The title of our Society may sound slightly misleading when you consider the more modern definition of the word ‘philosophy’, but it is in fact the oldest scientific society in Cambridge. Founded in 1819 by a group of Cambridge luminaries, John Stevens Henslow, Adam Sedgwick and Edward Clarke it became a Body Corporate by virtue of a Charter granted by King William IV in 1832.
Photo: The Lecture Room of the Cambridge Philosophical Society: London Illustrated News, June 28, 1845
The Cambridge Philosophical Society is what’s termed a learned and professional Society and was created with the charitable aim of ‘of promoting scientific inquiry, and of facilitating the communication of facts connected with the advancement of Philosophy and Natural History’. The aims of the Society today are no different from its founders’ and, put simply, we are here to promote research in all branches of science and to encourage the communication of the results of scientific research.
The Society is an independent self-supporting Charity, associated with the University of Cambridge and governed by an elected Council of 21 senior academics. Currently we have 2,000 Society members, also known as Fellows.
We run a regular series of lectures by well-respected speakers on a wide range of subjects from biology and astronomy to engineering and physics as well as many other events that are free and open to all. We also arrange a programme of events and visits just for Members. Income for the Society is generated by the publication of our two journals - Biological Reviews and Mathematical Proceedings as well as Membership fees.
The Society Bye-Laws adopted at the Annual General Meeting on 21 October 2024 are available to view in full here.
From Darwin’s paper on evolution to the development of stem cell research, publications from the Society continue to shape the scientific landscape.
Mathematical Proceedings is one of the few high-quality journals publishing original research papers that cover the whole range of pure and applied mathematics, theoretical physics and statistics.
Biological Reviews covers the entire range of the biological sciences, presenting several review articles per issue. Although scholarly and with extensive bibliographies, the articles are aimed at non-specialist biologists as well as researchers in the field.
The Spirit of Inquiry celebrates the 200th anniversary of the remarkable Cambridge Philosophical Society and brings to life the many remarkable episodes and illustrious figures associated with the Society, including Adam Sedgwick, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin, and Lawrence Bragg.
Become a Fellow of the Society and enjoy the benefits that membership brings. Membership costs £20 per year.
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Volcanoes are hazardous and beautiful manifestations of the dynamic processes that have shaped our planet. Volcanoes impact our environment in numerous ways. Over geological time volcanic activity has resurfaced the Earth and provided life with a terrestrial substrate upon which to proliferate. Volcanic degassing has shaped our secondary atmosphere and as part of the process of plate tectonics, maintained just the right amount of water and carbon dioxide at the surface to produce a stable and equitable climate. Magma in the subsurface in volcanic environments today gives Society geothermal energy. The fluids degassed from magmas in the plumbing systems of volcanoes give rise to hydrothermal ore deposits, the source of much of our copper and other metals, critical to the energy transition. In this lecture I will describe the nature and importance of magma degassing for our atmosphere and oceans, as a source of both pollutants and nutrients, and in the formation of mineral deposits. I will describe my own research in carrying out measurements of volcanic gases (using a range of spectroscopic methods, from the ground and using drones), and analysis of erupted lavas, to understand the chemistry and physics of volcanic outgassing and its role in sustaining our planetary environment.
One of the many outstanding achievements of G I Taylor was the discovery of relatively simple statistical laws that apply to highly complex turbulent flows. The emergence of simple laws from complexity is well known in other branches of physics, for example the emergence of the laws of heat conduction from molecular dynamics. Complexity can also arise at large scales, and the structural vibration of an aircraft or a car can be a surprisingly difficult phenomenon to analyse, partly because millions of degrees of freedom may be involved, and partly because the vibration can be extremely sensitive to small changes or imperfections in the system. In this talk it is shown that the prediction of vibration levels can be much simplified by the derivation and exploitation of emergent laws, analogous to some extent to the heat conduction equations, but with an added statistical aspect, as in turbulent flow. The emergent laws are discussed and their application to the design of aerospace, marine, and automotive structures is described. As an aside it will be shown that the same emergent theory can be applied to a range of problems involving electromagnetic fields.
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Office hours at the business address:Monday and Thursday: 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.
Please contact philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk to agree a timing before visiting the office.