Anniversary Miscellany
A growing assortment of quotes, clips, tweets, mentions and sightings relevant to the Royal Society’s anniversary.
25 February: Royal Mail today launches a series of 10 stamps commemorating past Fellows of the Royal Society and their enormous contributions to modern science. The BBC has an slideshow of the new stamps with narration by Stephen Cox, Executive Secretary of the Society, introducing each of the scientists and explaining why they've been chosen.
The scientists featured are Robert Boyle, founder of modern chemistry; Sir Isaac Newton, physicist and optical pioneer; Benjamin Franklin, inventor of the lightning conductor; Edward Jenner, inventor of vaccination; Charles Babbage, developer of programmable computers; Alfred Russell Wallace, pioneer of evolution theory; Joseph Lister, inventor of antiseptic surgery; Ernest Rutherford, founding father of nuclear physics; Dorothy Hodgkin (shown), inventor of x-ray crystallography and Sir Nicholas Shackleton, pioneer of climate research.
16 February: Microscopy was among the first interests of the Royal Society, and as part of its 350th anniversary celebrations London Zoo is putting on a show of colourful closeup images of plankton taken by Royal Society University Research Fellow Dr Richard Kirby
provocative, admirable
and highly readable 
The Sunday Times reviews Seeing Further, January 24th 2010
London Underground celebrates 350 years of the Royal Society with six poems reflecting on scientific thought and the changes it has wrought.
...These men lived in a world of plague, fire, war, public execution, witchcraft, alchemy, religious hatred, political ferment and precarious patronage: but they made it a rule to discuss neither God nor politics, nor news "other than what concern'd our business of Philosophy".
As well as collecting uncritical observations of monstrous births and listening to investigations into the supposed consequences of a tarantula's bite, they read a paper from a certain Mr Isaac Newton of Cambridge, which showed that white light was in fact made up of the colours of the rainbow. This was a landmark moment in science, but as James Gleick – the first of many impressive contributors to this substantial celebration of 350 years of the Royal Society – reminds us, we recognise landmarks after we have passed them. At the time, the society's own experimenter, Robert Hooke, dismissed Newton's hypothesis as wrong. This snub drove the sulking Newton back to his obsession with alchemy and scripture.
There is a solid case for regarding Hooke and Newton and their peers as the makers of the modern world, but it might not have seemed so at the time, even to members of this not so exclusive club. Past fellows have included Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, Edward Gibbon and Lord Byron, and Bill Bryson appropriately enhances his celebratory mix with contemporaries better known for pen than pipette.
Tim Radford reviews Seeing Further for the Guardian, January 9th 2010