narrative adjustments and the trepidation of not knowing many of the fields he intended to cover.

Continue reading →

Science owes much to both Christianity and the Middle Ages

Posted on by

James.JPGThis week’s guest blogger is James Hannam, he has a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (published in the UK as God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science).

The award of the Templeton Prize to the retired president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, has reawakened the controversy over science and religion. I have had the pleasure of meeting Lord Rees a couple of times, including when my book God’s Philosophers (newly released in the US as The Genesis of Science) was shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize. I doubt he has welcomed the fuss over the Templeton Foundation, but neither will he be particularly perturbed by it.

the genesis of science.JPGFew topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.

Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.

That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden.

god designing uni.bmpBut religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.

Given that the Church has not been an enemy to science, it is less surprising to find that the era which was most dominated by Christian faith, the Middle Ages, was a time of innovation and progress. Inventions like the mechanical clock, glasses, printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period. In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500AD to 1000AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.

It was only during the “enlightenment” that the idea took root that Christianity had been a serious impediment to science. Voltaire and his fellow philosophes opposed the Catholic Church because of its close association with France’s absolute monarchy. Accusing clerics of holding back scientific development was a safe way to make a political point. The cudgels were later taken up by TH Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, in his struggle to free English science from any sort of clerical influence. Creationism did the rest of the job of persuading the public that Christianity and science are doomed to perpetual antagonism.

Nonetheless, today, science and religion are the two most powerful intellectual forces on the planet. Both are capable of doing enormous good, but their chances of doing so are much greater if they can work together. The award of the Templeton Prize to Lord Rees is a small step in the right direction.

The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution is available now.

Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize

“Well-researched and hugely enjoyable.” New Scientist

“A spirited jaunt through centuries of scientific development… captures the wonder of the medieval world: its inspirational curiosity and its engaging strangeness.” Sunday Times

“This book contains much valuable material summarised with commendable no-nonsense clarity… James Hannam has done a fine job of knocking down an old caricature.” Sunday Telegraph

Knowledge, networks and nations

Posted on by

james wilsdon.jpg

This week’s guest blogger is James Wilsdon, Director of the Science Policy Centre at the Royal Society since 2008. Prior to this, he was Head of Science and Innovation at the think tank Demos. His publications include ‘See-Through Science’ (Demos, 2004) ‘The Public Value of Science’ (Demos, 2005), ‘The Atlas of Ideas’ (Demos, 2007) and ‘China: the next science superpower?’ (Demos, 2007).

At the 1908 Olympic Games in London, China failed even to field a team. Eighty years later, in Seoul, they finished in 11th place. And in 2008, as Beijing played host to the most spectacular Olympics in history, China topped the table for the first time, with a tally of 51 gold, 21 silver and 28 bronze medals.

If this is what China can achieve in sport, how quickly can it become a leader in science and innovation? This is one of the questions that prompted the Royal Society’s recent report Knowledge, Networks and Nations. The report maps the global landscape for science in 2011 and charts the growing strength of nations such as China, India and Brazil; as well as the emergence of newer players in the Middle East, South-East Asia and North Africa.

In both science and sport, the Chinese government has set ambitious, long-term targets and mobilized vast resources to achieve them. Just as the $40 billion spent on the Beijing Games dwarfed anything that had gone before, so China is now at an early stage in the most ambitious programme of research investment the world has ever seen. Since 1999, China’s spending on R&D has increased by almost 20 per cent each year. It is now spending US$ 100 billion a year on research, and hitting its target of 2.5% of GDP by 2020 will require a further tripling of investment, to around $300 billion a year.

r and d spending.bmp

Quantity of input doesn’t necessarily result in quality of output, but these investments are starting to yield results. Since 1981, the number of peer-reviewed papers produced by China has increased 64-fold, and it is well on target to become the leading producer of scientific publications within this decade, perhaps as soon as 2013. China’s Olympic triumphs flowed in part from its careful targeting of medal-rich sports like gymnastics, shooting and judo. In the same way, it has focused its research investment on disciplines where the opportunities are greatest.

Alongside globalisation, a second theme of the ‘Knowledge, Networks and Nations’ report is collaboration. The scientific world is also becoming more interconnected: over a third of all articles published in international journals are internationally collaborative, up from a quarter 15 years ago. This is happening for a variety of reasons. Advances in communication technology and cheaper travel have played a part, but the primary driver is scientists themselves, seeking to work with the best of their peers and to access complementary resources, equipment and knowledge. So at a time when budgets in many countries are under pressure, our report makes a strong case for continued investment in collaboration, as vital to high-quality research, and to our capacity to address the big social and environmental challenges that we face today.

Science policy at the Royal Society

The ‘Knowledge, Networks and Nations’ report is one recent example of the contribution that the Royal Society makes to public policy. We’ve been doing this for a long time: our earliest report, on the state of Britain’s forests, was delivered to King Charles II back in 1664.

But today, scientific advice to underpin policy is more important than ever before. In 2009, the Royal Society established a Science Policy Centre to strengthen the independent voice of science in UK, European and international policy. Each year we publish half a dozen reports, usually produced by groups of our Fellows and other experts. We also run workshop and seminars, as well as engaging directly with policymakers and with the media.

Above all, we want to make the Royal Society a hub for debate about science, society and public policy; to act as ‘honest brokers’ of the choices that confront scientists and policymakers in the 21st century.

Last year, the Royal Society celebrated its 350th anniversary. As historians such as Steve Shapin have described, in its early years, the Royal Society was a ‘house of experiment’. Hooke, Boyle, and the Society’s other founders – ‘ingenious and curious gentlemen’ as they styled themselves – met regularly to conduct experiments, to peer through newly-invented telescopes and microscopes, and to dissect strange animals.

Today, while the Society funds the work of several hundred research scientists through its grant schemes, no actual experiments take place within its four walls. Science moved out long ago into the universities and corporate R&D labs. But in other ways, the Society remains a house of experiment. Only now, the experiments that take place are in those messy and contested commons and borderlands between science, politics and society.

This, as I see it, is one of the primary responsibilities of a national academy of science in the 21st Century – to be honest and open in our recognition of the shifting politics of knowledge. To ask and to help answer the burning social, ethical and political questions raised by and for science today.