petri dish

watching the detectives

In introducing classic images of the scientist in popular culture, we've started with the essential prototypes: the heroic scientist and the mad scientist. The heroic image gets a huge boost at what history came to see as the culmination of the scientific revolution in the model of a quasi-divine Isaac Newton (1642-1727). This image is captured in the poetic sentiments of Edmund Halley, in his description of Newton's mind in 1687: "Nearer the gods no mortal may approach" -- and in Alexander Pope's famous couplet: "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!" (published in this form in 1735). [Or check out Newton's monument in Westminster Abbey.] A worthy assist to this image was carried forward, for example, in the praises sung of Benjamin Franklin's work on electricity as in Benjamin West's famous rendering from 1816, which shows heavenly light breaking up a raging storm as Franklin draws fire from the sky bare-knuckled, surrounded by cherubic assistants. The flip side of the heroic scientist is the mad scientist, whose power stems from base motives or infernal regions, and is familiar through countless renditions of the Frankenstein image. As the nineteenth century progressed, fresh literary forms such as science fiction offered ample display space for presentations of the compromised scientist, as in H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897) -- examples that would prove to have a long-lived future in films on through the next century.

We'll pick up sf later in the semester, but our next step will to be to take under consideration the appearance of another variation of scientific man that was brought into being in the nineteenth century, in the emergence of stories of the scientific detective. That's shown in the image at the upper left, which features the famous Sherlock Holmes. The caption reads: "Holmes was working hard over a chemical investigation;" it's from a short story titled "The Naval Treaty" from 1893. In the first Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet," Dr. Watson is told by a mutual acquaintance:

"Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes -- it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects." (quoted in E.J. Wagner, The Science of Sherlock Holmes, p. 3.)

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales depend on scientific imagery in a number of different ways. For example: 1) as with the chemical investigation above, he is seen as being a competent scientist himself, applying scientific techniques to crime detection; 2) he is seen as having certain characteristics that call up conventional images of the scientific persona as seen in Romantic era critiques ["a cold-blooded...spirit of inquiry"]; and, 3) his relentlessly logical mind is seen as the literal embodiment of analytic method, as empirical data are cognitively sorted into causal chains of truth, that reveal the ordered reality beneath a surface of disorder, much as a computer program might be portrayed as doing so today. This successful working out of the "calculus of probabilities" [a term first used by Edgar Allen Poe in relation to his scientific detective, C. Auguste Dupin -- see below -- and repeated by A.C. Doyle] is in principle within the reach of anyone willing to reason accurately, but is shown to be beyond the grasp of nearly all within Holmes' orbit -- and that includes us, his readers!

The rise of detective fiction in the nineteenth century -- inaugurated by Poe in 1841, in his introduction of the detective C. Auguste Dupin -- and elaborated by Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes tales --  helps to point us to broader portrayals of the image of science that circulated within popular media, and especially to an emphasis on portraying the scientific mind. As Richard K. Ho notes in a discussion of the rise of the scientific detective,

"The genre of crime fiction had come into its own in the nineteenth century, amidst a time of great intellectual advancement. Thanks to the influences of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, advances in science, technology, and rational thought began to find their way into contemporary literature. Victorian writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle incorporated these modern ideas into their fictional works, lending the credibility of science to the practical tasks of criminal detection and investigation."

While detectives such as Dupin and Holmes embody scientific characteristics, it is still the case that they occupy a space that is not strictly of the laboratory, and the ways in which they choose to spend their time differs from the normal round of what will come to be seen as the scientific enterprise. They will make an interesting case study for us of how scientific characteristics are mixed together with dimensions that may appear to be at odds with definitions of conventional scientific life, representing perhaps a hybrid creature that integrates scientific values and humanistic values, particularly perhaps in the detective's role as an agent of moral order.

As an opportunity to generate hypotheses of our own, we'll probe the literary creations of Poe and Doyle (Dupin and Holmes) and then compare these nineteenth-century depictions with a more modern-day version of the scientific detective: Lieutenant Columbo of television fame from the 1970s. In looking at the episode "A Stitch in Crime," we'll even get bonus representations of the "evil" scientist and the "good" scientist in addition to our ratiocinating detective as parts of the plot: a three-pack of images of the scientific mind and character, as we start to explore what all this imagery within popular culture may mean, then and now.

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For more: For an intriguing web exhibition about forensic science, see this National Library of Medicine project, "Visible Proofs" -- don't miss the section on "Riding the Forensic Wave," which discusses the circulation of ideas such as the scientific detective in the popular press. For a discussion of how Poe influenced Doyle, see this online article by Drew Thomas. And here's an earlier post on CSI.

Images: Upper left from "Visible Proofs" at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/galleries/exhibition/wave_image_2.html; Newton, from Westminster Abbey's site [scroll down] at http://www.westminster-abbey.org/history-research/monuments-gravestones/people/12186; and the Invisible Man poster via wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The-Invisible-Man.jpg

half a moon is better than none

As an historian of science, I've spent a lot of time observing the moon -- at least observing the historical traces of where the moon's path has intersected with the human quest to understand nature, the universe, and the meaning of (scientific) life. I've actually never seen the moon through a telescope, as so many scientific investigators have, down through the years since the time of Galileo (that's his work to the left: one of his drawings of his telescopic moon from the Sidereus Nuncius -- The Starry Messenger -- of 1610). Like a lot of moderns, I know the moon from the occasional naked eye glance up to the heavens when I'm out and about and the night is clear, or from the NASA photographs that became part of the collective consciousness for those of us growing up in the sixties.

I'd always liked the idea of star-gazing through a telescope, but growing up in a working-class family, the likelihood of owning a telescope was out of the realm of what was possible. When I became older and on my own, such a thing still seemed like an extravagance, and, really, weren't all those professional pictures in magazines and embedded within television science documentaries going to be vastly better than anything I could manage on my own with a telescope, rendering my own possible efforts redundant? Still, I always had a small, nagging feeling that I was missing out on something important that existed outside of a world of daily routines that kept my focus earth-bound, with little time to just sit back and scan the sky. (I'd heard that binoculars had come down in price and up in power in a way that allowed one to view the moon as Galileo had, but I never got around to investigating that in more detail -- if there had been the kind of web we have today to plug into in the 1970s or early eighties I would have found a lot of advice in seconds and it might have seemed do-able. Take a look here or here or here, for example. Or, if I had encountered the evangelism of sidewalk astronomy, who knows?)

So most of my moon-gazing these days takes place within the pages of books -- the History of Science Collections here at the University of Oklahoma has an astonishing collection of rare books, and I've had the opportunity to pore over the original copy of that Sidereus Nuncius pictured above more than a dozen times in the course of teaching students, and we'll be pulling some other Renaissance rarities this week in another visit for the science and popular culture class, to accompany our reading of Scott Montgomery's The Moon and the Western Imagination. If you want a sense of what we'll be up to, take a look at this wonderful online exhibition from the Linda Hall Library, The Face of the Moon: From Galileo to Apollo.

But before getting strapped into the way-back machine during our Collections visit, I thought I would take a tour around the web and see what might turn up, striking off on a trail that starts from Montgomery's book, but then which rapidly branched off to other strange and fascinating links:

• Montgomery makes the startling claim that the first naturalistic drawings of the moon don't come from the sketchpad of Leonardo da Vinci circa the very early 1500s, or the telescopic observations of Thomas Harriot or Galileo, but are displayed in the artist Jan van Eyck's oil paintings, such as his Crucifixion from the 1420s.
• A discussion of the phenomenon of "strange moonlight", via NASA, explaining, for example, why you can't read by moonlight.
• Moving from the visual to the literary, here's a collection of moon poetry.
• Where did that story about the moon and green cheese come from anyway? Try the Straight Dope.
• The "Earth and Moon Viewer" gives you an incredible number of ways to view the moon.
• And examples of "good moons rising" (and bad ones) from children's picture books -- see how the classic story, Good Night, Moon does a superlative job of portraying the moon through the window as you page through it. This is from a site with an inventive educational twist that is absorbing in itself: Paper Plate Education, whose motto is "Serving the universe on a paper plate." What a concept!

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For more: Here's a collection of paragraphs from an assignment I gave where each member of the class spent some time looking at the night sky and reported back what thoughts occurred to them: funny, lyrical, profound stuff. And here's a previous blog post that touches on the idea of the Apollo landing being a hoax and discusses the myths about the Challenger explosion.

Image: The Galileo drawing of the moon is courtesy of the History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries; copyright the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. The thumbnail is from http://hsci.cas.ou.edu/images/jpg-100dpi-5in/17thCentury/Galileo/1610/Galileo-1610-9v.jpg. 

halloween treats

Here are some history of science treats for fun, inspired by Halloween sneaking up around the corner. To get in the proper spirit, visit the skeleton carnival over at Dream Anatomy, the graphically elegant, evocative, erudite, and sometimes disturbing, sometimes droll display of what's beneath the skin. This is put together by the National Library of Medicine from their collections, particularly rich in the Renaissance and early modern period. The introduction begins by noting that:

The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century -- and the cascade of print technologies that followed -- helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque — a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self.

You can start with the introduction in the link above, or go straight to Cadavers at Play or Show-off Cadavers if you don't need to ease into touring dissected bodies. (The image here is from a 1690 book with Govard Bidloo as the anatomist and Gerard de Lairesse as the illustrator.)

Since Halloween conjures up a medieval vibe (although the great witch-hunts and such belong to the early modern era, not the middle ages, despite popular belief), it gives me an excuse here to point out the wonderful digital version of the 12th-century Aberdeen Bestiary, which provides the wonderful illuminated bat picture at the start of this entry. Magic and wizardry also calls to mind Harry Potter -- and "real science", history of science and mythology mixes together with the popular series in The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works by Roger Highfield. And, for the serious history of science student with a research library at hand and a yen to study the intersection of history of science and the occult, a good place to start is with U of Florida Professor Robert Hatch's bibliography on magic, mysticism, and the occult, from his Scientific Revolution website. (This isn't to say that Harry Potter hasn't been to college; Professor of Physics George Plitnik at Frostburg State has taught Harry Potter science, in wizard robes, no less, as CBS reported.)

History of science does have a few ghosts, witches, and monsters in the attic. The ur-monster of all, of course, is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the Bakken Libary and Museum (which focuses on the history of electricity and magnetism in the life sciences) has an online companion to their Frankenstein exhibit. Science writer Deborah Blum takes on "real" ghost stories in her latest book, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Proof for Life after Death. Johannes Kepler, astronomer extraordinaire, had to take time out to defend his mother in a witchcraft trial; the story is nicely retold in Kitty Ferguson's book, Tycho and Kepler. Kepler also has a character that resembles his herbal-knowledgeable mother in his Somnium (The Dream), which was published after his death in 1634. Kepler's tale concerns a young man who journeys to the moon in a dream, assisted by his mother, a witch (some consider this to be one of the first works of science fiction. For an analysis, see this piece by Gale E. Christianson in Science Fiction Studies, Kepler's Somnium: Science Fiction and the Renaissance Scientist).

Happy haunting!

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wondering about wonder

As a new mother, one of the things I found odd about baby books and such was an overwhelming emphasis on farm animals. Now, I’ve got nothing against farm animals, but it did strike me as interesting that our youngest humans are fed a steady diet of rural domesticated animal life as their introduction to nature.

Having grown up near the ocean, I began tracking down picture books that featured the sea, and not only was it a relief to venture beyond e-i-e-i-o with my pre-schooler but it was interesting that the ocean books themselves seemed to have a different, savvier edge to them rather than evoking the placid warm fuzziness of the pastoral nursery. For example, Eric Carle's Mister Seahorse comes with a story at odds with the relentless emphasis on mommies that you find in baby world (abetted by all those baby farm animals and stories about their mommies), featuring those species of sea creatures where it is the male who takes care of the eggs – a baroque group that ranges from Mr. Stickleback to Mr. Kurtus to Mr. Pipe to Mr. Bullhead . . . strange creatures doing the unexpected, naturally. In Stella, Star of the Sea by Marie-Louise Gay, an endlessly inventive little girl answers the million questions her little brother (reluctant to wade into the big loud ocean) puts to her, not with scientific accuracy, but certainly with exuberance, explaining how starfish are stars who fell in love with the sea, for example. And that reminded me of something else about children’s books about nature and children's interest in the why and wherefore of how the world works: for me, at least, it wasn’t the "fact" books that caught my attention, but books that captured great and intriguing questions, evoking a sense of wonder, remaining with me even today.

I’m not completely out to lunch on this – well, or at least I’m in the good company of noted physicist and author Chet Raymo, who made a similar point in his essay "Dr. Seuss and Dr. Einstein: Children’s Books and Scientific Imagination." Raymo notes that "we live in an age of information. We are inundated by it. Too much information can swamp the boat of wonder, especially for a child. Which is why it is important that information be conveyed to children in a way that enhances the wonder of the world. . . If a child is led to believe that science is a bunch of facts, then science will not inform the child’s life, nor will science enhance the child’s cultural and imaginative landscape." In my own childhood my curiosity about how the world works was powered by fantastic books like The Phantom Tollbooth (with its explanations of infinity and the daily recurrence of the dawn that I can picture even still) and the time-traveling mystery of A Wrinkle in Time and a lavishly illustrated "Big Golden Book" of elves and fairies (by Jane Werner and illustrated by Garth Williams, it still has a pull for other sixties kids as well – if you can find a used copy, it will run you upwards of $100, depending on the condition.)

A children’s picture book can weave a creative pattern that pulls you into the heart of nature in ways that leave an imprint on your psyche that few classroom science books will later on. One of my secret impulses, when someone asks me for a suggestion for a biography of Charles Darwin that might be a good introductory text for them, is to suggest they try Peter Sis’ brilliant picture book, The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin, aimed at children aged 9-12. I rarely give in to the impulse, however, presuming they’ll think I’m nuts, and instead suggest one of the impressive recent biographies that properly-credentialed historians of science have recently published. But if what they are really wanting to do is to brush back the shadows of time to try and capture the tangled bank within which Darwin lived, then in my heart of hearts, I think that Sis might be the better starting point (and bewitch them, even as he did me, despite my being a professional science historian). Sis captures so much of the fascination of Darwin’s life and times in pages that open up like intricate Chinese boxes, full of one surprise after another, with a collage of words and pictures that draw on maps, diagrams, portraits, Darwin’s writings and a myriad of other details big and small creating an artistic analysis of the naturalist’s intellectual and social ecology, of his private and public habitats, that is hard to forget. (You can even see an animated version of the opening pages on his website.)

In 1956, Rachel Carson wrote an essay for Woman’s Home Companion, entitled "Help Your Child to Wonder." The essay was expanded and turned into an adult picture book after her death. It begins not with a pastoral scene, but of a description of two humans, one older and experienced, one still new to walking and talking, facing the ocean on a tempestuous night, where, "out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us." You don't get much farther away from e-i-e-i-o than that.

I don't think it is necessarily true that somehow children are more attuned to wonder than adults, but I suspect that wonder is a powerful emotion that only manifests itself when the person doing the thinking and feeling is immersed in a world where space and time has an ample, expansive dimension to it. If that's true, then in a world of 24/7 in which multitasking is honed to a high art and where walking by oneself without being immersed in an electronic bell jar is becoming a thing of the past, wonder doesn’t stand a chance of putting in an appearance as a daily matter . . . unless maybe, sometimes, in the pages of a children's book, in the space and time that binds together the reader and the read-to.

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For more: Madeleine L'Engle's acceptance speech, "The Expanding Universe," for the Newbery Medal awarded in 1963 for A Wrinkle in Time; Eric Carle's bulletin board idea exchange for parents and teachers using his books; Charles Dickens's mordant take on the meeting of fact-based science and children's fancifulness, in Chapter 2 of Hard Times; and historian Caroline Walker Bynum's presidential address -- entitled "Wonder" -- to the American Historical Association in 1996.

Images: Cover illustration of Eric Carle's Mister Seahorse (Philomel, 2004) and Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (Delacorte Press, 1991) -- illustration by Peter Sis.