Science and technology in the United Kingdom has a long history, producing many important figures and developments in the field. Major theorists from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland include Isaac Newton whose laws of motion and illumination of gravity have been seen as a keystone of modern science and Charles Darwin whose theory of evolution by natural selection was fundamental to the development of modern biology. Major scientific discoveries include hydrogen by Henry Cavendish, penicillin by Alexander Fleming, and the structure of DNA, by Francis Crick and others. Major engineering projects and applications pursued by people from the United Kingdom include the steam locomotive developed by Richard Trevithick and Andrew Vivian, the jet engine by Frank Whittle and the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. The United Kingdom continues to play a major role in the development of science and technology and major technological sectors include the aerospace, motor and pharmaceutical industries.
England (which included Wales at the time) and Scotland were leading centres of the Scientific Revolution from the 17th century. [2] The United Kingdom led the Industrial Revolution from the 18th century, [3] and has continued to produce scientists and engineers credited with important advances. [4] Some of the major theories, discoveries and applications advanced by people from the United Kingdom are given below.
The United Kingdom plays a leading part in the aerospace industry, with companies including Rolls-Royce playing a leading role in the aero-engine market; BAE Systems acting as Britain's largest and the Pentagon's sixth largest defence supplier, and large companies including GKN acting as major suppliers to the Airbus project.<ref1.48>O’Connell, Dominic, "Britannia still rules the skies", The Sunday Times, archived from the original on January 12, 2012.</ref> Two British-based companies, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, ranked in the top five pharmaceutical companies in the world by sales in 2009 [33] and UK companies have discovered and developed more leading medicines than any other country apart from the US. [34] The UK remains a leading centre of automotive design and production, particularly of engines, and has around 2,600 component manufacturers. [35] Investment by venture capital firms in UK technology companies was $9.7 billion from 2010 to 2015. [36]
The UK is one of only 3 nations with $1trillion technology industry.[ citation needed ]
Scientific research and development remains important in British universities, with many establishing science parks to facilitate production and co-operation with industry. [37] Between 2004 and 2012, the United Kingdom produced 6% of the world's scientific research papers and had an 8% share of scientific citations, the third- and second-highest in the world (after the United States' 9% and China's 7% respectively). [38] [39] Scientific journals produced in the UK include Nature , the British Medical Journal and The Lancet .
Britain was one of the largest recipients of research funding from the European Union. From 2007 to 2013, the UK received €8.8 billion out of a total of €107 billion expenditure on research, development and innovation in EU Member States, associated and third countries. At the time, this represented the fourth largest share in the EU. [40] The European Research Council granted 79 projects funding in the UK in 2017, more than any other EU country. [41] [42] The United Kingdom was ranked fourth in the Global Innovation Index 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. [43]
The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into packets that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by routers to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the national measurement standards laboratory of the United Kingdom. It sets and maintains physical standards for British industry.
Leonard Kleinrock is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) is responsible for co-coordinating and funding medical research in the United Kingdom. It is part of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI), which came into operation 1 April 2018, and brings together the UK's seven research councils, Innovate UK and Research England. UK Research and Innovation is answerable to, although politically independent from, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Donald Watts Davies, was a Welsh computer scientist who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
The CYCLADES computer network was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was one of the pioneering networks experimenting with the concept of packet switching and, unlike the ARPANET, was explicitly designed to facilitate internetworking.
The United Kingdom has been involved with the Internet throughout its origins and development. The telecommunications infrastructure in the United Kingdom provides Internet access to homes and businesses mainly through fibre, cable, mobile and fixed wireless networks, with the UK's 140-year-old copper network, maintained by Openreach, set to be withdrawn by December 2025.
Dame Wendy Hall is a British computer scientist. She is Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
The Board of Invention and Research (BIR) was a British expert-level committee, initiated by the Admiralty of the Royal Navy. Established in 1915, the board was responsible for soliciting expert scientific assistance to solve tactical and technical problems. It was a sister organisation to the Munitions Inventions Department which had been set up in April 1915 and the Air Inventions Committee (AIC), once it became become fully operational in the summer of 1917.
The NPL network, or NPL Data Communications Network, was a local area computer network operated by a team from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London that pioneered the concept of packet switching.
The London Institute is Britain's only independent research centre in theoretical physics and mathematics. It was founded to be an alternative to universities, where scientists have to spend time on teaching and administrative duties. Instead, the Institute gives its researchers the freedom and support to devote themselves to research full-time.
Mike Galsworthy is the co-founder of Scientists for EU and Healthier IN the EU and a media commentator about the effects of Brexit on the scientific community in the United Kingdom, and is Chair of the European Movement UK. He is currently a visiting researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and was previously Senior Research Associate in the Department of Applied Health Research, University College London (UCL).
The Protocol Wars were a long-running debate in computer science that occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s, when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s when it became the dominant protocol suite through rapid adoption of the Internet.
Davies's invention of packet switching and design of computer communication networks ... were a cornerstone of the development which led to the Internet
Historians credit seminal insights to Welsh scientist Donald W. Davies and American engineer Paul Baran
As Kahn recalls: ... Paul Baran's contributions ... I also think Paul was motivated almost entirely by voice considerations. If you look at what he wrote, he was talking about switches that were low-cost electronics. The idea of putting powerful computers in these locations hadn't quite occurred to him as being cost effective. So the idea of computer switches was missing. The whole notion of protocols didn't exist at that time. And the idea of computer-to-computer communications was really a secondary concern.
There had been a paper written by [Paul Baran] from the Rand Corporation which, in a sense, foreshadowed packet switching in a way for speech networks and voice networks
He wove the World Wide Web and created a mass medium for the 21st century. The World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He set it loose it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it an open, non-proprietary and free.[ page needed ]