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The Spirit of Inquiry - How one extraordinary society shaped modern science (Hardcover)
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The Spirit of Inquiry - How one extraordinary society shaped modern science (Hardcover)
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Cambridge is now world-famous as a centre of science, but it wasn't
always so. Before the nineteenth century, the sciences were of
little importance in the University of Cambridge. But that began to
change in 1819 when two young Cambridge fellows took a geological
fieldtrip to the Isle of Wight. Adam Sedgwick and John Stevens
Henslow spent their days there exploring, unearthing dazzling
fossils, dreaming up elaborate theories about the formation of the
earth, and bemoaning the lack of serious science in their ancient
university. As they threw themselves into the exciting new science
of geology - conjuring millions of years of history from the
evidence they found in the island's rocks - they also began to
dream of a new scientific society for Cambridge. This society would
bring together like-minded young men who wished to learn of the
latest science from overseas, and would encourage original research
in Cambridge. It would be, they wrote, a society "to keep alive the
spirit of inquiry". Their vision was realised when they founded the
Cambridge Philosophical Society later that same year. Its founders
could not have imagined the impact the Cambridge Philosophical
Society would have: it was responsible for the first publication of
Charles Darwin's scientific writings, and hosted some of the most
heated debates about evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century;
it saw the first announcement of x-ray diffraction by a young
Lawrence Bragg - a technique that would revolutionise the physical,
chemical and life sciences; it published the first paper by C.T.R.
Wilson on his cloud chamber - a device that opened up a
previously-unimaginable world of sub-atomic particles. 200 years on
from the Society's foundation, this book reflects on the
achievements of Sedgwick, Henslow, their peers, and their
successors. Susannah Gibson explains how Cambridge moved from what
Sedgwick saw as a "death-like stagnation" (really little more than
a provincial training school for Church of England clergy) to being
a world-leader in the sciences. And she shows how science, once a
peripheral activity undertaken for interest by a small number of
wealthy gentlemen, has transformed into an enormously well-funded
activity that can affect every aspect of our lives.
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