Past Lectures

Tim Lewens: Universal Darwinism: A Health Check at Forty


Targeting Cellular Senescence in Cancer and Ageing - Dr. Daniel Muñoz-Espín


Towards the next frontier of galaxy formation simulations - Dr. Debora Sijacki


Publications

Discover our Journals & Books

From Darwin’s paper on evolution to the development of stem cell research, publications from the Society continue to shape the scientific landscape.

Membership

Join the Cambridge Philosophical Society

Become a Fellow of the Society and enjoy the benefits that membership brings. Membership costs £20 per year.

Join today

Upcoming Events

Show All

03

02

To Bend or to Break?  — new views on the hardening of metals

Professor Lindsay Greer

  • 18:00 - 19:00 Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre Lent Term G.I. Taylor Lecture

Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials.  Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed.  This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934.  Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline.  These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties.  They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.

View Details

17

02

Why there’s no such thing as “the” scientific advice

Professor Stephen John

  • 18:00 - 19:00 Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre Lent Term

During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics. 

View Details