Notes and Records at 75

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You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Fox Robert 2013Notes and Records at 75Notes Rec.673–5http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2012.0069SectionYou have accessEditorialNotes and Records at 75 Robert Fox Robert Fox [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Robert Fox Robert Fox [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:19 December 2012https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2012.0069This is the latest version of the article – see previous versions. January 1, 2012: Previous Version 1 The first issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London appeared almost exactly 75 years ago, in April 1938. The original aims of the journal were modest: in the words of the first editorial, they were to keep Fellows ‘more fully informed of the activities of the Society’.1 But Notes and Records almost immediately enlarged its brief, to include ‘information of historical interest’.2 In opening its pages to such ‘information’, it was reflecting a quite sudden acceleration of interest in the history of science in Britain, marked by the founding of two journals: Annals of Science in 1936 and Ambix, the journal of the recently formed Society for the History of Alchemy and Early Chemistry, in 1937.3 Gradually, historical contributions came to outweigh announcements of meetings and news of elections and other Society business, and for some years now the journal has welcomed articles on all aspects and all periods of the history of science, including the history of technology and medicine, whether or not the Royal Society and its Fellows have been involved.Despite this broadening of its scope, Notes and Records has always valued its close bonds with the Royal Society. It is one of the journal's happiest traditions that each year it publishes the President's anniversary address, as it does in this issue. In his address for 2012, delivered last November, Sir Paul Nurse reflects on the way in which scientific advice might best be communicated not just to the general public but also—and more specifically—to opinion-formers with agendas rooted in ideological and religious positions beyond the realm of science and to politicians and others involved in fashioning policy. As he insists, levels of public debate on climate change and genetically modified foods, much of it fired by the undisciplined ‘cherry-picking’ of evidence, give grave cause for concern. Exchanges on these and other matters of scientific importance constantly remind us of the need for both scientists and specialist communicators to guide all of us on the path of rational, objective argument, while conveying the uncertainties and loose ends that are part and parcel of science even in areas where broad consensus has been achieved. With the very notion of scientific consensus and the mechanisms for achieving it so vague in the public mind, the task is far from easy.In his concluding remarks, Sir Paul presents the Royal Society as supremely well placed to provide the informed, impartial scientific advice on which modern society depends. He is generally optimistic about the future, not least because of the seriousness with which most governments and civil servants listen to expert opinion. Looking back, he is also right to cite the Society's distinguished history of representing British science at the highest level. A generation ago, it was natural that China-watchers in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office should see the Royal Society as a valuable ‘diplomatic pathfinder’ in British moves to renew contacts with the People's Republic of China, after the depredations of the Cultural Revolution. As Jonathan Agar shows in this issue, the Society proved both responsive and effective, in part because foundations had been laid in contacts between individuals and delegations well before the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the consolidation of Den Xiaoping's authority in the following year. Encouraged by a new resolve on both sides to end three decades of isolation and suspicion, this meant that progress could be rapid. An intergovernmental science and technology agreement and a subsidiary agreement between the Royal Society and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, both signed in November 1978, set Sino-British scientific and industrial relations on a new footing. Thereafter, as part of what the president of the Chinese Academy described as a ‘new springtime for science’, exchanges of information, researchers and students started on the road that has made them the everyday occurrences they are today.Another of the Royal Society's multiple public roles is as a guardian of Britain's scientific heritage. Daniel Kuehn throws rather surprising light on that role by drawing attention to an episode in which, at the height of World War II, the Society found time to combine high-level diplomacy with its celebration of the tercentenary of the birth of Isaac Newton. The core celebration was modest enough: it consisted essentially of three short papers (by E. N. da Costa Andrade, the fourth baron Rayleigh, and Sir James Jeans) at the Anniversary Meeting in November 1942. But the Society's decision, in the following year, to donate a first edition of Newton's Principia to the Soviet Academy of Science had greater resonance, by bringing the tercentenary squarely into the realm of international alliance-building. As Kuehn shows, a key figure in both initiatives was John Maynard Keynes. A Newtonian scholar and bibliophile, Keynes gave an after-dinner talk following the Anniversary Meeting; the talk was apparently on Newton's alchemical work, which continued to fascinate Keynes even at a time of tense financial negotiations in Washington and London. And he emerged as an active promoter of the gift to the Soviet Academy.Other contributions to this issue explore aspects of observational precision and mathematical expertise in the physical sciences since 1800. In an essay review Terry Quinn, my predecessor as editor of Notes and Records, praises Malcolm Walker's history of Britain's meteorological service from its modest formalization in the mid-nineteenth century through to the leading scientific institution that it now is, with a staff of almost 2000. And reviews by William H. Brock and Roger Hutchins comment on recent major studies of two Fellows, Sir James Dewar and Sir William Huggins, by Sir John Rowlinson and Barbara J. Becker, respectively.4 The article by G. Neville Greaves takes us away from the Royal Society in tracing the long history of Poisson's ratio, the measure of the deformation of a material when compressed or stretched. Beginning with the quantity's roots in French studies of elasticity during the early nineteenth century, Greaves shows how the ratio has survived a succession of changes in approaches to elasticity theory in the nineteenth century and the multidisciplinary methods of twentieth-century materials science, to re-emerge in our own day as an important metric in determining mechanical performance. Physics and its applications similarly provide the starting point for Stathis Arapostathis's study of decision-making in the nascent electrical supply industry of late Victorian Britain. At a time when the numerous competing systems for generation and distribution were still largely unproven, civic leaders had to tread warily: they were venturing into territory that might enhance their credentials as modern-minded administrators, though at the risk of financial and technological catastrophe if things went wrong. In an exploration of how decisions were made in a number of British towns and cities, Arapostathis lays particular stress on the mediating role of consultants and other trusted holders of expertise in fashioning solutions that would carry the day with the engineers and elected officials of local authorities and with consumers in their common quest for efficiency and economy. His story has complexity at both the human level and the technical level as a guiding theme, as do other contributions in this issue. But that is the stuff of history. It is a facet of the course of past science that brooks no dissembling, whether by historians or those who draw on their work.FootnotesNotes1 [Unsigned], ‘Editorial’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 1, 1 (1938).2 Ibid.3 The context of this interest during the mid 1930s is well described in W. H. Brock, ‘Exploring early modern chemistry: the first twenty-five years of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Early Chemistry’, Ambix58, 191–214 (2011), a contribution to a special issue of Ambix, with Robert G. W. Anderson as its guest editor, celebrating the 75th anniversary of what has since been renamed the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry.4 Both Becker's book and Hutchins's review, however, insist on the great contribution made to Huggins's work by his wife and collaborator Margaret Huggins.© 2012 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. Previous ArticleNext Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This Issue20 March 2013Volume 67Issue 1 Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2012.0069PubMed:24686858Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0035-9149Online ISSN:1743-0178History: Published online19/12/2012Published in print20/03/2013 License:© 2012 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. Citations and impact