Published in Physics World, 8 Nov 2011
Hanging Hooke
Dir. Siobhán Nicholas and Chris Barnes
The Royal Society, 2 October 2011
Shortly after lunchtime on Wednesday 26 June 1689, Robert Hooke began delivering one of his regular lectures at the Royal Society, London. These were dramatic performances in which he would entertain his philosophically minded peers with experiments, often using instruments he had developed himself. But in this lecture, Hooke digressed. “Many of those things I here first discovered could not find acceptance,” he protested. “Yet I find there are not wanting some who pride themselves in arrogating of them for their own.”
Quite how many developments in science and engineering should be credited to Hooke rather than to his contemporaries – especially Isaac Newton – had long been a matter of debate. Then, in 2006, a stash of mysterious papers turned up at a Hampshire country house that threw new light on the subject. They turned out to be Hooke’s long lost Folio – the minutes of meetings at the Royal Society during his tenure as curator of experiments. The Folio revealed that, as Hooke had always maintained, it was he and not the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens who was the first to demonstrate a portable timepiece based on a balance spring. More importantly, it showed that Hooke was first to state that gravity causes the elliptical motion of the planets – an idea that Newton later honed into the famous inverse-square law. […]
The rest of this article is available here.
