an elderly white haired man stands up the members of the association are shocked to realize that it 's the poet samuel taylor coleridge who hadn 't even left his house in years until that day they 're even more shocked by what he says
you must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers
coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself pondered the cosmos from their armchairs they were not mucking around in the fossil pits or conducting messy experiments with electrical piles like the members of the british association
the crowd grew angry and began to complain loudly a young cambridgescholar named william whewell stood up and quieted the audience
he politely agreed that an appropriate name for the members of the association did not exist
if philosophers is taken to be too wide and lofty a term he said then
by analogy with artist we may form scientist
what had changed to make a new name necessary precisely at that moment
prior to this meeting those who studied the natural world were talented amateurs think of the country clergyman or squire collecting his beetles or fossils like charles darwin for example
or the hired help of a nobleman like joseph priestley who was the literarycompanion to the marquis of lansdowne when he discovered oxygen
after this they were scientists professionals with a particular scientific method goals societies and funding
john herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere and in his spare time co invented photography
i 'm sure we could all be that productive without facebook or twitter to take up our time richard jones became an important economist who later influenced karl marx and whewell not only coined the term scientist as well as the words anode cathode and ion
but spearheaded international big science with his global research on the tides in the cambridge winter of one thousand eight hundred and twelve and one thousand eight hundred and thirteen the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts they talked about science
and the need for a new scientific revolution they felt science had stagnated since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened in the seventeenth century
it was time for a new revolution which they pledged to bring about and what 's so amazing about these guys is not only did they have these grandiose undergraduate dreams but they actually carried them out even beyond their wildest dreams
and i 'm going to tell you today about four major changes to science these men made
about two hundred years before francis bacon and then later isaac newton had proposed an inductive scientific method
now that 's a method that starts from observations and experiments and moves to generalizations about nature called natural laws which are always subject to revision or rejection should new evidence arise
the members of the philosophical breakfast club disagreed they wrote books and articles promoting inductive method in all the sciences that were widely read by natural philosophers university students and members of the public
reading one of herschel 's books was such a watershed moment for charles darwin that he would later say scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me it made me wish to add my might to the accumulated store of natural knowledge
it also shaped darwin 's scientific method as well as that used by his peers
for example ship captains needed to know information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports harbormasters would gather this knowledge and sell it to the ship captains
the philosophical breakfast club changed that working together
herschel helped by making tidal observations off the coast of south africa and as he complained to whewell he was knocked off the docks during a violent high tide for his trouble
the four men really helped each other in every way they also relentlessly lobbied the british government for the money to build babbage 's engines because they believed these engines would have a huge practical impact on society in the days before pocket calculators the numbers that
most professionals needed bankers insurance agents ship captains engineers were to be found in lookup books like this filled with tables of figures
these tables were calculated using a fixed procedure over and over by part time workers known as and this is amazing computers
but these calculations were really difficult i mean this nautical almanac published the lunar differences for every month of the year
each month required one thousand three hundred and sixty five calculations so these tables were filled with mistakes babbage 's difference engine was the first mechanical calculator devised to accuratelycompute any of these tables
two models of his engine were built in the last twenty years by a team from the science museum of london using his own plans
this is the one now at the computer history museum in california and it calculates accurately it actually works
later babbage 's analytical engine was the first mechanicalcomputer in the modern sense
tragically babbage 's engines never were built in his day because most people thought that non human computers would have no usefulness for the public
these new societies required that members be active researchers publishing their results
they reinstated the tradition of the q a after scientific papers were read which had been discontinued by the royal society as being ungentlemanly
and for the first time they gave women a foot in the door of science
members were encouraged to bring their wives daughters and sisters to the meetings of the british association and while the women were expected to attend only the public lectures and the social events like this one they began to infiltrate the scientific sessions as well
the british association would later be the first of the major national science organizations in the world to admit women as full members
occasionally there were prizes such as that given to john harrison in the eighteenth century for solving the so called longitude problem but prizes were only given after the fact when they were given at all
on the advice of the philosophical breakfast club the british association began to use the extra money generated by its meetings to give grants for research in astronomy the tides fossil fish shipbuilding and many other areas
these grants not only allowed less wealthy men to conduct research but they also encouraged thinking outside the box rather than just trying to solve one pre set question
eventually the royal society and the scientific societies of other countries followed suit and this has become fortunately it 's become a major part of the scientificlandscape today
so the philosophical breakfast club helped invent the modern scientist that
they did not foresee at least one consequence of their revolution
they would have been deeply dismayed by today 's disjunction between science and the rest of culture
once scientists became members of a professional group they were slowly walled off from the rest of us this is the unintended consequence of the revolution that started with our four friends
charles darwin said i sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work in fact
origin of species was written for a general and popular audience and was widely read when it first appeared darwin knew
what we seem to have forgotten that science is not only for scientists thank you
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