Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

by Bill Bryson

a second distinctive characteristic of the Royal Society – namely, that it wasn’t necessary to be well born to be part of it. Having wealth and title didn’t hurt, of course, but being scientifically conscientious and experimentally clever were far more important.

my third remarkable fact about the Royal Society: it’s still there. More than that, it is still there and it is still important.

It is physics that makes ours a uni- rather than a multi-verse.

we also live in an age when expert disagreement is wrongly treated as a sign of fatal ignorance

Today is it painfully evident that we lack much ability to ‘control’ nature, but possess in abundance a capacity to foul it up.

Mathematics is simply the catalogue of all possible patterns.

When we look around us we do not observe the laws of Nature; rather, we see the outcomes of those laws.

warming is occurring and human activities are the primary driver of recent changes.

Einstein once remarked that what most interested him was whether God had any choice in his creation. The Abrahamic religious tradition answered with a resounding yes.

Modern science reveals that time is supple, changeable, and even enigmatic.

Or, as expressed by the fictional Time Lord known as The Doctor (Who), "timey, whimey stuff."

We can see time as moving, bringing events to us, or the reverse: we flow through time, sensing a moving moment.

Isaac Watts, in his popular hymn OUR GOD, OUR HELP, IN AGES PAST, wrote, TIME, LIKE AN EVER-ROLLING STREAM, BEARS ALL ITS SONS AWAY;

On the creative scale of the great, slow and blunt Darwinnowings, such as we see in the fossil record, no human monument can endure. But our neophyte primate species can now bring extinction to many, and no matter what the clock, extinction is for ever. We live in hurrying times.

St Augustine had proposed that God made both space and time, and the big bang told us when that was.

We now seem to occupy an unusual niche in the long history of this universe, living beyond the early, hot era, yet well before the accelerating expansion will isolate galaxies from each other, then stars, and finally may wrench apart all of matter as space-time stretches ever-faster. Time seems then like a judge, not a mere clock.

I repeat Isaac Watts' words from an earlier note, but this time finishing the verse: TIME, LIKE AN EVER-ROLLING STREAM, BEARS ALL ITS SONS AWAY; THEY FLY, FORGOTTEN, AS A DREAM DIES AT THE OPENING DAY.

the present century may be a defining moment. It’s the first in our planet’s history where one species – ours – has Earth’s future in its hands, and could not only jeopardise itself but foreclose life’s immense potential.