YOU COULD say that this is where modern science began – Wednesday, November 28th, 1660, when a group of friends gathered in a London room and agreed to meet once a week to discuss experiments.
Their new "Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning" ( sic) did not invent experimental science, but it did create a new way of doing science. It was based on doing experiments, sharing the results, collaborating internationally, publishing – significantly, not in Latin but in plain English – and with "peer reviewing" of their results.
Founding members included astronomer Christopher Wren, now better remembered as an architect; Irish-born Robert Boyle (see medal, below right), regarded as the father of modern chemistry; his assistant, the great experimentalist Robert Hooke; and Sir William Petty, who had helped set up a similar but short-lived society in Dublin, while in Ireland with Cromwell’s New Model army.
The friends had been meeting in Oxford for years – as what Boyle called “an invisible college” – during troubled times of civil war, political upheaval and religious hatred. But the 1660 restoration of the English monarchy promised more settled times, and they formalised their association.
Within two years, they had a Royal Charter becoming the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge – now simply the Royal Society – and in 1665 started the Philosophical Transactions, today the world's oldest surviving scientific journal.
They were driven by their belief in experimentation, influenced by Francis Bacon’s notion that knowledge is power. And over the coming weeks and years, they would go on to strangle, suffocate and dissect creatures, measure and monitor everything they could, even experimenting on themselves. Above all, they loved collecting data and working with the latest instruments and devices, including watches, telescopes, barometers and microscopes.
Their experiments and ideas would range from the profound to the practical; from Newton’s ideas about gravity and the spectrum of light, to Boyle’s Law and Maxwell’s equations and Bayes’s theorem of probability.
Today, 350 years after that first meeting, the Royal Society (RS) is the world’s most prestigious and oldest surviving scientific academy. Now with 1,400 “Fellows” (FRS), including 69 Nobel laureates and – tellingly – just as many women members.
Historian of science Dr Aileen Fyfe, of NUI Galway, believes the society was important because “it brought people together to share and collaborate”, and because “they created a new way of doing science”.
But Fyfe also points to the society’s “missed opportunities”, eg it didn’t support the steam engine, and admitted women only in 1945. Coincidentally, one of the two women finally admitted in 1945 was Irish-born: X-ray crystallographer, Dame Kathleen Lonsdale.
Irish connections also include the Irish harp which remains one of the four national symbols on the society’s silver mace – with England’s rose, Scotland’s thistle and France’s fleur-de-lis – and the Royal Irish Academy is among the 91 international academies with links to the RS.
The Royal Society’s prestige and clout explains why Trinity College Dublin proudly boasts that three of its physicists are FRSs: Mike Coey, John Pethica, and retired professor Denis Weaire.
Mary Mulvihill