This was an interesting read. They did a good job of representing the various sciences, including mathematics and engineering, whcih are often underrepresented. I felt it was a bit heavy on theoretical physicists, but that is probably just my own preference for biology. The look ahead was almost as interesting, if a bit more frightening, then the look back

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Very pleased to find this book was actually an amalgamation of famous authors writing 21 chapters to celebrate the 350th anniversary of The Royal Society. Collaboration of various authors including Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies, Maggie Gee, and others. Essays on The Royal Society. Particularly enjoyed Atwood's contribution relating fiction of Swift.
Below is my notes on each chapter:
1. Formation of society bringing like minded men together, and common questions and experiments they aimed to understand and undergo.
2. Mad scientist, Faust. Swift "acting in synergy with the Royal Society". Without the r.s., there would have been no scientist in Gulliver's Travels. Swift's "projectors", the fictional scientists experimentation and inventions existed for the benefit of mankind. "The Grand Academy of Lagado" is a satire of the r.s. itself. Scientific experimentation in fiction; Swift, Shelley (Frankenstein), Hawthorn (Dr Rappacini & The Birthmark "), Tom Brown's Schooldays, Jekyll & Hyde, Dr Moreau,
3. Christianity and science. Brilliant essay.
3. Especially related to Dante.
4. Metaphysics, Leibniz - tutored princess Caroline, invented binary, used reasoning to "prove" his ideas. Invented "monads", the stuff inside atoms that has choice and awareness. Much of his work unpublished.
5. The bringing together of science and maths. Aristotle logic. Galileo, Copernicus Descartes newton maths.
Kant "experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty "
6. Royal society advising the government. Lightning rods. Public trust in science.
7. Ballomania 1783
8. Specimen collection. Joseph Banks, sir Hans Sloane, natural history
9. Darwin, Patrick Matthew, Alfred Russell Wallace, Robert Malthus. Evolution
10. Civil engineers Telford, Fairbrain and Robert Stephenson elected members of r.s. after success of bridge construction (Britannia bridge). Goes on to describe other world bridges
11. First women to join r s. Kathleen Yardley and Marjorie Stephenson. The relationship between society members and how they helped each other, particularly Bragg's and x-rays
12. Species in danger throughout the world. "1859 London was the largest city on Earth" (population)
13. Argument to establish material science and engineering as a science, particularly related to Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. First description in story is mining metals. Mentions how Agricola's De Re Metallica (standard text for two centuries) contains summary of mining techniques and the detrimental effect mining has on the environment. Henry Ford experimented with an all plastic car made from extracts of soya beans.
14. Evolution of ideas about the universe, discoveries of the milky way, SETI, Goldilocks planets, the multiverse.
15. Relates the importance of Newton and Boole's mathematics in relation to space exploration. Goes on to list various everyday things we use that wouldn't exist without maths, especially describing JPEG images (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
16. The shift of physics to turn towards "gauge" theories, maths to work out a theory of everything, looking at patterns and symmetry. "Mathematics is simply the catalogue of all possible patterns"
17. George Orwell collected essays vol 4, essay on how he could convince a sceptic that the earth was spherical. Visions of astronomy have often stood as an emblem for all the other precise, disinterested but forward-looking observations of science. How looking at the earth from outside changes perception of humans.
18. The apocalypse (newton worked out the date as 2060 from the bible)
Fiction (murakami's hard boiled....) Metaphorical opening of two doors into alternate universes, both longing for a lost daylight world of physical beauty. Talks about many other authors fiction and non fiction related to earth disasters. About her own fiction disasters. How royal society for literature doesn't do anything for climate change, but helps people to come to terms and experience disasters.
19. How r.s. consults and advises about climate change, along with many other scientific groups through out the world (i.e. the IPCC). The use of statistics and probability, particularly Bayesian statistics.
20. Time from the creation of Earth, arguments between religion and science Einstein telling the world time can speed up or slow down with movement How time cannot go backwards (entropy) Time can be obliterated (by black holes)
21. A summary of the role of r.s. in it's 350th year, by Martin Rees, the present (in 2010) elected president. ( )

I enjoyed the contributions and perspectives by the various authors. Being an IT professional my favorite line was by Martin Rees FRS "The global village will have its village idiots". ( )

This is a collection of essays written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society of London, edited and curated by the omnipresent Bill Bryson. The main attraction for me was that the essays, each focusing on a member of the Society, or a discovery, or on some aspect of its innumerable contributions to human knowledge, were written by a large cast: authors like James Gleick, Margret Atwood, and Neal Stephenson rub shoulders with actual scientists and mathematicians like Richard Dawkins, Ian Stewart, and Gregory Benford. This means there's a variety of perspectives, which is both good and bad. My favorite was Stephenson's explanation of how superstar philosopher/mathematician/inventor/general scientific badass Gottfried Leibniz's bizarre monad philosophy compared not only with archrival Isaac Newton's discoveries, but also with contemporary work into the nature of reality. It's a perfect example of a talented author tackling a difficult subject (I'm not sure anyone knows exactly what Leibniz was thinking, but he's been ridiculed by everyone from Voltaire on down) with style and thoughtfulness. My other favorite was Dawkins' essay on Darwin, which is a similarly good example of how to clearly explain exactly why a complicated idea not only makes sense, but explains the world better than its alternatives. While there were several that either fell short of the mark or were otherwise lacking of interesting content (Margaret Wertheim's piece in particular had an almost unbearably high ratio of words to ideas, and was full of freshman undergrad-type vagaries), overall it was an excellent collection. If you're looking for a quick sampler of perspectives on scientific issues, you could certainly do worse, and it made me aware of the Society's vast influence on the modern world. ( )

5706. Seeing Further The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson (read 14 Sep 2020) This 490 page book contains 22 essays by mostly British scholars, on various aspects of science, past and present. I nearly always finish a book I start but almost quit when early on I read an essay which was hard to understand. But the next essay was comprehensible and interesting so I kept reading and finished the book. I will not claim I comprehended all the concepts discussed but there was enough fascinating that I think I got something from the book. Lots of things to think about. ( )

A mostly-very-good collection of essays to mark the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. The contributions by James Gleick, Margaret Atwood, Richard Holmes, Richard Fortey, and Neal Stephenson were those I liked best. ( )

Right from the start, the dishonesty of the book's title was an extreme aggravation to me. It takes a mildly amusing collection of essays and contorts them into a cheap marketing gimmick - selling them as something more grandiose and more thorough than they really are. I had at least hoped the essays themselves would have had some bearing on the title of the book, though this was frequently not the case.

In broad terms there are really two books here: one, a collection of essays on science and its history (in a simple, popularized format for those of us with slim forebrains) and the other, an assortment of rambling platitudes from the departments of arts&humanities. These belong more to the domain of literary criticism than science - they dwell heavily on personal feelings and attitudes towards science, and make a great deal of irrelevant connections that never seem to come to any point.

For example, though a lot of readers seemed to like the Margaret Atwood essay, I can hardly see why. While tracing out the literary history of the mad scientist, she ultimately reinforces rather than repudiates the cliche, and does little to contrast the stereotype with science actually applied. It is a literary essay wrapped between a host of personal anecdotes and specious ethical dilemmas.

One essay concerns itself almost entirely with theology; another attempts to vindicate some obscure philosophical views of leibnitz with tortured reinterpretations of modern science. it reminded me of religious scholars who pretend to discover modern laws of physics in their antiquated books. One essay harps endlessly on seeing a picture of the earth from outside... and how stultifying it is, for some inexplicable reason. There follows a brief essay on eschatology...

What does science mean to _us_, where is _our_ place in the universe, how can we _cope_ with this knowledge, where does science leave heaven? These sorts of meaningless open-ended questions are better suited to an introductory philosophy course than either a science or a history book, but it characterizes the tenor of many of these essays. Now you may enjoy that sort of thing personally, but it has no bearing on the purported subject of the book, and it doesn't justify its placement on the science shelf of the bookstore.

All that being said, there are a lot of genuinely good essays here, both scientific and historical, that are worth reading. They just deserved a better book. ( )

This collection included some excellent essays as well as a handful that sagged. I would have appreciated a bit more unity as only very liberally defined threads hold the collection together and very rarely do the authors seem to be in conversation with one another. ( )

From Bill Bryson's introduction:

The Royal Society...invented scientific publishing and peer review. It made English the primary language of scientific discourse, in place of Latin. It systematised experimentation. It promoted - indeed insisted upon - clarity of expression in place of high-flown rhetoric. It brought together the best thinking from all over the world. It created modern science.

This is not a straightforward history of the Royal Society, as I expected when I picked it up. It's a collection of articles by various notables on sundry subjects of scientific and philosophical interest. As with any collection of writing by different people, I found some of the subjects more interesting and some of the writing more to my taste than others. ( )

This is one immense tome that would interest all the science buffs out there.

This is one immense tome that would interest all the science buffs out there.

Sadly, "Seeing further" just wasn't as interesting as I expected it to be. There are certainly some engaging entries (Bill Bryson's inroduction and Margaret Atwood's article referencing "Gulliver's Travels to name just two) but there are also too many entries ranging from the dull to the outright incomprehensible (Margaret Wertheim's article, for example, had me regularly squinting to determine what on earth she was driving at - in my library book copy someone has underlined "futile" in Wertheim's piece, which sums up my attempts to make heads and tails of her article).

Obviously, there are many people out there more intelligent than me (no doubt including you) and will understand more of the denser science ideas at play here and will get a lot more out of it than me.

And in closing, a shout out to Margaret Attwood for including the sentence (about "Gulliver's Travels"):
"The edition I read was not a child's version, of the kind that dwells on the cute little people and the funny giant people and the talking horses, but dodges any mention of nipples and urination, and downplays the excrement." ( )

Seeing Further wanders all over science as we know it, with everything eventually tying back into the Royal Society. Margaret Atwood wrote a piece on the view of scientists in pop culture, tracing back to the satirizing of the Royal Society in Gulliver's Travels. There are essays on Darwin, crystallography, space-time, and climate change, among others. It was an enjoyable read, and it really gave me a broad appreciation for what the Royal Society does and influences. ( )

Although edited by Bill Bryson there are a number of authors contributing chapters. The style and quality of the articles varies greatly, but there were a few I enjoyed. ( )

Collection of essays about science celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. Authors include scientists, science and science fiction authors. Topics span all sciences and technology, and from the easily accessible to the difficult. ( )

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