Seeing Further (56 page)

Stephenson, George, 232

Stephenson, Marjorie, 257

Stephenson, Robert, 232–33, 235, 237, 238, 303

Stepped Reckoner, 85

Stevenson, Adlai E., 389

Stevenson, R. L.,
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
52,
53
, 54

St Helena, 280

Stonehenge, 14

Strauss, Joseph, 241, 242–43,
242

string theories, 100, 366–68, 369,
370
, 371, 472

structured nothingness, 75

structure pioneers, 253

Bernal, 258–60,
258
, 263, 271

Bragg and Bragg, 253–58,
254
, 266, 271

Hodgkin, 260–63,
262,
269–71,
270

legacies of, 266–71

Nobel prizes to, 255, 260, 263, 266, 267, 270

Perutz, 255, 263–66,
264,
267–68

Watson/Crick, 264–65, 266

Stuart, Dave, 268

Sulston, John, 267

Sun:

energy of, 398

expansion of, 460

planets in orbit around, 326–27

Sundrum, Raman, 368n

supernovae, 329, 397

superstring theory, 366–67,
370
, 371

Susskind, Leonard, 338

Sustainable biofuels
(Royal Society), 418,
418

Sutherland, Graham, portrait by,
270

Swan, Joseph, 9

Swift, Jonathan,
40
, 422

Gulliver’s Travels,
39, 41–42, 44–49, 55–57

symmetry, 364–65, 373, 375

synthetic materials, 308–14

Tableau de Paris, Le,
161, 163

Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 245,
245
, 248

Talbot, William Henry Fox, 9

Tasmanian devil,
282
, 283

taxonomy, development of, 188

Tay Bridge, 238–39

Taylor, Geoffrey, photograph by,
408

technology, 298, 475–78

dual-use, 319

Teflon, 312

Tegmark, Max, 104

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 79

teleology, 110, 111, 117, 119, 120, 126, 129

Telford, Thomas, 231, 235, 246

Thatcher, Margaret, 270, 418

theory of everything (TOE), 109–10, 366, 368, 369–70, 374, 470, 473

thermodynamics, 101, 397, 457, 460

Thorpe, Thomas, 11

time:

clocks, 10, 193, 408, 454

cosmological, 462–63, 465, 474

cyclic, 446, 448

Deep, 450, 461–62, 465

flow of, 457

and gravity, 329

Historical, 449

Intuitive, 449, 465

linear, 448, 457–60

mathematical, 449–50

and motion, 117

Newton on, 446, 449–50, 452, 455

relative, 452–57

and space, 64, 74, 92, 449–50, 454–55

and space-time, 74, 454, 455–56, 460, 463

and theology, 74

Tobacco Institute, 440

Toldbod, Björn, 344

Tradescant, John, 197

truth, physical vs. mathematical, 128

twin paradox, 453–54

Type I error, 437

Type II error, 437

Ulam, Stanislaw, 98

uncertainty:

in climate change, 408, 426–27, 428–29, 437, 439, 441–43, 479–80

management of, 442–43

theory of probability, 353

unifying system of thought, 109–10, 124, 365–66,
366,
472, 473

universe:

age of, 328–29, 465

eternal, 463

expanding, 325, 460, 463, 465

mathematical models of, 337

multiverse, 339

virtual, 478

University at Uppsala, 195

Uranus, 135

Urey, Harold, 332

Ussher, Archbishop James, 452

van der Zee, John,
The Gate: The True Story of the

Design and Construction of the Golden Gate

Bridge, 243

Varenius, Bernhardus,
Geographia,
24

Venter, Craig, 285

Verfaillie, Hendrik, 154–55

Verkolje, portrait of Leeuwenhock by,
6

“victimless leather,” 57

Viking space probes, 331

Virlogeux, Michel, 249

viruses, 333

vitamin B12, 263

volition, 74

Voltaire,
Candide,
100

von Laue, Max, 254

Vulcan (planet), 11

Walker, John, 267

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 206, 210, 211–19,
212
, 224

bridges crossed by, 219, 221, 226

and Darwin, 211–18, 221, 461

On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely
from the Original Type,
211–14

Waller, Richard, botanical print by,
194
, 195

Wallich, Nathaniel, botanical print by,
194
, 195

Wallis, John, 27–28, 32

Waterhouse, Alfred, 201

Watson, James, 264–65, 267

see also
Wat son / Crick

Watson, William, 140, 145, 146

Wat son / Crick:

DNA double helix, 256, 264–65

and genetics, 223, 224,
225
, 265

molecular biology of, 315

Nobel Prize to, 266

Watt, James, 136, 137

weapons of mass destruction, 259

weather, vs. climate, 427

weather forecasts, 291, 377

Wedgwood, Thomas, 305

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, 267

Wells, H. G.:

The Island of Dr Moreau,
54

The War of the Worlds,
42,
43

Wells, W. C., 211

White, Rev Gilbert, 193, 195–96

Whitehead, Alfred, 79

Wiesenfeld, Kurt, 381

Wigner, Eugene,
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences,
105, 129

Wilde, Oscar, 56

Wilkins, Maurice, 256, 264, 266

Wilson, Benjamin, 145–48, 149, 150, 152

Wilson, Harold, 271

Winer, Norbert, 97

Withering, William,
Botanical Arrangement,
193

Witten, Edward, 368

Wolpert, Lewis, 298

wolves, re-introduction of, 288

world line, 455

World Summit for Sustainable Development, 281

World Wide Web, 475

Wren, Christopher, 3, 22, 26, 108, 122–23, 189, 468

Wright, Joseph, portrait by,
168

Wright, Sewall, 223

Wulf, William A., 318–19

X-rays, 254–56, 269, 271

“Year 2K Bug,” 408–9, 414

Yellowstone National Park, 288

Yorke, James, 379

Zalta, Edward N., 104

Zambeccari, Francesco, 160

I would like to thank all the contributors, including the President of the Royal Society, for so generously taking part in the making of this book. I also wish to thank the Council of the Royal Society, Aosaf Afzal, Stephen Cox, Julia Higgins, Julie Hodgkinson, Jo Hopkins, Joanne Madders, Keith Moore, Dominic Reid and Martin Taylor.

I
N 350 YEARS, OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE UNIVERSE HAS EXPANDED BEYOND THE DREAMS OF THE FOUNDERS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY. BUT SCIENTISTS NEVER REACH FINALITY, WRITES MARTIN REES. NEW KNOWLEDGE AND NEW APPLICATIONS WILL MAKE A VITAL CONTRIBUTION TO HUMANITY IN THE COMING DECADES.

The Royal Society’s founders were inspired by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon. For Bacon, science was driven by two imperatives: the search for enlightenment, and ‘the relief of man’s estate’. Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and the other ‘ingenious and curious gentlemen’ who regularly convened in Gresham College were enthusiasts for what we would now call ‘curiosity-driven’ research. But they engaged also with the practical life of the nation. Indeed, in 1664 John Evelyn reported on the optimum management of forests to ensure a steady supply of good oak for the navy’s ships. And the first issue of
Philosophical Transactions
– the world’s oldest surviving scientific periodical – contained a paper by Christiaan Huygens on improvements to the pendulum clock and how to get it patented.

Bacon’s dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the
Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim ‘there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied’. There can be no better aim, for the next fifty years, than to sustain the curiosity and enthusiasm of our founders, while also achieving the same broad engagement with society and public affairs as they did.

The Society aims, above all, to support and recognise the creative individuals on whom scientific advance depends. What issues will engage such people in 2060, when the Society celebrates its 400th anniversary? Will we continue to push forward the frontiers, enlarging the range of our consensual understanding?

It is sometimes claimed that the big ideas have been discovered already, and that it only remains to fill in the details and apply what is already known. But nothing could be more wrong. Science is an unending quest: as its frontiers advance, new mysteries come into focus just beyond those frontiers. Most of the questions now being addressed simply couldn’t have been posed fifty years ago (or even twenty); we can’t conceive what problems will engage our successors.

A prime aim is to understand our world – and, in my own field of astronomy, to probe what lies beyond it. Just as geophysicists have come to understand the processes that made the oceans and sculpted the continents, so astrophysicists can understand our Sun and its planets – and even the other planets that may orbit distant stars. Astronomy is the grandest environmental science. And our exploration is just beginning. There are still domains where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must inscribe ‘here be dragons’.

Armchair theory alone cannot achieve much. We are no wiser than Aristotle was. It is technical advances that have enabled astronomers to probe immense distances, and to trace the evolutionary story back before
our solar system formed, back to an epoch long before there were any stars, when everything was initiated by an intensely hot ‘genesis event’, the so-called big bang. The first microsecond is shrouded in mystery, but everything that happened since then – the emergence of our complex cosmos from amorphous beginnings – is the outcome of processes that we are starting to grasp in outline. And our cosmic horizons are still expanding. What we’ve traditionally called our universe could be just one island – just one patch of space and time – in an infinitely larger cosmic archipelago.

Could there be, far beyond our Earth, other forms of life – perhaps even more complex and advanced than humans? Here again we’re flummoxed. Until we find out how life began on Earth we can’t understand how likely it is that life may have started elsewhere – nor where to focus our search. However, as Paul Davies describes, there is now some progress: exciting new ideas, and new ways to seek signs of life beyond our home planet. Perhaps we’ll one day ‘plug in’ to a galactic community. On the other hand, searches for extraterrestrial intelligence may fail. Earth’s intricate biosphere may be unique. Either way, the search for alien life – exobiology – will surely be one of the most exciting scientific frontiers in the next fifty years.

An undoubted intellectual peak of twentieth-century science was the quantum theory, which describes how atoms behave, and how they combine with each other to make the complex chemistry of the everyday world. The second ‘peak’ was Einstein’s general relativity. More than two hundred years earlier, Isaac Newton had achieved the first major ‘unification’ by showing that the force that makes apples fall is the same as the gravity that holds planets in their orbits. Newton’s mathematics is good enough to fly rockets into space and steer probes around planets. But Einstein transcended Newton: his general theory of relativity could cope with very high speeds, and strong gravity, and offered deeper insight into gravity’s nature.

A synthesis of these two great theories – an overarching theory that links the cosmos and the microworld, and applies the quantum principle to space, time and gravity – is unfinished business for the twenty-first century.Success will require new insights into what might seem the simplest entity of all: ‘mere’ empty space. Space itself may have a rich structure – on scales a trillion trillion times smaller than an atom, and also on scales far larger than the entire universe we know.

Einstein was not a first-rate mathematician, despite his deep physical insights. He was lucky that the geometrical concepts he needed had already been developed by the German mathematician Georg Riemann a century earlier. The cohort of young quantum theorists led by Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac were similarly fortunate in being able to apply ready-made mathematics.

But the twenty-first-century counterparts of these great physicists – those seeking to mesh general relativity and quantum mechanics in a
unified theory – are not so lucky. The most favoured theory posits that all subatomic particles are made up of tiny loops, or strings that vibrate in a space with ten or eleven dimensions. String theory involves intensely complex mathematics that certainly can’t be found on the shelf and offers a creative stimulus to ‘real’ mathematicians.

Einstein himself worked on an abortive unified theory till his dying day. In retrospect it is clear that his efforts were premature – too little was then known about the forces and particles that govern the subatomic world. Cynics have said that he might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards. But there’s something rather noble about the way he persevered and ‘raised his game’ – reaching beyond his grasp. (Likewise, Francis Crick, the driving intellect behind molecular biology, shifted, when he reached sixty, to the ‘Everest’ problems of consciousness and the brain even though he knew he’d never get near the summit.)