Shaping Cambridge science
200 years of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
In 1819, the year Queen Victoria was born, Cambridge science was in the doldrums. The glory days of Newton’s Principia were 130 years in the past, and the colleges saw their business solely as the education of future clergymen. There were no University departments as we know them today, no science degrees, no museums— and degrees for women were in the distant future.
In that year, two young Cambridge graduates went on a geologising trip to the Isle of Wight: Adam Sedgwick (left, now commemorated by the Sedgwick Museum) and John Stevens Henslow (right, who established the present Botanic Garden).
Field geology was the cutting-edge science of the day, as the traditional biblically-inspired view of the age of the earth was starting to be overturned by the work of geologists like Charles Lyell. With the enthusiasm of youth, Sedgwick and Henslow wanted to discuss their findings with others, so on their return to Cambridge they sought out like-minded scholars in order to do so.
This led quite rapidly to the formation of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, dedicated to “keeping alive the spirit of inquiry” by giving a forum for presentation and debate of new scientific research, and also by acting as a pressure group to encourage the University to take science more seriously. The success of that pressure is plain today: Cambridge is world famous as a centre of scientific research, to the extent that it comes as a surprise to many that this reputation has grown in such a relatively short time.
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Philosophical Society, an exhibition in the University Library brought together some of the treasures that illustrate this history. They range from Darwin’s Beagle letters to Henslow in the 1830s, to Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s radio telescope chart showing the first observation of a pulsar in 1967. The story began as you entered the exhibition space with a ‘time capsule’ from Sedgwick and Henslow’s trip in 1819: Sedgwick’s collecting bag and hammer, and some of the samples they collected.
The exhibition explored and celebrated the fact that, from its earliest days, the Philosophical Society encouraged the use of quantitative methods and mathematics in the sciences. Newton’s legacy in Cambridge had not been forgotten, and at the time, all graduates of the University were mathematically trained in the elements of Newton’s work. One theme which illustrates the success of this method through the years relates to the phenomenon of ‘wave diffraction’: the wave nature of sound waves, light waves, x-rays and radio waves means that all these apparently disparate topics are in fact closely related. All these subjects have a Cambridge connection.
Lord Rayleigh, the second Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics following James Clerk Maxwell, and Cambridge’s first Nobel prizewinner, made major contributions both in optics and acoustics. For example, he was the first to describe how the diffraction of light waves from the sun by the molecules of air causes the sky to appear blue.
Early in the 20th century it was found that the newly-discovered x-rays produced wave diffraction patterns when passing through a crystal. This phenomenon was first explained by the father-and-son team of William Henry and William Lawrence Bragg, who shared the Nobel prize for the work. Their theory gave the foundation for later triumphs in molecular biology by Watson, Crick, Perutz, Kendrew and others. The image below, which was displayed in the University Library exhibition, shows Sir John Kendrew beside a large model of the Myoglobin molecule, whose structure he first revealed.
The life sciences lagged behind the physical sciences in the use of quantitative and mathematical methods. However, an important early project in this area was in fact run by the Philosophical Society. ‘Anthropometrics’ – the measurement of man – attempted to apply the empirical tools used to survey the natural world to humankind. It involved the systematic measurement of the physical properties of the human body. In 1886 the Cambridge Anthropometric Committee began recording anthropometric data for University students, a project which ran for two decades and produced over 9,000 personalised cards, some of which formed one of the exhibition’s striking displays.
The resulting data, and the need to analyse it, led the mathematician, R A Fisher, to pioneer the methods of modern statistics. The wide-ranging and open approach of the Philosophical Society, and its consistent support of the spirit of discovery, has been the backdrop to this and to many other major scientific breakthroughs of the last 200 years.
These days, the Cambridge Philosophical Society is most familiar to Cambridge residents through its regular program of public lectures on scientific topics — and to graduate students through its grant scheme which continues to help many whose funding runs out before they have completed their PhD study. But the Society also continues to publish two highly-regarded scientific journals, and to fund cutting-edge new science, particularly through its programme of Henslow Fellowships, 3-year postdoctoral grants run in conjunction with the less wealthy colleges to augment the number of Junior Research Fellowships on offer in Cambridge.
For more of the history of the Philosophical Society go to their website to read the brochure for the exhibition. For the full story, see the book The Spirit of Inquiry by Susannah Gibson, published by Oxford University Press.
Images reproduced with kind permission of the exhibitors.
