Invisible College

[2][3][4] Originally used to describe the early association of the Enlightenment-era Royal Society of London, which consisted of a number of natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren,[5] the term has been of considerable interest to scholars since the 1960s with the research of Derek Price and Donald Beaver.

Members of this early Royal Society of Scientists did not belong to a formal institution, thus they referred to themselves as an invisible college due to their "geographic closeness and regular meetings based on shared scientific interests".

By contrast, the Invisible College put chemistry on a sound footing in a matter of a couple of decades, one of the most important intellectual transitions in the history of science.

[15] Worsley in 1646 was experimenting on saltpetre manufacture, and Charles Webster in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography argues that he was the "prime mover" of the Invisible College at this point: a network with aims and views close to those of the Hartlib Circle with which it overlapped.

[16] Margery Purver concludes that the 1647 reference of "invisible college" was to the group around Hartlib concerned to lobby Parliament in favour of an "Office of Address" or centralised communication centre for the exchange of information.

[13] Maddison suggests that the "Invisible College" might have comprised Worsley, John Dury and others with Boyle, who were interested in profiting from science (and possibly involving George Starkey).

[24] The concept of invisible college was developed in the sociology of science by Diana Crane (1972) building on Derek J. de Solla Price's work on citation networks.

[4] Lievrow et al note that "In contrast to the considerable research attention that has been paid to examining the communication of scientific knowledge, especially through formal channels like publishing (e.g. Menzel 1968), there has been remarkably little study of why.

It was the inspiration for the Unseen University in the works of Terry Pratchett, and was one of the main reference points for Grant Morrison's The Invisibles comic book series.