Photo: George Darwin: Great Tidal Bore, detail from 1897 lecture slide. By Kind Permission of Darwin College, Cambridge
As part of the Cambridge University Library's exhibition 'Darwin in Conversation: The endlessly curious life and letters of Charles Darwin' which runs from 9 July – 3 December 2022, Dr. Edwin Rose will give a talk on George Howard Darwin (1845–1912), Charles Darwin's second child and twice president of the Society on Wednesday 28th September 2022.
The talk, 'George Howard Darwin and the ‘Public’ Understanding of Nature' explores the later period of George Darwin's life concentrating on the series of Lowell Lectures George Darwin gave in Boston in 1897 and examines his means for conveying complex theories to public audiences, work that resulted in his only—and extremely successful—monograph The Tides and Kindred Phenomena of the Solar System (1898).
George Howard Darwin was Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and became president of Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1890, shortly after he purchased Newnham Grange, now Darwin College, in 1885. He later became president of the Society for a second time in 1910, 3 years before he died. George Howard Darwin is the only person to hold the position of president twice, after one of our founders Rev. Adam Sedgwick in 1831 and 1853.
Dr. Edwin Rose is an affiliate of the History and Philosophy of Science Department and Fellow of Darwin College and previously Munby Fellow at Cambridge University Library. In October 2021 Edwin will start a new role as PI on the AHRC funded research project 'Natural History in the Age of Revolutions, 1776-1848'. Follow Dr. Edwin Rose on Twitter: @EdwinRose3
The talk is free and open to all. Book and find out more here: https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/what...
Photo: Dr Edwin Rose, Fellow of Darwin College with George Darwin's original lecture slides from his 1897 lectures.
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.
Show All
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.
Registered address:17 Mill LaneCambridgeCB2 1RXUnited Kingdom
Business address:6A King's ParadeCambridgeCB2 1SJUnited Kingdom
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.