Scientific Adviser To The Admiralty
On the abolition of the Board of Longitude in 1828, it was arranged that three scientific advisers to the Admiralty should be nominated from the council of the Royal Society. Sabine, Michael Faraday, and Thomas Young were chosen. Sabine's appointment was violently attacked by Charles Babbage, the father of the computer, (largely on account of his associations with the Royal Society, whose scientific credentials Babbage did not recognise) in a pamphlet entitled Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of its Causes. Sabine, however, refused to be drawn into the controversy.
Read more about this topic: Edward Sabine
Famous quotes containing the word scientific:
“To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.”
—Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)