Visit of Major Yuri Gagarin

On13 July during his five-day visit to this country Major Yuri Gagarin, the first man to be placed in orbit round the earth in a space vehicle, was received by the President and Officers o f the Society in the Society’s apartments. Major Gagarin was accompanied by His Excellency The Soviet Ambassador M r Soldatov, Lieutenant-General N. P. Kamanin, Colonel N. N. Denisov, M r Romanov, Mr Pavlov, other members of his party and representatives of the Soviet Embassy. The President and Officers, having welcomed Major Gargarin, entertained the visitors to lunch at which several other Fellows were present. After a few words o f welcome by the President, Major Gagarin responded in a felicitous speech in which he made reference to the interest of Soviet scientists in the Royal Society and the work of the Fellows and in particular recalled the Tercentenary Celebrations. He referred to Isaac Newton’s laws of motion as an essential step to his journey in space on 12 April 1961.

1857 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 111-116 ◽  

The Trigonometrical Survey of the United Kingdom commenced in the year 1784, under the immediate auspices of the Royal Society; the first base was traced by General Roy on the 16th of April of that year, on Hounslow Heath, in presence of Sir Joseph Banks, then President of the Society, and some of its most distinguished Fellows. The principal object which the Government had then in view, was the connexion of the Observatories of Paris and Greenwich by means of a triangulation, for the purpose of determining the difference of longitude between the two observatories.


1765 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 326-344 ◽  

The observations of the late transit of Venus, though made with all possible care and accuracy, have not enabled us to determine with certainty the real quantity of the sun's parallax; since, by a comparison of the observations made in several parts of the globe, the sun's parallax is not less than 8" 1/2, nor does it seem to exceed 10". From the labours of those gentlemen, who have attempted to deduce this quantity from the theory of gravity, it should seem that the earth performs its annual revolution round the sun at a greater distance than is generally imagined: since Mr. Professor Stewart has determined the sun's parallax to be only 6', 9, and Mr. Mayer, the late celebrated Professor at Gottingen, who hath brought the lunar tables to a degree of perfection almost unexpected, is of opinion that it cannot exceed 8".


1766 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 216-223 ◽  

My Lord, The following tables I have compared with the variation chart, published in the year 1756, and so find that they agree pretty well in general, making allowance for the time elapsed: it is true, that, in some few places in the Atlantic Ocean, they differ; yet this may probably arise, as is often the case, from an error in the Montagu's supposed longitude, where such observations were made. But the greatest difference (a greater than should arise, I think, according to common course) appears upon the coast of Portugal, Cape Saint Vincent, and about Gibraltar, near and within sight of land, where the observations are ascertained to the spot. Hence, if mine observed about the year 1756, and those of Mr. Ross's, were both near the truth, at the respective times when they were taken, I know not how to account for this considerable encrease, unless those late extraordinary convulsions, in the bowels of the earth, upon those several coasts, may be found, by further experiments, to have there influenced the directions of the magnetic needle.


1926 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
J. Alfred Ewing

In this the centenary year of Lord Kelvin's birth it is fitting that the Society should call to remembrance one who was for long its most distinguished Fellow, who first became its President at the age of thirty-nine, and was repeatedly re-elected to the office, which he held for twenty-one years in all, and who used the Society as a medium for the publication of many of his most brilliant discoveries. In the long list of his published papers there are at least one hundred and twenty items communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. No other contributor has done so much to give to our Proceedings and Transactions a world-wide and lasting fame. It was to this Society that he brought, in 1849, his account of Carnot's Theory, which marks the beginning of his study of Thermodynamics, and it was in our Transactions that he published his epochmaking series of papers on the “Dynamical Theory of Heat” from 1851 to 1854. It was here in 1852 that he propounded the doctrine of the Dissipation of Energy. It was here that his investigations of underground temperature and the secular cooling of the Earth appeared in 1860 and 1862. It was here in 1865 that he “briefly refuted” the doctrine of Uniformity in Geology. Here, too, were published his long series of papers on Vortex Motion and Vortex Atoms, from 1867 to 1881, and much of his work on the molecular constitution of matter. Here he first showed, in germ, his mariner's compass, in 1874.


In a paper printed in the Proceedings of the Royal Society,' No. 190, 1878 (vol. 28, pp. 2-35), I gave an account of some experiments undertaken in order to test the possibility of using the Common Balance in place of the Torsion Balance in the Cavendish Experiment. The success obtained seemed to justify the intention expressed in that paper to continue the work, using a large bullion balance, instead of the chemical balance with which the preliminary experiments were made. As I have had the honour to obtain grants from the Royal Society for the construction of the necessary apparatus, I have been able to carry out the experiment on the larger scale which appeared likely to render the method more satisfactory, and this paper contains an account of the results obtained.


Author(s):  
Tony Bridgeman ◽  
P. C. Chatwin ◽  
C. Plumpton

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