Since I have decided to keep a blog, I think this means I am meant to update it fairly frequently. Damn, I knew there’d be a catch. Anyway, my good friend Anna has asked where the next one was so at least one person read the first blog. So any advice on how to improve on it or topics for discussion are welcome (email me at j.al-khalili@surrey.ac.uk).
So, what has been happening in science over the past week? Well, just in case the big news has passed you by, I will report here on what should have been a momentous event last week deserving of appropriate pomp, fanfare, razzmatazz and, well, a bit of a fuss I suppose. Instead, it passed unnoticed to the outside world with all fizz of a cheap sparkler on a damp bonfire night.
I mean admittedly there is a global credit crunch, hundreds of innocent children are dying in Gaza, and the world’s gaze turns to Obama to wave his magic wand. But still you’d think someone would care that the British Association for the Advancement of Science is no more!
Last Thursday, I was at a House of Commons reception with a couple of hundred other enthusiastic representatives of British science to mark the re-branding of this most illustrious of institutions. The BA (as it has been affectionately known for 177 years) was founded in York on the 27 September 1831, eighteen years earlier than its larger American cousin, the AAAS.
The original purpose of the BA, expressed through its annual meetings held in different towns and cities throughout the UK was: “to give a stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific inquiry; to promote the intercourse of those who cultivate Science in different parts of the British Empire with one another and with foreign philosophers; to obtain more general attention for the objects of Science and the removal of any disadvantages of a public kind that may impede its progress.”
The meetings from the start attracted the country’s leading scientists, and for many years this was the event at which major advances in science were announced – for example, Joule’s experiments on the mechanical equivalent of heat in the 1840s, the first use of the term ‘dinosaur’ (1841), Bessemer’s steel process (1856), the discovery of the first of the inert gases, argon, by Rayleigh and Ramsay (1894), the first public demonstration of wireless transmission over a few hundred yards by Sir Oliver Lodge (1894), and JJ Thomson’s discovery of the electron (1899).
Perhaps the best remembered of all BA meetings was held at Oxford in 1860: Darwin’s The Origin of Species had been published in 1859, but his health was not good enough to allow him to go to the Oxford meeting. T. H. Huxley was there, though, and it was he who so brilliantly debated Darwinism with Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. Wilberforce, having refused to regard monkeys as his ancestors, turned to Huxley and asked whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from “a venerable ape”. Huxley took the challenge and is reputed to have answered “If I am asked whether I would choose to be descended from the poor animal of low intelligence and stooping gait, who grins and chatters as we pass, or from a man, endowed with great ability and splendid position, who should use these gifts to discredit and crush humble seekers after truth, I hesitate what answer to make!”
Oh, and how about this: at the Cambridge BA meeting of 1831, the local secretary, William Whewell, a co-founder of the BA, first coined the word ‘scientist’. This was upon the request of the poet Coleridge who argued that there had to be a better name for ‘men of science’ than the more awkward ‘natural philosophers’.
So, fast forward to 2009 and finally the BA has grown tired of being mistaken for a well known Airline company and has decided it’s time for a shake up. As of last Thursday it has become the British Science Association (not to be abbreviated to BSA you understand – those old enough will recall motorbikes made by Birmingham Small Arms!)
This is exciting for me because not only am I quite heavily involved with the Association (I am Vice President, a trustee, member of council, honorary fellow, etc etc.. blah blah, which is partly why I am giving it such a plug you understand) but more excitingly, the next Festival, the first under the new name and still the largest science festival in Europe, is coming to the University of Surrey this September. Hurrah!