Laura Snyder: The Philosophical Breakfast Club

116,373 views ・ 2013-04-12

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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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I'd like you to come back with me for a moment
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to the 19th century,
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specifically to June 24, 1833.
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The British Association for the Advancement of Science
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is holding its third meeting at the University of Cambridge.
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It's the first night of the meeting,
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and a confrontation is about to take place
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that will change science forever.
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An elderly, white-haired man stands up.
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The members of the Association are shocked to realize
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that it's the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
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who hadn't even left his house in years until that day.
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They're even more shocked by what he says.
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"You must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers."
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Coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself
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pondered the cosmos from their armchairs.
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They were not mucking around in the fossil pits
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or conducting messy experiments with electrical piles
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like the members of the British Association.
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The crowd grew angry and began to complain loudly.
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A young Cambridge scholar named William Whewell stood up
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and quieted the audience.
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He politely agreed that an appropriate name
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for the members of the association did not exist.
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"If 'philosophers' is taken to be too wide and lofty a term,"
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he said, "then, by analogy with 'artist,'
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we may form 'scientist.'"
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This was the first time the word scientist
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was uttered in public,
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only 179 years ago.
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I first found out about this confrontation when I was in graduate school,
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and it kind of blew me away.
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I mean, how could the word scientist
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not have existed until 1833?
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What were scientists called before?
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What had changed to make a new name necessary
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precisely at that moment?
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Prior to this meeting, those who studied the natural world
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were talented amateurs.
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Think of the country clergyman or squire
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collecting his beetles or fossils,
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like Charles Darwin, for example,
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or, the hired help of a nobleman, like Joseph Priestley,
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who was the literary companion
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to the Marquis of Lansdowne
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when he discovered oxygen.
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After this, they were scientists,
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professionals with a particular scientific method,
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goals, societies and funding.
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Much of this revolution can be traced to four men
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who met at Cambridge University in 1812:
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Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell.
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These were brilliant, driven men
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who accomplished amazing things.
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Charles Babbage, I think known to most TEDsters,
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invented the first mechanical calculator
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and the first prototype of a modern computer.
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John Herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere,
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and, in his spare time, co-invented photography.
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I'm sure we could all be that productive
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without Facebook or Twitter to take up our time.
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Richard Jones became an important economist
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who later influenced Karl Marx.
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And Whewell not only coined the term scientist,
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as well as the words anode, cathode and ion,
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but spearheaded international big science
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with his global research on the tides.
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In the Cambridge winter of 1812 and 1813,
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the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts.
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They talked about science
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and the need for a new scientific revolution.
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They felt science had stagnated
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since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened
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in the 17th century.
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It was time for a new revolution,
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which they pledged to bring about,
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and what's so amazing about these guys is,
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not only did they have these
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grandiose undergraduate dreams,
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but they actually carried them out,
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even beyond their wildest dreams.
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And I'm going to tell you today
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about four major changes to science these men made.
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About 200 years before,
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Francis Bacon and then, later, Isaac Newton,
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had proposed an inductive scientific method.
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Now that's a method that starts from
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observations and experiments
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and moves to generalizations about nature called natural laws,
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which are always subject to revision or rejection
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should new evidence arise.
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However, in 1809, David Ricardo muddied the waters
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by arguing that the science of economics
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should use a different, deductive method.
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The problem was that an influential group at Oxford
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began arguing that because it worked so well in economics,
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this deductive method ought to be applied
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to the natural sciences too.
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The members of the philosophical breakfast club disagreed.
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They wrote books and articles promoting inductive method
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in all the sciences
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that were widely read by natural philosophers,
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university students and members of the public.
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Reading one of Herschel's books
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was such a watershed moment for Charles Darwin
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that he would later say, "Scarcely anything in my life
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made so deep an impression on me.
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It made me wish to add my might
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to the accumulated store of natural knowledge."
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It also shaped Darwin's scientific method,
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as well as that used by his peers.
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[Science for the public good]
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Previously, it was believed that scientific knowledge
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ought to be used for the good of the king or queen,
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or for one's own personal gain.
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For example, ship captains needed to know
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information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports.
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Harbormasters would gather this knowledge
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and sell it to the ship captains.
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The philosophical breakfast club changed that,
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working together.
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Whewell's worldwide study of the tides
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resulted in public tide tables and tidal maps
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that freely provided the harbormasters' knowledge
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to all ship captains.
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Herschel helped by making tidal observations
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off the coast of South Africa,
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and, as he complained to Whewell,
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he was knocked off the docks during a violent high tide for his trouble.
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The four men really helped each other in every way.
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They also relentlessly lobbied the British government
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for the money to build Babbage's engines
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because they believed these engines
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would have a huge practical impact on society.
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In the days before pocket calculators,
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the numbers that most professionals needed --
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bankers, insurance agents, ship captains, engineers —
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were to be found in lookup books like this,
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filled with tables of figures.
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These tables were calculated
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using a fixed procedure over and over
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by part-time workers known as -- and this is amazing -- computers,
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but these calculations were really difficult.
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I mean, this nautical almanac
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published the lunar differences for every month of the year.
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Each month required 1,365 calculations,
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so these tables were filled with mistakes.
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Babbage's difference engine was the first mechanical calculator
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devised to accurately compute any of these tables.
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Two models of his engine were built in the last 20 years
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by a team from the Science Museum of London
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using his own plans.
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This is the one now at the Computer History Museum in California,
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and it calculates accurately. It actually works.
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Later, Babbage's analytical engine
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was the first mechanical computer in the modern sense.
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It had a separate memory and central processor.
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It was capable of iteration, conditional branching
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and parallel processing,
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and it was programmable using punched cards,
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an idea Babbage took from Jacquard's loom.
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Tragically, Babbage's engines never were built in his day
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because most people thought that
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non-human computers would have no usefulness
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for the public.
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[New scientific institutions]
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Founded in Bacon's time, the Royal Society of London
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was the foremost scientific society in England
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and even in the rest of the world.
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By the 19th century, it had become
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a kind of gentleman's club
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populated mainly by antiquarians, literary men and the nobility.
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The members of the philosophical breakfast club
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helped form a number of new scientific societies,
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including the British Association.
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These new societies required
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that members be active researchers publishing their results.
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They reinstated the tradition of the Q&A
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after scientific papers were read,
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which had been discontinued by the Royal Society
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as being ungentlemanly.
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And for the first time, they gave women a foot in the door of science.
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Members were encouraged to bring their wives,
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daughters and sisters to the meetings of the British Association,
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and while the women were expected to attend
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only the public lectures and the social events like this one,
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they began to infiltrate the scientific sessions as well.
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The British Association would later be the first
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of the major national science organizations in the world
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to admit women as full members.
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[External funding for science]
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Up to the 19th century,
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natural philosophers were expected to pay
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for their own equipment and supplies.
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Occasionally, there were prizes,
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such as that given to John Harrison in the 18th century,
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for solving the so-called longitude problem,
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but prizes were only given after the fact,
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when they were given at all.
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On the advice of the philosophical breakfast club,
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the British Association began to use the extra money
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generated by its meetings to give grants
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for research in astronomy, the tides, fossil fish,
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shipbuilding, and many other areas.
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These grants not only allowed
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less wealthy men to conduct research,
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but they also encouraged thinking outside the box,
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rather than just trying to solve one pre-set question.
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Eventually, the Royal Society
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and the scientific societies of other countries followed suit,
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and this has become -- fortunately it's become --
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a major part of the scientific landscape today.
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So the philosophical breakfast club
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helped invent the modern scientist.
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That's the heroic part of their story.
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There's a flip side as well.
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They did not foresee at least one consequence
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of their revolution.
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They would have been deeply dismayed
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by today's disjunction between science and the rest of culture.
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It's shocking to realize
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that only 28 percent of American adults
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have even a very basic level of science literacy,
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and this was tested by asking simple questions like,
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"Did humans and dinosaurs inhabit the Earth at the same time?"
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and "What proportion of the Earth is covered in water?"
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Once scientists became members of a professional group,
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they were slowly walled off from the rest of us.
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This is the unintended consequence of the revolution
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that started with our four friends.
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Charles Darwin said,
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"I sometimes think that general and popular treatises
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are almost as important for the progress of science
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as original work."
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In fact, "Origin of Species" was written
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for a general and popular audience,
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and was widely read when it first appeared.
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Darwin knew what we seem to have forgotten,
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that science is not only for scientists.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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