Institutions, Instruments, and a New Cosmology

The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660 by a group of natural philosophers who had met informally for years and granted a royal charter by Charles II in 1662, gave English experimental science its first durable institutional home. Adopting the motto Nullius in verba, roughly 'take nobody's word for it,' the Society emphasized public demonstration, replication, and collective scrutiny of experimental claims over reliance on ancient textual authority. Its secretary Henry Oldenburg founded the Philosophical Transactions in 1665, generally regarded as the first scientific journal and an early ancestor of modern peer review, in which members such as Boyle, Hooke, and Christopher Wren, and later Newton as the Society's long-serving president from 1703, published and debated their findings.