A Redoubt of Learning Stands Firm

This wonderful picture comes from the Royal Society, the oldest scientific body in the world. As posted in the NY Times, the society forever remains A Redoubt of Learning Stands Firm, something to be cherished in a world fraught with intolerance, ignorance and hostility, in many ways, to science, the discipline best suited to learning how reality actually works.

Then you enter the sunlight-suffused office of the society’s president, Sir Paul Nurse. With his spiky mass of white hair, broad nose, ready smile and thick work boots, he looks the part of old-fashioned knight of science ready to tramp through the fens. But this Nobel Prize winner in medicine offers a very 21st-century lament.

“Policy debate these days involves trying to rubbish the science, and that is dangerous,” Dr. Nurse says. “Global warming denialists, those who oppose genetically modified crops and vaccinations, or the teaching of evolution: their trick is treat scientific argument as if it’s a political argument, and cherry-pick data.”

Dr. Nurse feels this danger more passionately than most, for the society he presides over was the crucible of the scientific revolution that formed the modern world. The society conducts studies, consults on government panels and has 1,450 fellows, about 80 of them Nobel winners. Yet theirs is, at times, an embattled world.

The other notion one gets from reading the NY Times piece, and amplified when visiting the Royal Society website, is the society's deep connect to art, creativity and education from the humanist perspective, a characteristic all to rare in today's age of instant gratification being not fast enough.

Seen above, a study of the system of equilibrated levers made by Thomas Grubb (1800-1878), 

devised for the Armagh Cassegrain telescope and applied to the Great Melbourne Telescope’s 

twin speculum mirrors.