The World Cup, courtesy of Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke. The electronic network that brings us the World Cup has its origins in a meeting in 1660 , writes Roger Highfield.
As the World Cup semi-finals play out over the next two days, BlackBerries, the internetscience will enable us all to tap into the unfolding drama. The time between a goal being scored in Cape Town and the streets of Amsterdam erupting in joy will be measured by the fractions of a second it takes an electromagnetic signal to reach, and descend from, a satellite. and the other fruits of modern
Sir Isaac Newton, president of the Royal Society from 1703 until his death in 1727
Even during one of the most extraordinary events on the scientific calendar, there was no escape from this lightning flow of information. Last month, I attended the “Convocation” of the Royal Society – from the Latin for “calling together”. It marked the 350th anniversary of that august body, which is about to announce the replacement of the outgoing president, the astrophysicist Lord Rees, with Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel Prize-winning president of Rockefeller University in New York. (There is a tradition that the society’s leadership alternates between physicists and biologists, to ensure that neither side monopolises control, with each candidate being elected unopposed.)
This was, by any measure, a special occasion: the last Convocation was held in 1960, when it was first attended by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Indeed, to ensure that there will be a future royal patron, Prince William was admitted as a Fellow last week (“Just shows what a geography degree can do,” he joked).
Yet I couldn’t help feeling that some of my companions’ minds weren’t wholly on the matter at hand. With England at that point still struggling to keep their World Cup hopes alive, the suit of the gentleman sitting next to me buzzed repeatedly, as a friend texted him the latest developments. Under his white shirt, I could even make out the England kit.
News of the goal against Slovenia came from the seat in front, where Brian Cox, professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester and presenter of the BBC’s recent history of the Solar System, had spent much time staring intently at his phone. According to one of the Fellows who had greeted the Queen, she too was itching to find out the latest news from South Africa.
All this seemed astonishingly appropriate. The fact that we live in such a connected world owes everything to a system of connected thinking whose Big Bang took place on a damp night in 1660, when about a dozen men gathered at Gresham College in London to listen to the 28-year-old Christopher Wren, a noted astronomer and architect. They decided that it would be a good idea to create a club to promote the accumulation of useful knowledge. With that, the Royal Society was established, along with the first scientific journal.
From this origin has spun a continuous thread of thought and debate down the generations. On the stage, before the Convocation of around 2,000 people, was the very table on which Robert Hooke had experimented in the 1660s with an early microscope, presumably as Wren and Isaac Newton looked on. On the table lay a mace, a gift from Charles II in 1663. His portrait gazed down on the gathering, along with those of Newton, Joseph Banks, Robert Boyle and Charles Darwin.
This great collective endeavour has united scientists and engineers worldwide across the centuries, even when they were divided by war and conflict. And today, this network is more interlinked than ever, courtesy of the remarkable web of electronic signals that straddles our planet.
In fact, the way that information ripples through networks – whether it be a scientific theory or the flourishing of a yellow card – is a burgeoning subject of study in its own right. Just about everything we know is disseminated through a complex series of networks, whether made up of neurons in our brain, or scientists and companies in different parts of the world.
Our ability to follow events worldwide is one of myriad examples of how much these networks have shaped the modern world. Lord Rees has argued eloquently in his recent Reith Lectures that the great collective effort of science is essential for creating wealth and for improving our health and the quality of our lives.
At lunchtime today, there will be another reminder of the network’s extraordinary reach. In front of a small gathering in the Royal Society’s headquarters off Pall Mall, the British-born astronaut Dr Piers Sellers will present the society with a piece of wood that he recently took into orbit on the Atlantis space shuttle. The four-inch section, which is soon to go on display, is from the original tree from which Newton’s apple fell – inspiring the theory of gravity that governs both the path of a dipping free kick, and the heavenly movements of the satellites that enable us to watch it smash into the net. ( telegraph.co.uk )
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