Promoting Experimental Learning
Experiment and the Royal Society, 1660–1727

An account by a leading student of the early Royal Society of the practice of experiment at its meetings between 1660 and 1727.

Marie Boas Hall (Author)

9780521892650, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 June 2002

224 pages, 8 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

In spite of all that has been written in the past decades about the first half-century of the Royal Society's existence, no one has so far examined just what took place at the Society's weekly meetings nor how far they fulfilled the expressed aim of promoting 'experimental learning'. Students of the early Royal Society have often taken its aim to have been fully expressed in the writings of such Fellows as Boyle, Hooke and Newton, aware that Hooke especially performed very many experiments at the meetings between 1662 and 1703, while he and others wrote about the necessity of doing so. This study attempts to analyse the content of the meetings in detail in order to discover how far and in what manner the aims of the Society were fulfilled in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This book for the first time explores the practices of the Society's Fellows, and shows how these altered between 1660 and 1727.

Introduction
1. Aims and ideals
2. The record of the minutes 1660–1674
3. The communication of experiment 1660–1677
4. The record of the minutes 1674–1703
5. The communication of experiment 1677–1703
6. The record of the minutes 1703–1727
7. The view of the world: friend and foe.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX]