Seeing Further

"This was published to celebrate 350 years of the Royal Society. It is edited by Bill Bryson but made up of articles by all sorts of interesting people like Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones. It’s a set of essays on key issues which have arisen during the history of the Royal Society. There is one essay I particularly like by Simon Schaffer. He is talking about the development of lightning conductors by Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century. His definition of ‘Promethean science’, as an experimental enterprise that mixes a vaulting ambition to safeguard humanity against a major threat with the troubling hazards of following this science’s recipes, sounds to me exactly like where we are with geoengineering at the moment. That is to say, something bold and dangerous that might well go wrong. When they were dealing with lightning conductors there was the suggestion that, instead of protecting you, some of the lightening conductors could attract the lightning to you, and cause fires where they wouldn’t otherwise have been. It’s a fascinating story about how the Royal Society dealt with the inquiry. It was a big problem for the government because they wanted to protect their stores of gunpowder. So all these issues that we think are modern were in fact already around in the 18th century. It was unsatisfactory and messy just as things are today."