British Science Association
The British Science Association is a charity and learned society founded in 1831 to aid in the promotion and development of science. Until 2009 it was known as the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The current Chief Executive is Hannah Russell. The BSA's mission is to get more people engaged in the field of science by coordinating, delivering, and overseeing different projects that are suited to achieve these goals. The BSA "envisions a society in which a diverse group of people can learn and apply the sciences in which they learn." and is managed by a professional staff located at their Head Office in the Wellcome Wolfson Building. The BSA offers a wide variety of activities and events that both recognise and encourage people to be involved in science. These include the British Science Festival, British Science Week, the CREST Awards, For Thought, The Ideas Fund, along with regional and local events.
History
Foundation
The Association was founded in 1831 and modelled on the German Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte. It was founded during post-war reconstruction after the Peninsula war to improve the advancement of science in England. The prime mover was Reverend William Vernon Harcourt, following a suggestion by Sir David Brewster, who was disillusioned with the elitist and conservative attitude of the Royal Society. Charles Babbage, William Whewell and J. F. W. Johnston are also considered to be founding members. The first meeting was held in York on Tuesday 27 September 1831 with various scientific papers being presented on the following days. It was chaired by Viscount Milton, president of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and "upwards of 300 gentlemen" attended the meeting. The Preston Mercury recorded that those gathered consisted of "persons of distinction from various parts of the kingdom, together with several of the gentry of Yorkshire and the members of philosopher societies in this country". The newspaper published the names of over a hundred of those attending and these included, amongst others, eighteen clergymen, eleven doctors, four knights, two Viscounts and one Lord.From that date onwards a meeting was held annually at a place chosen at a previous meeting. In 1832, for example, the meeting was held in Oxford, chaired by Reverend Dr William Buckland. By this stage the Association had four sections: Physics, Chemistry, Geology and Natural History.
During this second meeting, the first objects and rules of the Association were published. Objects included systematically directing the acquisition of scientific knowledge, spreading this knowledge as well as discussion between scientists across the world, and to focus on furthering science by removing obstacles to progress. The rules established included what constituted a member of the Association, the fee to remain a member, and the process for future meetings. They also include dividing the members into different committees. These committees separated members into their preferred subject matter, and were to recommend investigations into areas of interest, then report on these findings, as well as progress in their science at the annual meetings.
Additional sections were added throughout the years by either splitting off part of an original section, like making Geography and Ethnology its own section apart from Geology in 1851, or by defining a new subject area of discussion, such as Anthropology in 1869.
A very important decision in the Association's history was made in 1842 when it was resolved to create a "physical observatory". A building that became well known as the Kew Observatory was taken on for the purpose and Francis Ronalds was chosen as the inaugural Honorary Director. Kew Observatory quickly became one of the most renowned meteorological and geomagnetic observatories in the world. The Association relinquished control of the Kew Observatory in 1871 to the management of the Royal Society, after a large donation to grant the observatory its independence.
In 1872, the Association purchased its first central office in London, acquiring four rooms at 22 Albemarle Street. This office was intended to be a resource for members of the Association.
One of the most famous events linked to the Association Meeting was an exchange between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860. Although it is often described as a "debate", the exchange occurred after the presentation of a paper by Prof Draper of New York, on the intellectual development of Europe with relation to Darwin's theory and the subsequent discussion involved a number of other participants. Although a number of newspapers made passing references to the exchange, it was not until later that it was accorded greater significance in the evolution debate.
Electrical standards
One of the most important contributions of the British Association was the establishment of standards for electrical usage: the ohm as the unit of electrical resistance, the volt as the unit of electrical potential, and the ampere as the unit of electrical current. A need for standards arose with the submarine telegraph industry. Practitioners came to use their own standards established by wire coils: "By the late 1850s, Clark, Varley, Bright, Smith and other leading British cable engineers were using calibrated resistance coils on a regular basis and were beginning to use calibrated condensers as well."The undertaking was suggested to the BA by William Thomson, and its success was due to the use of Thomson's mirror galvanometer. Josiah Latimer Clark and Fleeming Jenkin made preparations. Thomson, with his students, found that impure copper, contaminated with arsenic, introduced significant extra resistance. The chemist Augustus Matthiessen contributed an appendix to the final 1873 report that showed temperature-dependence of alloys.
The unit system was "absolute" since it agreed with previously accepted units of work, or energy:
Committee on Mechanical Nomenclature
In 1888, at a meeting of the British Association in Bath, the Committee on Mechanical Nomenclature suggested three new units: the kine for velocity, equal to 1 centimeter per second; the bole for momentum, equal to 1 gram times 1 kine; and the barad for pressure, equal to 1 dyne per square centimeter. The London Electrical Review called the new units "an abomination, and wholly unnecessary" and attributed their creation to a "craze" for naming new units. William Henry Preece noted in 1891 that he had only seen one instance of use of the new units. By 1913, the units had fallen entirely out of use.Other
The Association was parodied by English novelist Charles Dickens as 'The Mudfog Society for the Advancement of Everything' in The Mudfog Papers.In 1878 a committee of the Association recommended against constructing Charles Babbage's analytical engine, due to concerns about the current state of the machine's lack of complete working drawings, the machine's potential cost to produce, the machine's durability during repeated use, how and what the machine will actually be utilized for, and that more work would need to be done to bring the design up to a standard at which it is guaranteed to work.
The Association introduced the British Association screw threads, a series of screw thread standards in sizes from 0.25 mm up to 6 mm, in 1882. The standards were based on the metric system, although they had to be re-defined in imperial terms for use by UK industry. The standard was modified in 1884 to restrict significant figures for the metric counterpart of diameter and pitch of the screw in the published table, as well as not designating screws by their number of threads per inch, and instead giving an approximation due to considerable actual differences in manufactured screws.
In 1889, a member of the Rational Dress Society, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, stunned the proceedings of a meeting of the Association in Newcastle upon Tyne by organizing an impromptu session where she introduced rational dress to a wide audience, her speech being noted in newspapers across Britain.
In 1903, microscopist and astronomer Washington Teasdale died whilst attending the annual meeting.
Perception of science in the UK
The Association's main aim is to make science more relevant, representative and connected to society.At the beginning of the Great Depression, the Association's focus began to shift their purpose to account for not only scientific progress, but the social aspects of such progress. In the Association's 1931 meeting, the president General Jan Christiaan Smuts ended his address by the proposal of linking science and ethics together but provided no means to actuate his ideas. In the following years, debate began as to whom the responsibilities of scientists fell upon. The Association adopted a resolution in 1934 that dedicated efforts to better balance scientific advancement with social progress.
J.D. Bernal, a member of the Royal Society and the British Association, wrote The Social Function of Science in 1939, describing a need to correctly utilize science for society and the importance of its public perception. The idea of the public perception of science was furthered in 1985 when the Royal Society published a report titled The Public Understanding of Science.
In the report, a committee of the Royal Society determined that it was scientists' duty to communicate to and educate the public. Lord George Porter, then president of the Royal Society, British Association, and director of the Royal Institution, created the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, or COPUS, to promote public understanding of science.
Professor Sir George Porter became the president in September 1985. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1967 along with Manfred Eigen, and Ronald George Wreyford Norrish. When asked about the scientific literacy of Britain, he stated that Britain was the least educated country compared to all the other advanced countries. His idea to solve this problem would be to start scientific education for children at the age of 4. He says his reason for such an early age is because that is the age when children are the most curious, and implementing science at that age will help them gain curiosity towards all disciplines of science. When asked why public ignorance to science matters, his response was
It matters because among those who are scientifically illiterate are some of those who are in power, people who lead us in politics, in civil service, in the media, in the church, often in industry and sometimes even in education. Think, for example, about the enormous influence of scientific knowledge on one's whole philosophy of life, even one's religion. It is no more permissible for the archbishops of today, who advise their flocks on how to interpret the Scriptures, to ignore the findings of Watson and Crick, than it was right for clerics of the last century to ignore the work of Darwin. Science today is all-pervasive. Without some scientific and technical education, it is becoming impossible even to vote responsibly on matters of health, energy, defense or education. So unless things change, we shall soon live in a country that is backward not only in its technology and standard of living but in its cultural vitality too. It is wrong to suppose that by foregoing technological and scientific education we shall somehow become a nation of artists, writers or philosophers instead. These two aspects of culture have never been divorced from each other throughout our history. Every renaissance, every period that showed a flowering of civilization, advanced simultaneously in the arts and sciences, and in technology too.
Sir Kenneth Durham, former director of research at Unilever, on becoming president in August 1987 followed on from Sir George Porter saying that science teachers needed extra pay to overcome the scarcity of mathematics and physics teachers in secondary schools, and that "unless we deal with this as matter of urgency, the outlook for our manufacturing future is bleak". He regretted that headmasters and careers masters had for many years followed 'the cult of Oxbridge' because "it carried more prestige to read classics at Oxbridge and go into the Civil Service or banking, than to read engineering at, say, Salford, and go into manufacturing industry". He said that reporting of sciences gave good coverage to medical science, but that "nevertheless, editors ought to be sensitive to developments in areas such as solid state physics, astro-physics, colloid science, molecular biology, transmission of stimuli along nerve fibres, and so on, and that newspaper editors were in danger of waiting for disasters before the scientific factors involved in the incidents were explained.
In September 2001 Sir William Stewart, as outgoing president, warned that universities faced "dumbing down" and that
we can deliver social inclusiveness, and the best universities, but not both from a limited amount of money. We run the risk of doing neither well. Universities are underfunded, and must not be seen simply as a substitute for National Service to keep youngsters off the dole queue... scientists have to be careful and consider the full implications of what they are seeking to achieve. The problem with some clever people is that they find cleverer ways of being stupid.
In the year 2000, Sir Peter Williams had put together a panel to discuss the shortage of physics majors. A physicist called Derek Raine had stated that he has had multiple firms call him up asking for physics majors. The report they made stated that it is critical that they increase the number of physics teachers, or it will have a detrimental effect on the number of future engineers and scientists.