Invisible College

The Invisible College was the name given to themselves by a group of like-minded scientists and natural philosophers in England in the mid-17th century.Kassell, Lauren.  "Invisible College (act. 1646-1647)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography  The informal association is considered to have been one of the origins of the Royal Society.

The purpose of the invisible college was to encourage each other to develop scientific knowledge through experiments and other kinds of investigation.The Royal Society

Some of the members of the Invisible College were among the founders of the Royal Society in 1660,"Robert Boyle’s astonishing scientific wishlist," The Royal Society: 350 Years of Science (exhibition). June 2010. including Robert Boyle, John Wilkins and Samuel Hartlib.Lyons, Henry 1944. The Royal Society 1660-1940 : a history of its administration under its charters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–19  OCLC 59841604

 Modern use 
The concept of invisible college was developed in the sociology of science by Diane Crane,Crane, Diana 1972. Invisible colleges: diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London.  building on  de Solla Price's work on citation networks. It is related to, but significantly different from, other concepts of expert communities, such as "Epistemic communities",Haas P. 1990. Obtaining international environmental protection through epistemic consensus, Millennium Journal of International Studies 19:3, 347-363. or "Communities of Practice".Wenger, Etienne 1998. Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   Recently, the concept was applied to the global network of communications among scientists by Caroline S. Wagner.Wagner, Caroline S. 2008. The new Invisible College: science for development. Brooking Press: Washington DC.

In fiction it is mentioned in the novel The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, and was the inspiration for the Unseen University in the works of Terry Pratchett.

 Related pages
 Epistemic community

 References 

Category:History of science
Category:Royal Society
Category:17th-century establishments in England