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Public Lecture 17 May 2006 'Return of the Hooke Papers' by Professor Lisa Jardine
The remarkably generous and swift outpouring of support that enabled the return of the Hooke folio to the Society's archives was a high point for the Society's fundraising effort. More than 150 Fellows, friends and organisations contributed, including the Wellcome Trust, which provided a dramatic major grant in the days before the folio was due to go to auction. Buoyed by the success of the campaign led by Royal Society President Martin Rees, the folio was secured by private treaty only minutes before it was due to be auctioned on 28 March 2006. Significant additional support was also provided to preserve and study, and present these important papers to historians, students, teachers and the general public.
The Society went on to host a themed reception in May 2006 to celebrate the folio's return and to thank the many supporters who made this possible
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Wilkins Lecture 22 November 2006 'Benjamin Franklin in Europe: electrician, academician, politician' By Professor John Heilbron,University of California, Berkeley and University of Oxford
Benjamin Franklin, American patriot and natural philosopher, was born 300 years ago. Apart from a brief stay in England as a young man, he spent the first fifty years of his life transforming himself from a nobody into the leading citizen of Philadelphia.
When he began his first extended residence in England in 1757, he was already a Fellow of the Royal Society and the winner of its Copley Medal for his revolutionary discoveries in electricity. He did not come to Europe to collect his medal, however, but to represent the colony of Pennsylvania in its struggle with its Proprietor. His mission failed but he succeeded, becoming a great friend of Britain and its empire and of many of its leading men of science.
A second mission, on behalf of several colonies, also foundered, and with it Franklin's admiration of English ways; after many rebuffs and a spectacular public humiliation, he returned to America in 1775 a political as well as a scientific revolutionary. He soon turned up in France, whose academicians and statesmen welcomed him as a man of science and as the ambassador of an independent people. He accomplished his mission, which was to obtain French support of the Revolution, while cultivating philosophy at the Académie royale des sciences and courting elegant ladies wherever he found them.
The lecturer describes Franklin's juggling of science and politics, others' judgments of his performance, and, perhaps, his ladies in Paris.
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Public Lecture and Panel discussion 'In conversation with Michael Frayn' on 24 November 2006
Chaired by Professor Lisa Jardine, Queen Mary University of London
Humankind, scientists agree, is a tiny and insignificant anomaly in the impersonal vastness of the universe. But what would that universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there still be numbers, if there were no one to count them? Or scientific laws, if there were no words or numbers in which to express them? Would the universe even be vast, without the very fact of our tininess and insignificance to give it scale?
This paradox is what Michael Frayn calls the world's oldest mystery'. In his new book, The Human Touch, he shows how fleeting and indeterminate our contacts with the world around us are. Like all living creatures, humankind has had to pursue an active role in order to survive and propagate, and to do this it has had to fashion from its transitory contacts a comprehensible world in which action was possible. This, he argues, introduces an irreducible element of subjectivity into our understanding of the universe. The world is what we make of it. In which case, though, what are we?
Lisa Jardine, acclaimed writer, historian and critic quizes Michael Frayn over some of the conceptual questions of this nature that have been the driving force behind many of his novels and plays. |