Royal Society

[Yahoo7]

Royal Society

In full ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON FOR THE PROMOTION OF NATURAL KNOWLEDGE, the oldest scientific society in Great Britain and one of the oldest in Europe, founded in 1660. It began earlier with small, informal groups, who met periodically to discuss scientific subjects. The "Invisible College" of London and Oxford, which first met in 1645, and a number of small academies in England became incorporated in 1662 when the newly restored Charles II granted a charter to the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge. Largely composed of Puritan sympathizers and adherents of Francis Bacon, the Royal Society received little more than moral support from the crown, unlike academies on the European continent, which were established by the state and whose members gained an income but lost their independence. Founders and early members of the Royal Society included the scientist Bishop John Wilkins (Winki), the philosopher Joseph Glanvill, the mathematician John Wallis, the inventor and microscopist Robert Hooke, and the architect Christopher Wren, who wrote the preamble to its charter.
The stimulus of free expression provided an impetus to scientific thought and developments in England. By the 18th century, the achievements of the Royal Society were internationally famous. Its publication, Philosophical Transactions, begun in 1665, was one of the earliest periodicals in the West. Isaac Newton was elected to the society in 1671, and Edmond Halley, the astronomer, in 1678. In 1768 the society sponsored the first scientific expedition to the Pacific, under James Cook, and in 1919 it sent an expedition to photograph the solar eclipse of May 29 from Principe Island in the Gulf of Guinea, which verified Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity and helped make Einstein famous.
Five medals (the Copley Medal, two Royal, the Davy, and the Hughes) are awarded by the society every year, the Rumford and the Darwin medals biennially, the Sylvester triennially, and the Buchanan quinquennially. The Copley Medal originated in a bequest by Sir Godfrey Copley (1709) and is the most prestigious scientific award in Great Britain. The Royal Society continues to publish scientific papers in its Philosophical Transactions, while abstracts of the papers appear in the Proceedings. Members of the society are known as fellows. Candidates for membership in the Royal Society must be recommended by several fellows who personally attest to the candidate's scientific achievement. The society also has a number of foreign members. In the late 20th century, membership in the Royal Society included more than 1,000 fellows and 90 foreign members.


Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

[Yahoo7]

The diffusion of scientific method

The publication of the Principia marks the culmination of the movement begun by Copernicus and, as such, has always stood as the symbol of the scientific revolution. There were, however, similar attempts to criticize, systematize, and organize natural knowledge that did not lead to such dramatic results. In the same year as Copernicus' great volume, there appeared an equally important book on anatomy: Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica ("On the Fabric of the Human Body," called the De fabrica), a critical examination of Galen's anatomy in which Vesalius drew on his own studies to correct many of Galen's errors. Vesalius, like Newton a century later, emphasized the phenomena, i.e., the accurate description of natural facts. Vesalius' work touched off a flurry of anatomical work in Italy and elsewhere that culminated in the discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey, whose Exercitatio Anatomica De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals) was published in 1628. This was the Principia of physiology that established anatomy and physiology as sciences in their own right. Harvey showed that organic phenomena could be studied experimentally and that some organic processes could be reduced to mechanical systems. The heart and the vascular system could be considered as a pump and a system of pipes and could be understood without recourse to spirits or other forces immune to analysis.

In other sciences the attempt to systematize and criticize was not so successful. In chemistry, for example, the work of the medieval and early modern alchemists had yielded important new substances and processes, such as the mineral acids and distillation, but had obscured theory in almost impenetrable mystical argot. Robert Boyle in England tried to clear away some of the intellectual underbrush by insisting upon clear descriptions, reproducibility of experiments, and mechanical conceptions of chemical processes. Chemistry, however, was not yet ripe for revolution.

In many areas there was little hope of reducing phenomena to comprehensibility, simply because of the sheer number of facts to be accounted for. New instruments like the microscope and the telescope vastly multiplied the worlds with which man had to reckon. The voyages of discovery brought back a flood of new botanical and zoological specimens that overwhelmed ancient classificatory schemes. The best that could be done was to describe new things accurately and hope that someday they could all be fitted together in a coherent way.

The growing flood of information put heavy strains upon old institutions and practices. It was no longer sufficient to publish scientific results in an expensive book that few could buy; information had to be spread widely and rapidly. Nor could the isolated genius, like Newton, comprehend a world in which new information was being produced faster than any single person could assimilate it. Natural philosophers had to be sure of their data, and to that end they required independent and critical confirmation of their discoveries. New means were created to accomplish these ends. Scientific societies sprang up, beginning in Italy in the early years of the 17th century and culminating in the two great national scientific societies that mark the zenith of the scientific revolution: the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, created by royal charter in 1662, and the Académie des Sciences of Paris, formed in 1666. In these societies and others like them all over the world, natural philosophers could gather to examine, discuss, and criticize new discoveries and old theories. To provide a firm basis for these discussions, societies began to publish scientific papers. The Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, which began as a private venture of its secretary, was the first such professional scientific journal. It was soon copied by the French academy's Mémoires, which won equal importance and prestige. The old practice of hiding new discoveries in private jargon, obscure language, or even anagrams gradually gave way to the ideal of universal comprehensibility. New canons of reporting were devised so that experiments and discoveries could be reproduced by others. This required new precision in language and a willingness to share experimental or observational methods. The failure of others to reproduce results cast serious doubts upon the original reports. Thus were created the tools for a massive assault on nature's secrets.

Even with the scientific revolution accomplished, much remained to be done. Again, it was Newton who showed the way. For the macroscopic world, the Principia sufficed. Newton's three laws of motion and the principle of universal gravitation were all that was necessary to analyze the mechanical relations of ordinary bodies, and the calculus provided the essential mathematical tools. For the microscopic world, Newton provided two methods. Where simple laws of action had already been determined from observation, as the relation of volume and pressure of a gas (Boyle's law, pv = k), Newton assumed forces between particles that permitted him to derive the law. He then used these forces to predict other phenomena, in this case the speed of sound in air, that could be measured against the prediction. Conformity of observation to prediction was taken as evidence for the essential truth of the theory. Second, Newton's method made possible the discovery of laws of macroscopic action that could be accounted for by microscopic forces. Here the seminal work was not the Principia but Newton's masterpiece of experimental physics, the Opticks, published in 1704, in which he showed how to examine a subject experimentally and discover the laws concealed therein. Newton showed how judicious use of hypotheses could open the way to further experimental investigation until a coherent theory was achieved. The Opticks was to serve as the model in the 18th and early 19th centuries for the investigation of heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and chemical atoms.


Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

[Professor]

Шо за престеровина...

[Yahoo7]

Restoration period

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, men again looked to France. John Dryden admired the Académie Française and greatly deplored that the English had "not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a manner barbarous" as compared with elegant French. After the passionate controversies of the Civil War, this was an age of cool scientific nationalism. In 1662 the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge received its charter. Its first members, much concerned with language, appointed a committee of 22 "to improve the English tongue particularly for philosophic purposes." It included Dryden, the diarist John Evelyn, Bishop Thomas Sprat, and the poet Edmund Waller. Sprat pleaded for "a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses, a native easiness; bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness" as possible. The committee, however, achieved no tangible result, and failed in its attempt to found an authoritative arbiter over the English tongue. A second attempt was made in 1712, when Jonathan Swift addressed an open letter to Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, then Lord Treasurer, making "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining [fixing] the English Tongue." This letter received some popular support, but its aims were frustrated by a turn in political fortunes. Queen Anne died in 1714. The Earl of Oxford and his fellow Tories, including Swift, lost power. No organized attempt to found a language academy on French lines has ever been made since.
With Dryden and Swift the English language reached its full maturity. Their failure to found an academy was partly counterbalanced by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary (published in 1755) and by Robert Lowth in his Grammar (published in 1761).

Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

[Mono]

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, men again looked to France. John Dryden admired the Académie Française and greatly deplored that the English had "not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a manner barbarous" as compared with elegant French. After the passionate controversies of the Civil War, this was an age of cool scientific nationalism. In 1662 the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge received its charter. Its first members, much concerned with language, appointed a committee of 22 "to improve the English tongue particularly for philosophic purposes." It included Dryden, the diarist John Evelyn, Bishop Thomas Sprat, and the poet Edmund Waller. Sprat pleaded for "a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses, a native easiness; bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness" as possible. The committee, however, achieved no tangible result, and failed in its attempt to found an authoritative arbiter over the English tongue. A second attempt was made in 1712, when Jonathan Swift addressed an open letter to Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, then Lord Treasurer, making "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining [fixing] the English Tongue." This letter received some popular support, but its aims were frustrated by a turn in political fortunes. Queen Anne died in 1714. The Earl of Oxford and his fellow Tories, including Swift, lost power. No organized attempt to found a language academy on French lines has ever been made since.
With Dryden and Swift the English language reached its full maturity. Their failure to found an academy was partly counterbalanced by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary (published in 1755) and by Robert Lowth in his Grammar (published in 1761).

Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

весьма позновательно.

[Professor]

Breaking news!
Престер переметнулся от Википедии к Британской энциклопедии.
Новая ипостась - Yahoo7. Таким образом Прессишуалло (Престер+Джессика+Джошуа+Помпабилло) переименовывается в Прессишуалло7.
Прессишуалло7 - с каждой новой ипостасью твое название будет все более приближаться к идеалу.
Mono - может хватит реагировать на посты Прессишуалло7? Тем более так ласково...

[Yahoo7]

Contributions

A) The pedagogy of Comenius

Comenius (1592-1670) was, even more than Ratke, a leading intellect of European educational theory in the 17th century. Born in Moravia, he was forced by the circumstances of the Thirty Years' War to wander constantly from place to place--Germany, Poland, England, Sweden, Hungary, Transylvania, and Holland--and was deprived of his wife, children, and property. He himself said, "My life was one long journey. I never had a homeland."
As a onetime bishop of the Bohemian Brethren, he sought to live according to their motto, "Away from the world towards Heaven." To prepare for the hereafter, Comenius taught, one should "live rightly"--that is, seek learned piety by living one's life according to correct principles of science and morality. Comenius' philosophy was both humanitarian and universalistic. In his Pampaedia ("Universal Education," discovered in 1935), he argued that "the whole of the human race may become educated, men of all ages, all conditions, both sexes and all nations." His aim was pansophia (universal wisdom), which meant that "all men should be educated to full humanity"--to rationality, morality, and happiness.
Comenius realized that, to achieve pansophia by universal education, radical reforms in pedagogy and in the organization of schools were required, and he devised an all-embracing school system to meet this need. During infancy (up to six years of age), the child in the "mother school," or family grouping, would develop basic physical faculties. During the following period (seven to 12), the child would go to the "vernacular school," which was divided into six classes according to age and could be found in every town. The prime aim of these schools would be to develop the child's imagination and memory through such subjects as religion, ethics, diction, reading, writing, basic mathematics, music, domestic economy, civics, history, geography, and handicraft. This vernacular school formed the final stage of education for technical vocations. After this school would come the grammar school (or Latin school), which the pupils would attend during their youth (13-18) and which would exist in every town of every district. Through progressive courses in language and the exact sciences, the young people would be brought to a deeper understanding of things. Finally, the university (19-24) would be a continuation of this school. Every province ought to have one such university, whose central task would be the formation of willpower and powers of judgment and categorization. Over and above this four-tier school system Comenius also envisaged a "college of light," a kind of academy of the sciences for the centralized pooling of all learning. It is important to note, in this regard, that it was Comenius' stay in England (1641-42) that initiated discussions leading to the founding of the Royal Society (incorporated 1662). Furthermore, the German philosopher Leibniz, influenced by Comenius, founded the Berlin Academy, and similar societies sprouted elsewhere.
The Great Didactic (1657) sets forth Comenius' methodology--one for the arts, another for the sciences. Comenius believed that everything should be presented to the child's senses--and to as many senses as possible, using pictures, models, workshops, music, and other "objective" means. With proper presentation, the mind of the child could become a "psychological" counterpart of the world of nature. The mind can take in what is in nature if the method of teaching most akin to nature is used. For the upper age levels, he recommended that language study and other studies be integrated, and indeed he employed this scheme in his Gate of Tongues Unlocked (1631), a book of Latin and sciences arranged by subjects, which revolutionized Latin teaching and was translated into 16 languages. The Visible World in Pictures (1658), which remained popular in Europe for two centuries, attempted to dramatize Latin through pictures illustrating Latin sentences, accompanied by one or two vernacular translations.


Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

[Yahoo7]

Contributions

B) The academies

The beginning of academies for the promotion of philosophy, arts, or sciences can be traced to the early Renaissance, particularly in Italy and France. The Platonic Academy in Florence, cited earlier in this article, was one of the most noted of speculative societies. The first scientific academies belong to the 16th century: in 1560, for instance, the Academia Secretorum Naturae ("Secret Academy of Nature") was founded in Naples; in 1575 Philip II of Spain founded in Madrid the Academy of Mathematical Sciences. Then, in 1617, the first German academy, Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft ("Productive Society"), was founded at Weimar with the expressed purposes of the purification of the language and the cultivation of literature. A number of other academies were founded throughout Europe.
It was in the 17th century that the two preeminent scientific academies were founded. Both the English Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences began as informal gatherings of famous men. The "invisible college" of London and Oxford had its first meetings in 1645; it was incorporated as the Royal Society in 1662. In Paris, a group of men including the philosophers Descartes and Pascal started private meetings almost at the same time. In 1666 they were invited by the economic minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert to meet in the royal library. In 1699 the society was transferred to the Louvre under the name of the Academy of Sciences. The French Academy also started as a private society of men of letters some five years before its incorporation in 1635 under the patronage of Cardinal de Richelieu. In the 18th century, the fame and achievements of these English and French academies became internationally recognized, and many other European countries started to found their own national academies.


Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

[Yahoo7]

Voyages and discoveries

In 1768 the Royal Society, in conjunction with the Admiralty, was organizing the first scientific expedition to the Pacific, and the rather obscure 40-year-old James Cook was appointed commander of the expedition. Hurriedly commissioned as lieutenant, he was given a homely looking but extremely sturdy Whitby coal-hauling bark renamed Hms "Endeavour," then four years old, of just 368 tons, and less than 98 feet long. Cook's orders were to convey gentlemen of the Royal Society and their assistants to Tahiti to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun. That done, on June 3, 1769, he was to find the southern continent, the so-called Terra Australis, which philosophers argued must exist to balance the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. The leader of the scientists was the rich and able Joseph Banks, aged 26, who was assisted by Daniel Solander, a Swedish botanist, as well as astronomers (Cook rating as one) and artists. Cook carried an early nautical almanac and brass sextants, but no chronometer on the first voyage.
Striking south and southwest from Tahiti, where his predecessors had sailed west and west-northwest with the favouring trade winds, Cook found and charted all of New Zealand, a difficult job that took six months. After that, instead of turning before the west winds for the homeward run around Cape Horn, he crossed the Tasman Sea westward and, on April 19, 1770, came on the southeast coast of Australia. Running north along its 2,000-mile eastern coast, surveying as he went, Cook successfully navigated Queensland's Great Barrier Reef--since reckoned as one of the greatest navigational hazards in the world--taking the Coral Sea and the Torres Strait in his stride. Once the bark touched on a coral spur by night, but it withstood the impact and was refloated. After the "Endeavour" was grounded on the nearby Queensland coast and repaired, Cook sailed it back to England. He stopped briefly at Batavia (modern Jakarta) for supplies, and, although the crew had been remarkably healthy until then, 30 died of fever and dysentery contracted while on land. None of the crew, however, died of scurvy (a dietary disease caused by a lack of ascorbic acid and that habitually decimated the crews of ships on lengthy voyages in the 18th century). This was because, in addition to ensuring cleanliness and ventilation in the crew's quarters, Cook insisted on an appropriate diet that included cress, sauerkraut, and a kind of orange extract. The health in which he maintained his sailors in consequence made his name a naval byword.
Back in England, he was promoted to commander and presented to King George III, and soon he began to organize another and even more ambitious voyage. The success of the expedition of Joseph Banks and his scientists (which established the useful principle of sending scientists on naval voyages--e.g., Charles Darwin in the "Beagle," T.H. Huxley in the "Rattlesnake," and J.D. Hooker with Sir James Ross to the Ross Sea in the Antarctic) stimulated interest not only in the discovery of new lands but in the new knowledge in many other scientific subjects. The wealth of scientifically collected material from the "Endeavour" voyage was unique. Cook was now sent out with two ships to make the first circumnavigation of and penetration into the Antarctic.
Between July 1772 and July 1775 Cook made what ranks as one of the greatest sailing ship voyages, again with a small former Whitby ship, the "Resolution," and a consort ship, the "Adventure." He found no trace of Terra Australis, though he sailed beyond latitude 70[IMG]file:///D:/Program%20Files/Britannica/2001/gifs/degree.gif[/IMG] S in the Antarctic, but he successfully completed the first west-east circumnavigation in high latitudes, charted Tonga and Easter Island during the winters, and discovered New Caledonia in the Pacific and the South Sandwich Islands and South Georgia Island in the Atlantic. He showed that a real Terra Australis existed only in the landmasses of Australia, New Zealand, and whatever land might remain frozen beyond the ice rim of Antarctica. And, once again, not one of his crew died of scurvy. Back in England, he was promoted to captain at last, elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and awarded one of its highest honours, the gold Copley Medal, for a paper that he prepared on his work against scurvy.
There was yet one secret of the Pacific to be discovered: whether there existed a northwest passage around Canada and Alaska or a northeast one around Siberia, between the Atlantic and Pacific. Although the passages had long been sought in vain from Europe, it was thought that the search from the North Pacific might be successful. The man to undertake the search obviously was Cook, and in July 1776 he went off again on the Resolution, with another Whitby ship, the Discovery. This search was unsuccessful, for neither a northwest nor a northeast passage usable by sailing ships existed, and the voyage led to Cook's death. In a brief fracas with Hawaiians over the stealing of a cutter, Cook was slain on the beach at Kealakekua by the Polynesian natives.
Cook's voyaging left him comparatively little time for family life. Although Cook had married Elizabeth Batts in 1762, when he was 34 years old, he was at sea for more than half of their married life. The couple had six children, three of whom died in infancy. The three surviving sons, two of whom entered the navy, had all died by 1794.
Cook had set new standards of thoroughness in discovery and seamanship, in navigation, cartography, and the sea care of men, in relations with natives both friendly and hostile, and in the application of science at sea; and he had peacefully changed the map of the world more than any other single man in history.


Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

[AvDav]

ему и правда кажется что его метровые лишенные смысла полотна кто либо читает и тем более воспринимает всерьез?

[Yahoo7]

Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose

Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best-sellers of the period were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, like Arthur Dent's Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly's Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions followed), the two of which formed the meagre dowry of John Bunyan's first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely profitable treatment of doctrine, though equally some famous godly preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other shaping factor was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian prose that would accurately and concretely represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope, repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and '50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society (incorporated 1662), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier prose, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in the baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620) Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others. The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning, that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward, and his inductive method, by which scientific principles were to be established by experimentation, beginning at particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God's glory). The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first "distemper" of learning; his own prose, however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric; and the famous Essayes (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended complications.
The Essayes are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essais of Montaigne. Lesser collections were published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600-01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson (his posthumous Timber; or, Discoveries). A related genre was the "character," a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus, and practiced first by Joseph Hall (Characters of Vertues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle's (Micro-cosmographie, 1628). Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker. Walton's hagiographies are entertaining, but he manipulated the facts shamelessly; his biographies seem lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville's tragical and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter Raleigh's unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling periods and sombre skepticism, written from the Tower during his disgrace. Raleigh's providential framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James found it "too saucy in censuring princes." Bacon's History of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (1622) belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in pragmatism.


Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.