The British population makes up just one per cent of the
world’s population. Yet our small collection of rocks poking out of the
Northern Atlantic has thrown up beaters in virtually every field of human endeavour.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Science and
Engineering. Edward Jenner came up with vaccines, Sir Charles Darwin came up
with the Origin of Species, Sir Isaac Newton pioneered the basic laws of
motion, Sir Tim Berners-Lee who pioneered the world-wide web, Michael Faraday
and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the list is gloriously long.
Why do so many great minds emerge and flourish from Britain?
This is an extremely important question to ask ourselves, not only our past,
but our future economy hangs on further technical advances being made and
developed. Our successes can be traced back almost 800 years ago when The
University of Oxford and Cambridge were founded.
In 1660 The ‘Royal Society’ was formed, backed by Sir
Christopher Wren who was a Professor of Astronomy and an architect at St Paul’s
Cathedral in London. The aim was to pursue a radical idea for the time, that the
workings of nature can be best understood by observations and experiment. So
any theory about the world should be tested and if it disagrees with the
observations, then it is wrong. Even today that is radical the theories of
powerful and important people could end up being undermined by science. So
central to science is this idea that it is enshrined in the Royal Society’s
motto: “Take nobody’s word for it”
Shortly after the Royal Society was formed, Sir Isaac Newton
developed this approach in his work of “The Principia” which contains of his
laws of gravity and the foundations of what we now call classical mechanics, the
tools you need to calculate things from the forces on bridges and buildings to the
paths of artillery shells, arguably the first modern work of physics.
No comments:
Post a Comment