In 2019 we celebrated our 200th year with a programme of special events in and around Cambridge.
These included the 'Discovery: 200 Years of the Cambridge Philosophical Society' exhibition at the Cambridge University Library (8 March - 31 August, 2019), which featured rarely seen archive material and items from the Society’s fascinating history, which helped turn Cambridge from a scientific backwater into the world-famous centre for research it is today.
Our bicentenary year also saw the publication of The Spirit of Inquiry, a new book on the Society’s history by respected Cambridge author Susannah Gibson, which explores how our extraordinary society helped shape modern science.
We also held a themed two-day meeting entitled “The Futures of Sciences”. Both the exhibition and the two-day meeting were free and open to all – as is our whole programme of lectures.
Photo: The Cambridge Philosophical Society Seal, bearing an image of Newton, 1832
Photo: Cambridge Philosophical Society Blue Plaque at 17 All Saints Passage, Cambridge.
Discovery: 200 Years of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, which runs from March 8-August 31, 2019 at Cambridge University Library, charts two centuries of the Society’s key role in some of the most significant scientific advances of the day, including Darwin’s theory of evolution, Cambridge’s first Nobel Prize winner Lord Rayleigh’s seminal work on waves, and the birth of ‘Big Data’ experiments from the 19th century.
Photo: Jim Woodhouse
Download a fully illustrated PDF version of the Discovery exhibition catalogue.
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Cambridge Philosophical Society Founded
New Botanic Garden opens
New Fitzwilliam Museum building opens
Natural Sciences Tripos starts
Cavendish laboratory opens
Balfour laboratory for women opens
Women first eligible as honorary fellows of CPS
Women eligible to be full fellows of CPS
Women first awarded degrees
Philosophical Library becomes Scientific Periodicals Library
Henslow Fellowship scheme launched
Society’s Bicentenary
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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