janeandbobandmore: OPEN HOUSE LONDON

www.openhouselondon.org.uk

We were delighted to be in London for the 25^th annual Open House London weekend. On September 16 and 17, 2017, many buildings, usually inaccessible, are open to the public – offices, libraries, government centers – with behind-the-scene tours. Checking the extensive list of options, we were intrigued by Burlington House in Piccadilly where five scientific societies -- the Royal Society of Chemistry, Royal Astronomical Society, Geological Society, Linnean Society of London and the Royal Academy of Arts – are housed independently with separate entrances in an 18^th century building with a large shared rectangular courtyard.

Each society houses an extensive collection of historic and scientific books relating to its own area of study. These volumes are shelved floor to ceiling and accessed by a tall wooden library ladder.

Highlights of this amazing day included:

The Royal Astronomical Society – whose purpose is to advance and record our understanding of the Earth, solar system, galaxies, and the nature of the universe.

Here we saw original sketches by **Copernicus whose model put the sun rather than the earth at the center of the universe ** Galileo who has been called the founder of scientific method.

Linnean Society of London - the world’s oldest active biological society. Founded in 1788 and named for the Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the building includes a climate-controlled vault for Linneaus’ collection of plants, fish, insects, etc. which still form the key for identifying plants and animals worldwide.

Before 1700 the world’s fauna and flora had been understood on the basis of subjective, word of mouth reports, which amazingly permitted the inclusion of a bestiary of mythical animals, such as griffins and dragons. Right out of Harry Potter.

Linneaus lived in the age of exploration, when new plants and animal species were being brought to Europe with each voyage to the New World, Africa or the South Seas. He rejected hearsay as adequate and believed only in evidence he actually saw and could analyze directly. His classification system would be based on scientific observation. And thus Linneaus set up the basis for modern taxonomy – comparing like with like and establishing categories in the plant and animal kingdoms. Genus-species-order- etc. We remembered how President Thomas Jefferson charged Lewis and Clark, as they explored the Louisiana Territory, to bring back samples of new flora and fauna to be identified and classified. This too was part of the Linnean revolution.

Royal Society of Chemistry

Displayed here is Robert Boyle’s seminal volume, The Sceptical Chymist, 1680. Here Boyle challenged the accepted beliefs of his day which dated back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle who had asserted that everything in the world was made from four elements – air, fire, water and earth. With Boyle’s revolutionary thought, modern chemical analysis was born.

The Geological Society

And then there was the great hoax. On one wall of a conference room was a painting of Englishmen discussing the purported discovery of “fossil” evidence for a new prehistoric man, who had been unearthed in Sussex, quite close to London. Discovering Piltdown Man was used to prove that Britain was truly important in the early evolution of man and, in fact, early man appeared first in Great Britain, not necessarily Africa. As you may (or may not) recall, later study of these finds in the 1950’s showed the bones to be a conglomerate of touched-up animal and human remains and that Piltdown Man was a massive scientific hoax. The painting is here in a prominent place to remind us of the dangers of letting wish overcome the facts.

OpenHouseLondon enabled us to visit these royal societies and to honor great thinkers of the past and to see their seminal intellectual works. Right here in Burlington House, we saw the roots of the treasured western tradition of reason, scientific analysis and objective inquiry, all honored and pursued until this very day.