555. Seeing Further: Ideas, Endeavours, Discoveries and Disputes — The Story of Science Through 350 Years of the Royal Society
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by: Art Drake
Author: Bill Bryson (Editor, Introduction), James Gleick (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Henry Petroski (Contributor), Georgina Ferrey (Contributor), Steve Jones (Contributor), Philip Ball (Contributor), Paul C.W. Davies (Contributor), Ian Stewart (Contributor), John D. Barrow (Contributor), Oliver Morton (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Maggie Gee (Contributor), Stephen H. Schneider (Contributor), Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Gregory Benford (Contributor), Martin J. Rees (Contributor), Margaret Wertheim (Contributor), Neal Stephenson (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Rebecca Goldstein (Contributor), Simon Schaffer (Contributor), Richard Holmes (Contributor), Richard Fortey (Contributor), Richard Dawkins
Genre: Non Fiction, History, Essays, Science, Nature
490 pages, published 2010
Reading Format: e-book on Hoopla
Summary
Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, and with contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, David Attenborough, Martin Rees and Richard Fortey, Seeing Further was compiled to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. The Society was started after a small audience listened to a lecture by twenty-eight year old Christopher Wren on astronomy with the intention of promoting the accumulation of useful knowledge. Since its inception, the
Royal Society has fostered scientific exploration and discovery and includes Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Bayes, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, John Locke, and Alexander Fleming as fellows. Members of the Royal Society have split the atom, discovered the double helix, the electron, the computer and the World Wide Web. In short, it is has played an enormous role in the creation of modern science.
Quotes
“We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.”
“Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.”
“Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.”
“Human memories are short and inaccurate.”
“Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).”
“The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.”
“The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.”
“The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.”
“The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.”
“A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. There is nothing wrong”
“To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s
“A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight ‘years to save the planet’, depending on your headline writer and expert of choice (‘Eleven years to save the planet’ seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs).”
“And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.”
“Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.”
“There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet’s behaviours.”
“As the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.”
“Bacon’s dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim ‘there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied’.”
“It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial.”
“For minds and cogitation are, to Leibniz, the ultimate reality, and unless the minds have free will, they are not minds at all but physical mechanisms numbly obeying deterministic rules.”
“It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.”
My Take
Having previously read and enjoyed several books by Bill Bryson, I was looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, Bryson only serves as the Editor and contributes a brief introduction. Each chapter is written by a different scientific or literary luminary and focuses on some aspect of life related to the Royal Society. Some are very interesting and some are incredibly dense, causing my eyes to glaze over. If you are interested in science, you may like this book but I recommend an ala carte approach.
