{"id":3658,"date":"2011-06-26T22:03:26","date_gmt":"2011-06-26T21:03:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3658"},"modified":"2011-06-26T22:03:26","modified_gmt":"2011-06-26T21:03:26","slug":"book-review-the-philosophical-breakfast-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3658","title":{"rendered":"Book review: The Philosophical Breakfast Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in the good old days when I was a freshly minted postgraduate student I had big plans– In short, I was going to change the world.\u00a0 Along with a couple of my friends I was going to revolutionize the field I was working in, win the Nobel prize and transform the way science and mathematics is taught at University.\u00a0 Fast forward four years and it pains me to say that my actual achievements fell rather short of these lofty ideals.\u00a0 I considered myself lucky to simply pass my PhD and land a job that didn’t involve querying members of the public on their preferences regarding potato based products.\u00a0 The four subjects of Laura Snyder’s latest book, The Philosophical Breakfast Club<\/a>\"\" had broadly similar aims to my younger self but they actually delivered the goods and they did so in spades.<\/p>\n

In this sweeping history of nineteenth century science, Snyder gives us not one biography but four — those of Charles Babbage<\/a>, John Herschel<\/a>, William Whewell<\/a> and Richard Jones<\/a>.\u00a0 You may not have heard of all of them but I’d be surprised if you didn’t know of some of their work.\u00a0 Between them they invented computing, modern economics, produced the most detailed astronomical maps of their age, co-invented photography, made important advances in tidology<\/a>, invented the term scientist<\/a> (among many other neologisms) and they are just the headliners!\u00a0 Under-achievers they were not.<\/p>\n

These four men met while studying at Cambridge University way back in 1812 where they held weekly meetings which they called The Philosophical Breakfast Club.\u00a0 They took a look at how science was practiced in their day, found it wanting and decided to do something it.\u00a0 Remarkably, they succeeded!<\/p>\n

I found Snyder’s combination of biography, history and science to be utterly compelling…so much so that during my time reading it, my beloved iPad stayed at home, lonely and forgotten, while I undertook my daily commute.\u00a0 This is no dry treatise on nineteenth century science; instead it is a living, breathing page-turner about a group of very colourful individuals who lived in a time where science was done rather differently from how it is practiced today.\u00a0 This was a time where ‘computer’ meant ‘a person who was good at arithmetic’ and professors would share afternoon champagne with their students after giving them advice.\u00a0 Who would have thought that a group of nineteenth century geeks could form the basis of one of the best books I’ve read all year?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in the good old days when I was a freshly minted postgraduate student I had big plans– In short, I was going to change the world.\u00a0 Along with a couple of my friends I was going to revolutionize the field I was working in, win the Nobel prize and transform the way science and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-X0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3658"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3666,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3658\/revisions\/3666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}