Articles by Stella Pratt-Smith

A one-day meeting “Science in Fiction: British Voices” will take place in Paris on Monday October 17^th, 2011 from 10 am to 4.00 pm, at Maison des Sciences de la Communication, 20, rue Berbier-du-Mets, Paris 75013, France.

This is the second meeting of the international seminar series organised by the “Science en Fiction” research group, with the support of the ISCC. The group, directed by Marie Musset (IFE – ENS, Lyon), aims at exploring the relationship between science and fiction, and the use of fiction in science communication. A first meeting was organised in Paris in September 2011. Future meetings are planned for November in Strasbourg and December in Lyon.

This second meeting aims at discussing recent work by British scholars. The sessions will be chaired by Melanie Bayley (Kingston University) and Amirouche Moktefi (University of Strasbourg). Participants must register by sending a message to: marie.musset@ens-lyon.fr. There are no registration fees.
Programme

10.00-11.00: Alice R. Bell (Imperial College, London), Science through sequential art: The rise of popular non-fiction comic books.

11.00-12.00: Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow), Induction, deduction, and storytelling.

14.00-15.00: Melanie Keene (University of Cambridge), Fiction and facts in fairyland.

15.00-16.00: Stella Pratt-Smith (University of Oxford), Science in fiction versus science fiction: Issues of narrative choice, credibility and authority.

Directed by Kevin Elliott.  To be performed in The Theatre at the Old Fire Station, Oxford.

The mathematician Alan Turing broke the Nazi codes used in World War 2, and has the gratitude of the Prime Minister. His sheer passion for learning seems bound to lead him to even greater success. But can his private life remain private in the moral fervour of 1950s Britain? What help can he expect from those around him, and what betrayals will he face? How much room does his society have for those that won’t conform?

Hugh Whitemore’s play covers the life of Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park code breaker who laid the foundations for modern computing. Described by Time Magazine as “elegant and poignant”, this award-winning play depicts the life of this most extraordinary man, his unique talent for innovation, his eccentricity, his hunger for companionship, and above all, his sheer humanity.

For more information, please visit www.oxfordtheatreguild.com.

You may like to take part in the production or help with it, if you live close enough to Oxford. Auditions will be held: Wed 31st Aug – 7.30pm United Reformed Church Hall, Summertown; Fri 2nd Sept – 7.30pm United Reformed Church Hall, Summertown; Tues 6th Sept – 7.30pm Jericho Community Centre, Oxford.  Please contact the director, Kevin Elliott, on 07970 982789 with any questions.

Interdisciplinary conference organized by the research group Literature and Science, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, The University of Bergen 27-28 October 2011.

Invited speakers include:

Luigi Dei, Professor of Chemistry, Università di Firenze, on Primo Levi’s bridging of chemistry and literature; Robert Gordon, Reader in Modern Italian Culture, Cambridge University, on Primo Levi; Bernard Joly, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, Université de Lille 3, on the figure of the alchemist in 19th and 20th century fiction Marek Krawczyk, Rector of Medical University of Warsaw, on the life and scientific achievements of Marie Sklodowska-Curie, the winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; George Rousseau, Professor of History, Oxford University, on science-politics, nostalgia and Ludwig Boltzmann; Sharon Ruston, Professor of English Literature, University of Salford, on Humphry Davy and British Romanticism; Leiv K. Sydnes, Professor of Chemistry, Universitetet i Bergen, on Oxygen.

Conference topic

Chemistry is the art of separating, weighing, and distinguishing: these are three useful exercises also for the person who sets out to describe events or give body to his own imagination. Moreover, there is an immense treasure of metaphors that the writer can take from the chemistry of today and yesterday, which those who have not frequented the laboratory and factory know only approximately. […] Even a layman knows what to filter, crystallize, and distil means, but he knows it only at second hand: he does not know “the passion infused by them”, he does not know the emotions that are tied to these gestures, has not perceived the symbolic shadow they cast.

These are the words of the Italian novelist and essayist Primo Levi (1919-1987), chemist and survivor of Auschwitz, who wrote extensively on chemistry. Designated the UNESCO International Year of Chemistry, 2011 also commemorates the 100th anniversary of Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded for her ground-breaking studies in radium and polonium. The relationship between literature and chemistry has a long history, reaching back to the time before the existence of chemistry as a scientific discipline, to alchemy and natural philosophy, and to philosophers and poets like Epicurus and Lucretius. Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809) represents one of the most notable metaphoric explorations of chemistry; with its suggestion of human connections as originating at a biochemical level. The chemist Humphry Davy had a direct influence on Wordsworth and Coleridge. In his 1880 essay “The Experimental Novel”, Emile Zola stated that his great source of inspiration as a novelist was the physiologist Claude Bernard, who studied the chemistry of the body. Other authors who have treated and explored alchemy and chemistry are E.T.A. Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, Poe, Dickens, Turgenev, Yeats, Joyce, Strindberg, Proust, Balzac, Zola, Asimov, Pynchon, Updike, not to mention philosophers as different as Comte, Jung and Bachelard. Chemistry also plays an important role in crime and detective fiction, in apocalyptic literature and in SF literature.

Together with its ancestor alchemy, chemistry has always had a darker and troubling side, infected with the guilt of hubris, of artifice and contamination, faults that, since Plato, have also been associated with literature. A hybrid science, posed between the technological and the theoretical, between observation and experiment, chemistry can be said to share with literature many of its fundamental processes of creation and epistemological problems of representation. The French chemist Marcellin Berthelot (1827-1907) stated that, like literature and art, chemistry creates its object, and that the creative faculty forms an essential distinction between chemistry and the other natural or historical sciences.

Call for papers:

For this conference we welcome a range of approaches – historical, theoretical, ethical and aesthetical – to the encounters and affinities between literature and chemistry. Proposed topics might address:

• Literary representations of the chemical sciences

• The nomenclature of chemistry; tools and languages of representation (chemical terms as literary metaphors)

• The cultural and intellectual history of chemistry

• The philosophy of chemistry

• The symbolism of the elements

• SF and chemistry

• The chemical mind and body in literature

• Chemistry and hubris – the ethics of chemistry

• Artificiality and naturalness

• Contamination, pollution, radiation

The organizers invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on these or other aspects of the conference topic. The organizers will consider publishing the proceedings of the workshop. Please e-mail your proposed topic and preliminary paper title by 30 June, followed by a 250-word abstract by 1 September, to the following address: margareth.hagen@if.uib.no

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us: Randi.koppen@if.uib.no; Margareth.hagen@if.uib.no; Margery.skagen@if.uib.no; http://www.uib.no/fg/litt_vit.

Call for Papers: Journal special issue

April 2011

Essay proposals are invited for a collection entitled ‘The Cultural Production of Eighteenth-Century Natural Knowledge’. We are developing a collection of essays as a journal special issue which will examine the production and circulation of knowledge about the natural world in the eighteenth century. This interdisciplinary collection will bring together original research on the relationship between science, culture and social practice in the eighteenth century.

The Enlightenment heralded an era of fascination with the workings of the natural world which eventually resulted in the development of large-scale, institutionalized efforts to investigate, categorize and explain nature. But Enlightenment knowledge was not made in the laboratory or the university alone: a complex of social networks outside these walls played a crucial role in making and disseminating new ideas, information and objects. We invite contributions that discuss scientific texts, objects, images, ideas and social networks in terms of the cultural and social conditions of scientific knowledge-making—both inside and outside of institutions. The collection will focus on the cultural and aesthetic frameworks within which medical and natural philosophical knowledge was created, represented and communicated. We hope contributors will pay special attention to historical interactions between different forms of knowledge, addressing how new kinds of ideas and social practices were produced at the points of meeting between artistic and scientific discourses and the moments of crossing between disciplinary, professional and social boundaries. The intention is to examine the cultural dimensions of eighteenth-century enquiry in order to understand what constituted ‘knowledge’ and the social processes of its production, as well as the various imaginative forms employed to make sense of new systems of information.

The essays in this special issue will demonstrate how Enlightenment representations of knowledge, manifested in textual, pictorial or oral form, influenced the development of new ways of knowing and encouraged the participation of new types of scientific practitioner. The first half of the collection will discuss the production and consumption of texts, collections and visual representations. The aim is to understand the relationship between these cultural manifestations and knowledge-making, through an examination of the points of intersection between aesthetic discourse and medical and scientific knowledge. How were scientific and medical ideas created and disseminated in literary texts, epistolary culture, travel writings, works of art, museums and other cultural productions? Who read these texts or studied collections, and how did they relate to them? Part Two will ask what the social consequences of this were for participation in Enlightenment science. By attending to how the circulation of knowledge and particular cultural forms might influence scientific practice, we aim to understand who participated in knowledge-making and how they did so during and in the wake of the Enlightenment. Through reanimating the cultural and social contexts of medical and scientific ideas and practices, this collection asks how people were invited to imagine the natural world as well as what the natural world was imagined to be. By enlarging the cultural and social framework through which we view eighteenth-century knowledge, the essays in this special issue will open up alternate genealogies for the production of ideas and development of new practices central to the emergence of scientific modernity.

We invite proposals on topics including, but not limited to:

-          The literary production of medical and scientific knowledges

-          Social participation in knowledge-making

-          Science and visual culture

-          Enlightenment scholarly networks and the circulation of people and things

-          Scientific objects

-          Science and storytelling

-          Colonialism, geographical movement and the production of knowledge

-          Aesthetic theory and discourses of scientific cognition

The collection will be edited and introduced by Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith (European University Institute) and Dr Emily Senior (University of Warwick), with an afterword by Professor Judith Hawley (Royal Holloway, University of London).

Submissions:

Deadline for proposals (2 pages max, accompanied by a brief biographical statement or CV): 20^th May 2011. Complete essays of c. 7,000 words will be due 15th September 2011.

Please send queries and submissions to:

Sarah Easterby Smith Sarah.Easterby-Smith@alumni.warwick.ac.uk and

Emily Senior E.Senior@alumni.warwick.ac.uk

The Centre for History of Science is delighted to present the Spring series of ever-popular free Friday lunchtime lectures. All are welcome to attend, but please reserve your seat in advance to avoid disappointment! For descriptions of each lecture and to make reservations, please visit http://royalsociety.org/lunchtime-lectures-spring-2011/

 Ghosts of Women Past, Friday 18 February, 1pm-2pm Dr Patricia Fara, Clare College, Cambridge

 Doting on Instruments, Friday 25 February, 1pm-2pm Rebecca Pohancenik, Queen Mary

 Paul Dirac and the religion of mathematical beauty, Friday 4 March, 1pm-2pm Graham Farmelo

Free-thinking and language-planning in the 17th century Royal Society, Friday 11 March, 1pm-2pm Dr William Poole, New College, Oxford

 Science and the Church in the Middle Ages, Friday 18 March, 1pm-2pm Dr James Hannam

 A history of autism: my conversations with the pioneers, Friday 25 March, 1pm-2pm Adam Feinstein

 From butterflies to biochemistry: Frederick Gowland Hopkins and the chemistry of life, Friday 1 April, 1pm-2pm Dr Alison Thomas, Anglia Ruskin University

 ’Behold a New Thing in the Earth!’: Reflections on Science at the Great Exhibition, Friday 8 April, 1pm-2pm Prof. Geoffrey Cantor

 John Soane and the learned societies of Somerset House, Friday 15 April, 1pm-2pm Gillian Darley

The Scientific Instrument Society awards small grants, of up to £500 each, for research on the history of scientific instruments. SIS Research Grants are intended to support new research into the history of scientific instruments. They are not intended to fund activities to which an applicant is already committed. Grants may be used to cover any reasonable costs of research, including travel and photography. Grants cannot be used to purchase equipment, and are not intended to support conference travel, unless there is a specific research dimension. Grants are open to applicants from any country, and both members and non-members of the Scientific Instrument Society may apply.

Please complete an application, as set out on the Grant Application page. Applications should be sent to grants@sis.org.uk . Two rounds of applications will be considered each year. The deadlines for receipt of applications are 1 March and 1 September. Further information can be found at http://www.sis.org.uk/grants/what-we-support.

Thursday 10 March 2011, 6.30pm

Speaker: Professor Lorraine Daston, MaxPlanck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

At Queen Mary, University of London, Arts Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, Mile End.

The Nicolai Rubinstein Lecture in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History is an annual memorial lecture held in honour of the distinguished Renaissance scholar and former Queen Mary colleague, Nicolai Rubinstein. 

Since Antiquity, science (episteme, scientia) has been understood as a privileged form of knowledge: more certain, more rigorous, harder won and longer lived. No one doubted that other forms of knowledge were useful, even essential. Aristotle theorized the techne of the arts and crafts; Cicero wrote of the “natural divination” practiced by farmers, shepherds, and sailors who read the signs of fat times and lean, fair weather and foul. But a line was drawn between knowledge and science and a hierarchy erected – even though the grounds for the distinction varied. Early modern Europe witnessed a radical reconceptualization of science and knowledge and the differences between them – and even a challenge to the very existence of such distinctions. Nowhere was the rethinking of the meaning and status of knowledge and science more dramatic in the realm of experience. Experientia, once the province of knowledge, was cultivated by the learned, who created new forms of scientific knowing and concomitant practices: experimenting, observing, collecting, note-taking, table-making, measuring, archiving. These practices were in part derived from the traditional realm of knowledge (e.g. the experiment from the artisan’s workshop and the observation from the shepherd’s vigil). But in part they relied on the scholar’s skills: reading, excerpting, collating, comparing. “Learned experience” (in Francis Bacon’s phrase) redrew the boundary between knowledge and science in ways that still reverberate in our contemporary classification of the disciplines.

To register and for a map and directions to this event, please go to the Queen Mary website: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/qmul/events/details.php?id=34695 or email: events@qmul.ac.uk.

Hosted by the Museum of the History of Science and Mansfield College, Oxford on Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

The public event ‘Astronomy and Poetry’ was a rarity—one that brought together literature’s stirring power with that of expert scientific knowledge.  Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered radio pulsars as a postgraduate student, is currently Professorial Fellow in Physics at Mansfield College, Oxford.  Until recently, she was president of the Institute of Physics and, in 2010, she received the Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture from the Royal Society in recognition of her excellence in communicating science.  

 Volunteer audience members were privileged to read aloud selected poems from the captivating anthology, Dark Matter: Poems of Space, which Professor Bell Burrell edited with poet Maurice Riordan in 2008, including poems by Diane Ackerman, John Herschel, Stanley Kunitz and Thomas Hardy.  As Paul Murdin of the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy remarked in 2009, ‘we reach for analogy and the architecture of poetry to express dark matter, black holes and red giants.’  Professor Bell’s generous sharing of her astronomical insight and affection for poetry demonstrated not only the aptness of the poetic form for expressing astrophysics but also the inherently poetic virtues of her science.

The event was accompanied by the Museum’s exhibition of science poetry by competition winners, entitled ‘Parallel Universe’ (see http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/events/).

Tuesday 8 February 7.00pm–8.30pm

Speaker: Philip Ball

 Philip Ball delves beneath the surface of the cultural history of ‘anthropoeia’ – the creation of artificial people – to explore what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul. He suggests that, from the legendary inventor Daedalus to Goethe’s tragic Faust and the automata-making magicians of E.T.A Hoffmann, the old tales and myths are alive and well, subtly manipulating the current debates about assisted conception, embryo research and human cloning, which have at last made the fantasy of ‘making people’ into some kind of reality.

 Admission: Tickets cost £10, £7 concessions, £5 Ri members. You can book tickets online at www.rigb.org

 Venue: The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS

The closing date for receipt of applications is Friday 11^th February 2011.