El Club de los desayunos filosóficos

In the 19th century, four men, after discovering their shared passion for scientific progress at Cambridge University, decided to meet on Sunday mornings to discuss the state of science in Great Britain and in the world. Inspired by the great politician and scientific reformer Francis Bacon, members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club joined forces to promote a new scientific revolution. William Whewell, Charles Babbage, John Herschel and Richard Jones, prestigious researchers who made important discoveries in different fields, were the last natural philosophers, who were not only at the forefront of the modernization of science, but also engendered a new one. species: the scientist. Historian Laura J. Snyder explores in this dazzling essay the political and religious motivations, friendships and enmities, and the thirst for knowledge and power that drove these extraordinary men, protagonists of an authentic intellectual revolution.