The story of how London turned from a small city into a scientific powerhouse is remarkable, so much so that we should be confident it will continue to thrive despite political uncertainty.
Tonight, at the Science Museum, I’m hosting the Scientists Meet the Media event to bring together the city’s cultural lifeblood, from professors and editors to authors and commentators.
During the 1660s another influential gathering including architect Christopher Wren, chemist Robert Boyle and diarist Samuel Pepys met at Gresham College, on the site today occupied by the NatWest Tower. They formed the Royal Society, which declared the Tudor philosopher Francis Bacon their spiritual father and championed a new method: experiment. Today, this way of thinking remains the most powerful.
The Society’s Curator of Experiments was Robert Hooke. In 1664, before the old St Paul’s was consumed by the Great Fire, he perched on its cross beams to time the vibrations of pendulums and falling objects. Wren designed today’s St Paul’s but we should also thank Hooke who, as Corporation Surveyor, applied mathematics to construction. People marvelled at the view of the microscopic world in Hooke’s Micrographia, the first scientific bestseller, and the stars of his 1665 book inspired pre-prepared specimens and microscopes that you could use at home.
To tell the story of how science shaped our city, the Science Museum will open Science City: the Linbury Gallery in September. It will, of course, feature Sir Isaac Newton. He made his Principia, a cornerstone of scientific thinking, deliberately obscure to confound “little Smatterers in Mathematics”. Long before the likes of Brian Cox, Newton’s opacity helped foster pop science writing featuring “Tom Telescope”, among others.
In the new gallery we’ll show a portrait of Letitia Ann Sage, England’s first female aeronaut, who made balloon ascents in the 1780s, taking off from St George’s Fields. The 18th century saw science become so chic that George III watched the transit of Venus from his observatory at Kew and backed William and Caroline Herschel, after William’s discovery in 1781 of Uranus.
Among the people who will hear our plans tonight will be former Royal Society President Sir Paul Nurse, who shepherded his dream of creating Europe’s largest biomedical research powerhouse past three Prime Ministers to create the Crick Institute in St Pancras; Peter Coveney of UCL, who heads EU projects worth around £15 million and has taken up a role at the University of Amsterdam to sidestep the effects of Brexit: and Julie Maxton, the society’s executive director, who will tell the throng that science has always been global — if the ups and downs of our international relationships over the centuries have not put a stop to that, Brexit will not either. Have no doubt: London science will flourish.
Roger Highfield is Science Director of the Science Museum and a visiting professor at UCL
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