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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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.
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.
Please Note: Due to building works, the CPS office at 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge is now closed until further notice. Business operations as usual. Please contact us by email only: philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk
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philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk