petri dish

a big hello to this year's scipop students!

welcome to the spring 2009 edition of hsci 1133, "science and popular culture"! I'm glad you're enrolled, excited about getting started, and looking forward to exploring aspects of the class further here on the blog as we move along through the semester. Although the things I write about on the blog aren't confined to our class alone, the class is the heartbeat behind its existence, and during spring semester a great deal of what appears here will relate to course content.

Sometimes I'll post about a topic or issue that will be coming up soon on the schedule, and providing a sneak preview -- as you'll see below about dinosaurs as scientific icons. Other times I'll supplement our course materials by seeing what I can turn up on the web, just meandering down different avenues that allow you to do some extra exploration if you'd like -- as when we were looking at the history of conceptualizing the moon two years ago. Other times I may reflect on questions you all have raised in class or in your assignments -- this space gives me a place to work on my thinking about these questions at greater length outside of class (see, professors assign themselves homework, too!) Here's an example from a previous year, when we watched a 1950s television program that addressed evolution and religion. And there will be entries related to topics where there is so much interesting extra information to be found online, that I'll use this as a place to bring some of that together as a point of departure for those who might find particular areas interesting beyond what we've had time for in class or in the reading (for example, anyone up for pondering the relationship of medieval bestiaries and phenomena such as the Loch Ness Monster in the present day? Then you're in luck!). Or sometimes, stuff that is just fun (like history of science and Halloween.)

This week coming up we'll begin discussing the kinds of symbolic images that appear within popular culture relating to science -- as a kind of quick example, I passed out brochures last class that advertised the "Walking with Dinosaurs" extravaganza that rolled into OKC this weekend at the Ford Center downtown (here's a newspaper review and here's the official site where you can get a sense of the show and here's a review by a scientist, Brian Switek, at his blog Laelaps). Dinosaurs certainly loom large as scientific icons in the public sphere, and the idea of thousands of people gathering together in a darkened sports arena to watch million dollar mechanical/puppet/thingamajigs conjure dinosaurs back to the living world is certainly an interesting example of the intersection of science/education/entertainment/spectacle/commerce.

Trying to understand the ecology of dinosaur images as a social phenomenon even as it is a scientific one is part of our task in analyzing popular culture. For example, if the popular success of paleontology as seen by the arena rock status of "Walking with Dinosaurs" -- or the auction of the T. rex skeleton, Sue, in 1997 for 8.36 million dollars, and the busy schedule the copies of her bones have had in traveling around the US and the world -- are indicative of something powerfully significant, it would follow logically that paleontology would be a richly-endowed area of scientific research, with untold numbers of paleontologists-to-be clamoring to take part, right, with huge paleontological institutes part of the university landscape? Ummmm, not exactly. Discuss.

We'll also work on analyzing images themselves, and trying to discern the patterns of meaning that connect dinosaurian imagery -- as one example -- with other aspects of what's going on in particular cultures at particular historical times and comparing them with the present. We'll look at how it was that a prehistoric creature that seems relatively banal to us today -- the mastodon (how many kids run screaming through natural history museums demanding to see the mastodon fossils?) -- was the first fossil exemplar of the idea of extinction, and on whom we projected our images of a vicious, dangerous past. The newly-founded United States was especially pleased to claim this ferocious carnivore (!) as our own mascot: "huge as the frowning precipice, cruel as the bloody panther, swift as the descending eagle, and terrible as the Angel of Night." Such attention to big, cruel, meat-eating tyrants is still common two hundred years later. Exhibit one: Oklahoma's own state fossil, the Saurophaganax maximus [note the maximus!], ushered into state law with the following words:

"Because of the extraordinarily rich paleontological heritage of the State of Oklahoma, the Legislature hereby declares Saurophaganax Maximus to be the State Fossil of Oklahoma. This spectacular dinosaur, the 'greatest king of reptile eaters', once roamed this great land. It is only known from Oklahoma and has surpassed the Tyrannosaurus rex, the 'king of the dinosaurs', as the greatest predator of earth’s history."

We don't want no puny critter representing us, ha! Surpassing T. rex! And if you want to check it out, look no further than the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, where on the south campus you can see:

"The centerpiece exhibit in the Hall of Ancient Life, the Jones Family 'Clash of the Titans,' [which] shows an encounter between Oklahoma's largest Jurassic animals - the plant-eating sauropod Apatosaurus, which, at more than 93 feet long, is the largest of its kind in the world, and the carnivorous theropod Saurophaganax maximus, the largest of the Jurassic predators."

There's also a mammoth or two, and we'll take a look at how they're presented as well. Feel free to take a field trip of your own and get an early feel for what you think about all this!

If you'd like to explore dinosaurs as modern totems in greater detail, there's no better guide than W.J.T. Mitchell in The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. Here's an interview with him about the book that will give you a sense of what kinds of questions scholars ask about popular phenomena like these and how they go about theorizing the answers. And there's a chapter excerpt as well: the counter-intuitive, "Why Children Hate Dinosaurs." Were you a dinosaur fan, foe, or indifferent to all the hoopla? Still feel the same today as an adult? Stay tuned, and we'll find out more from each of you.
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For more: How do you think the general public view science/paleontology in your country? At paleontologist David Hone's public forum website at DinoBase, he asked the question and you can read the answers given by various scientists. For a quick piece on Oklahoma's dinosaurs, here's a report from News9 by Christian Price, "Oklahoma's First Residents" -- and note that down on the right side of the page in the green sidebar there are some nice video links. And will the whole king of beasts tag become extinct?: see the BBC's report, "T. rex: Warrior or Wimp?" 

Image: Advertising from the producers, at http://www.zrock.com/zforum/about1044.html

flotsam and jetsam and historical memories

1953: Midnight Fireball Hits Bay -- UFO Near Miss???? No, the image isn't a real historic boardwalk handbill from Antiques Roadshow but one more bit of McMilleniana (as are the ones below and to the right) -- they're actually banners made in 2004 for the Santa Monica Pier in California for a public art project that took its inspiration from "the facts, folklore, myths, and legends of the Pier's early history," with the images "representing historical events that may -- or may not-- have actually occurred." McMillen's banners, along with those of artist Steve Galloway, were printed on vinyl and hung out on light poles on the boardwalk, flickering in and out of view of visitors as they strolled along the Pier entertaining themselves. (There are more than two dozen, and each one of them is really fun and clever... very much in keeping with a characterization that McMillen used in another context about an art project of his: "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious.")

My third take-away lesson from the world of art for myself as an historian of science (there is a first one -- "trying to make the (seemingly) ephemeral visible". . . and a second one -- "of crocodelephants and category confusions") as seen through the envisionings of Los Angeles artists Sam Rodia and Michael C. McMillen is related to the idea of artistic installations: art in the wild, out in the public square. McMillen's banners for the Pier are an exuberant wave of the hand, inviting those who encounter them to take them in -- maybe do a double-take -- and respond as might be, maybe with amusement or bemusement, or in sparking off a train-of-associations, or drifting in and out of a game of detecting how close to historical reality the "commemorative" homages are. 

The artist initiates a conversation, drawing on the representations and forms and idioms of everyday life, and provides an opportunity for engagement in a way that brings the specialist or expert (the artist) into an inviting -- if brief -- relationship with ordinary folk, casual passers-by. The Pier's visitors didn't have to possess the right connections to enter the home of a wealthy collector who owns an artpiece only seen by invitation, or even to venture into a museum gallery that is the art world's home turf: here, installation art, as public art in its most open form, takes up residence within a commonplace that offers the possibility for an interplay between "experts" and "laity" in a way that neither condescends nor intimidates. The third lesson, then, is of how venturing out beyond professional confines has so much potential: of teaching ourselves as we improvise new forms of communication, in ways that offer different kinds of connections and opportunities for imagination and reflection. And that's why I'm here on the web, diving into the area of science and popular culture, trying to figure out how to be a digital historian of science: putting out a few banners to fly in the public square. Its time to learn how to do history of science in the wild, not simply caretake it within the neatly trimmed hedges and rows of academic propriety.

McMillen's banners are also a wonderful nudge in and of themselves to speculate about the flotsam and jetsam of science and popular culture. UFOS streaking down into the sea, giant squid breaking the surface and upending an unwary boater, late-Victorian submarine steamers illuminating the murky depths: they're all wonderful evocations of the idea of mysteries that lurk so often at the heart of popular culture phenomena, with the ocean being a particularly apt emblematic prompt. In fact these three "historical" posters offer more than just apt symbolic representations of recurring popular symbols -- they intersect with real artifacts as well, in which connecting the dots begins to reveal possible patterns of culture. If not a real-world UFO sighting, well there was the 1953 movie, Phantom from Space ("Million Monkey Theater" provides a sharp narrative and commentary) in which an alien being crashes into the ocean off of Santa Monica. Jules Verne, in the 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, gives us both a Victorian submersible and a giant squid, featured as well in the 1954 film by Disney. Off the coast of Santa Monica you can spy Catalina Island twenty-seven miles away, where (as the locals tell it) the glass-bottom boat was invented in the late-19th century to take advantage of the clear waters and abundant sealife as a novel tourist attraction-- not quite the gothic hulk of McMillen's imagining, but in 1906 you could experience a variant of the Vernian aquatic dreamscape by touring Catalina's "undersea gardens" via glass-bottom boat. Of course, Catalina being a tinsel-town playground, the tourist craft gets its own star treatment in the Doris Day movie from 1966, The Glass Bottom Boat (with Day as a NASA employee and occasional mermaid...there are interesting images of scientists to consider in this comic film). With just this brief tour, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items worthy of study that are historical obscurities for most by now.

It's unlikely that a rampaging squid actually tormented a bay-dweller in 1949 as recorded on the second banner, but Hollywood, just down the road, produced The Lady Takes a Sailor that year with Jane Wyman (directed by Michael Curtiz) where an octopus apparently figures into the narrative, although it's an underwater vehicle that breaks the surface and upends her sailboat -- and, interestingly, just two years post-Roswell, the plot features a government cover-up of secret experiments (extending to messing with civilians' heads and reputations) involving a submarine tractor (bringing together, in a loose but ever more thickly woven web, echoes of ufology, troublesome cephalopods, and novel deepsea machines :-) Of course, nasty squids/octopi received iconic treatment at the movies during the cold war period in Disney's 20,000 Leagues and It Came from Beneath the Sea ("it" being a six-armed octopus that attacked San Francisco, courtesy of Ray Harryhausen) from 1955 and in the 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, directed by Irwin Allen (I actually saw one of these as a kid -- I think the third one -- at Catalina's movie theater at the Avalon Casino, after having had my first tour in a glass-bottom boat. . . I can still see the vague form of a giant octopus in my mind's-eye today, it scared me that much!). Of course, giant squid are among the most durable popular culture themes and are still a big draw, being that they're so elusive -- they were only recently caught live on video in 2005.

A fascinating late-19th century California seaside connection is a science fiction short story that appeared in a periodical called The Californian in December of 1893. Entitled "A Submarine Christmas" [via Google Books], the fantastic tale by Thomas R. Caldwell shamelessly draws from Verne, but is a surprisingly fresh and up-to-date look for its time at marine zoology. The plot involves an inventor of a submarine research vessel who travels to Avalon Bay at Catalina Island to test it out, and of his intrepid friend from the East Coast who joins him for assorted undersea adventures, including a near-fatal encounter with a "giant cuttle-fish (Architeuthis), a monster at least seventy feet in length. . . Its arms were thrown about the boat: its uncanny black eyes glowing like huge plates in the glare of the search lights" (accompanied by an excellent illustration). Fortunately for the harried explorers, it was all a dream! But the 1906 piscatorial machine of the Santa Monica Pier banner would look remarkably apt as an illustration for the 1893 story; certainly Thomas R. Caldwell would have felt right at home! And, again, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items here that are historical obscurities for most by now, simply by using the 2004 banner imaginings by McMillen as jumping-off points.

Making the (seemingly) ephemeral visible is part of what the art world can teach us humanists, and artists can also inspire ideas about how to visualize a carnival for the curious -- experimenting outside the petri dish -- needed, especially, when humanism becomes tinged with scientism. Not only that, but they can send us off into cultural scavenger hunts that turn flotsam and jetsam into useful things to think with and that point toward historical work that needs doing.

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Images: All from the image gallery at http://arts.santa-monica.org/gallery/paintings/PierBanners/.

of crocodelephants and category confusions

So how can you make something that is as wide as a (modest) household lot and as high as 100 feet and has the heft of hundreds (thousands?) of cubic yards of steel and cement invisible? As I wrote last time, in what it seems now was the first installment of lessons for science and popular culture from art, it's a very simple sleight of hand: leave it unclassified. As Calvin Trillin remarked in the New Yorker in 1965 about what came to be known as Sam Rodia's Watts Towers in south-central Los Angeles, "If a man who has not labelled himself an artist happens to produce a work of art, he is likely to cause a lot of confusion and inconvenience." The problem in classification had been created through the decades-long labor of an Italian immigrant who, the correspondent from NYC explained, "constructed  a dream-like complex of openwork towers . . . and encrusted them with a sparkling mosaic, composed mainly of what had once been refuse." A book without a Library of Congress call number can't be shelved, and may as well not exist -- you won't find it in the art section. Of course, even if forced by circumstances to classify something that is confusing and inconvenient and made out of refuse, we can assign it to a category that still renders it hard to see: say, label it as popular culture, not Art. In the part of the scholarly map where I work, the stuff that relates to science but that isn't produced by a scientist also creates category problems: if it's stuck in the ephemeral -- the category of "popular culture" -- it is hard for professional historians of science to see it (or to take it seriously). If it's not scientist-produced and approved -- and therefore solid and visible -- then why would a historian of science study it? Another category problem.

About a decade after I'd seen the Watts Towers, I received another lesson in art, from another Los Angeles artist who makes particular use of the discarded junk of modern society in creating his sculptures and installations, Michael C. McMillen (that's one of his pieces at the top -- "The Box of All Knowledge," from 1997 -- which, by the way, can't be opened. So what is in it???) To the left is one of his recycled pieces on the cover of "Folksongs for a Nuclear Village," a Shadowfax album -- the piece's title translates as "In the Middle of Our Life's Journey," a line taken from the opening of The Divine Comedy. As a post-Sputnik youngster McMillen was very involved with tinkering and with science -- reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, working in a homemade chemistry lab behind his grandfather's workshop -- and he majored in science in college before switching to art his sophomore year (for this and more, see an interview from 2002 titled "The Alchemy of Things"). His artworks often reference technology and science and history. In capturing the nature of his work from this time period Elenore Welles suggested that:

Fifteen years' experience building models for Hollywood movies [such as Blade Runner] and an abiding love of craftsmanship is visible in the amount of technical finesse applied to these intricate constructions. McMillen's passion for junk is evidenced in the huge stockpile in his backyard. Items such as plumbing valves, door hinges or typewriter keys provide impetus for his conceptual fecundity. He likes his process to be ongoing and interactive. In fact, works often appear to be in an evolving state. The viewer is brought into the process of invention and discovery.

McMillen juxtaposes objects to evoke associations and to investigate the fine line between illusion and fiction. The transmutation of matter, how it disintegrates and is reborn, inspires his art. Scientific logic and the nature of matter are terrains that often remain obscure. But he attempts to demythologize them. In the process of building his imagery he plays with the psychology of perception and the ideas those images might convey.

As someone who was set to return to graduate school (not to study cognitive psychology, like before, but history of science instead) I loved visiting his installations and gallery shows, which through the richness of the juxtapositions and layerings and their surprises and resonances raised all kinds of interesting questions about the meaning of science and technology as past and present for me. The artworks were always the effort of one mind seeking to convey ideas and emotions to other minds, but without dictating results, leaving room for viewers to discover and interpret and reimagine. McMillen's installations were partnerships with his visitors, sometimes literally, as when their actions became part of the exhibit themselves. He once remarked that he "wants viewers to interpret his art according to their own experiences. . . 'I suggest, rather than shout.'" (from Patricia Hamilton, Michael C. McMillen: Hermetic Landscapes, 1988).

Suggesting, rather than shouting. . . this was part of what I loved about these carefully constructed worlds of McMillen's and why they seemed so engaging to me. And here's this second lesson I learned, although it has caused me no end of uneasiness in becoming an academic historian of science. Our disciplinary rhetoric, our blunt-edged forms of persuasion such as the scholarly monograph and the professional article, are built on an argumentative platform that seeks to marshal evidence and drive home a thesis, in order to engage almost in a battle with the minds of readers to convince them that they must understand what we are writing about in just this one way. Especially within the history of science, which frequently seeks to emulate the sciences themselves, our histories often proceed as if they were clever, neatly contained scientific experiments, in which we deploy independent variables to find out if our hypothesis is judged to prevail or not. This professional mode was coming up against a set of changing dynamics, however -- something that cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed in 1983: that a "blurring of genres" was occurring within intellectual life, with "many social scientists hav[ing] turned away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation toward a cases and interpretations one, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords." He characterized this shift as a contemporary "refiguration of social thought," summing it up in this way: "something is happening to the way we think about the way we think." I could see this shift all around me, as with McMillen's installations. But Geertz's shift didn't seem all that real when dealing with the print culture of academia in which I was being trained for.

So, what I wondered from what artists such as McMillen had taught me is this: what does the rhetoric look like for less martial, less adversarial histories of science? Why not histories of science that instead view the reader as a partner in meaning-making, that strive to evoke, and broaden, and recalibrate, and suggest, and raise possibilities rather than seek to have the last word (reject the null hypothesis)? What category would this kind of history of science fall into, this kind of art-inflected narrative, one based on picking up the flotsam and jetsam discarded by the mainstream, reworking it, reconsidering it, recategorizing it, blurring genres?

I left California in 1994 for Oklahoma, and haven't been able to follow McMillen's work in person, although the web makes possible a bit of visiting at several removes. And it's a delight to see that among the numerous and fascinating turnings he's taken that he's found unusual ways to bring his reflections on humans and history and science and technology to new and different locations: whether just this last year at the San Jose Museum of Art, for their group exhibition on "Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon". . . or CalTech, with "Dr. Crump's Inductive Geo-Imaging Mobile Laboratory (Field Unit 1)" (pictured to the left, with the artist; for the link, you'll need to scroll down), where visitors would see an "ever-evolving archive of artifacts" from the research being conducted of, he revealed, a series of buried chambers from an underground abandoned laboratory, sealed off over seventy years before. . .or Geologica 42, at the LA Metro Fillmore station . . . or the joint experiment by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Naturalis (the Netherlands' national Natural History Museum in Leiden) that he and a handful of other artists participated in, "Conversations: Nature and the City," featuring his Crocodelephant Incognitus Giganticus and the "The Flying Dutchman" (the porpoise skeletons with schooner sails above to the right). When the exhibit set up in Leiden a real scientist came by to look over the artists' pieces and deliver a prouncement: Philip Campbell, an astrophysicist and editor-in-chief of Nature (his review, "Conceits and Provocations: Artists Reveal a Variety of Responses to the Contents of a Natural-History Museum," appeared in the 16 November 2006 issue, p. 274). His final conclusion about artists in a museum context is that: "Cumbersome attempts by artists to pose philosophical questions in a visual form tend to smack of conceit, rather than stimulate," although he allows that the closer that the artists get to "artfulness" -- which he defines as "sheer visual creativity" -- the better they do. I wish an historian of science had also reviewed the exhibition, to see what further conversations might have resulted!

Campbell finds McMillen coming off somewhat better in his mind than did some of the others, giving him an evaluation of being "conceptually more substantive" and displaying a "sense of visual play that adds to the cultural value of the specimens." He also seems to endorse the statement in the organizers' supplementary material that "McMillen's creativity is closer to the way our brains work than we might want to admit." McMillen himself speaks of his Naturalis creations, which play off of nature's creations, as "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious." Perhaps this is what leads "print" historians like me (who spend too much time haunting artists' venues?) to venture out into the digital world -- searching for a contemporary space that allows room to mount a carnival for the curious with open-ended narratives allowed, even necessary. Ephemeral? It depends on what categories we navigate by . . .

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For more: McMillen's most well-known Los Angeles installation is the fascinating "Central Meridian" (and here) which is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. If you're ever visiting LA don't miss it (or the Watts Towers)! You can also see a quick YouTube hit of a recent installation at Cincinnati's UnMuseum, Speed's Place. For more background on the artist, see this oral history interview that the Smithsonian Institution conducted with McMillen in 1997. Clifford Geertz's essay, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought" is from his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology; the essay was first published in 1980 in American Scholar.

Images: The Box of All Knowledge (photo by Brian Forrest) accompanies an essay on McMillen at http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1997/Articles0697/MMcMillen.html; the album cover is at wikipedia; the porpoises image is from the Natural History Museum of LA County website for the exhibit, at http://www.nhm.org/Conversations_LA_Leiden/?artist=mcmillen; and the CalTech lab accompanies an article by Michael Rogers, "When Art and Science Collude," at http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/caltechnews/articles/v38/collude.html.

science fairs and what you can find there

Okay, back again at last! I've been all tied up with administrative work, including a review of our undergraduate program with the generation of new proposals that took much much much much much much much much more time than I had figured for, so I've been lost to cyberspace for lo these many months. I really look forward to getting back on track (or if I can't find the old one, clearing a path through the electron dust bunnies that have piled up and seeing what turns up)!

As my class in Science and Popular Culture winds down this semester its that time of the year when students begin formulating their individual projects, giving 30 different perspectives on how to end the class as they have their own final say. In revisiting the work from 2007 (yes, it takes me that long to convert piles of stuff on my office floor to files that I can actually access, sad to say!), I came across one cluster of particularly thoughtful projects that honed in on the phenomenon of science fairs, with some participant-observer recollections and mini-surveys. I'll start with some of what they had to say about science fairs, but also feature two offshoots that really got me thinking: one having to do with engineering, and the other with natural history.

The "science fair" idea goes back to 1942 when Science Service (now called Society for Science and the Public) partnered with the Westinghouse corporation to create the Science Talent Search, which would spawn a program for coordinating high school science fairs into a network of regional and then national contests. I've become interested in thinking about these competitions as a part of science and popular culture for lots of reasons: Do they accentuate the idea that some kids are "science people" and some aren't? Projecting ahead from what a science fair entails, what conclusions would students draw about what science is like later on in college or as a profession? What's the effect of focusing on science as a "contest"? For a sense of some of the contemporary aspects of science fairing today, this 2003 article from the New York Times is helpful: "Those Simple Science Fairs Go the Way of the Dinosaurs." One unlucky kid with a modest experiment was dumbstruck to find that "kids had boards that were monsters, nine feet tall," and, the reporter recounts, "one judge laughed out loud at his display. 'And it was not a fun laugh. I wanted to take my board and beat him over the head.'" Yikes! Although one young man -- who came to be known as "Cockroach Boy" back at school -- triumphed with a project that did not entail lasers, DNA testing kits, or time on the Hubble Space Telescope, so it appears there is still a place for a kitchen table kind of project, if it's got a great angle (see it described at the end of the article).

Okay, back to my students and the traditional science fair. Students who had participated generally remembered the experience as a good one, as with one philosophy major stating how important it was to have "hands on learning experience, as opposed to reading out of textbooks," and he judged that his opportunity to compete in a science fair project proved to be "important in that it helped develop my reasoning skills with the application of the scientific method." Sounds like exactly the kind of outcome a science fair planner wants!

However, when the student running the survey asked her interviewees "whether or not science fairs did a good job of facilitating thoughts about science outside of the experience," the answers were much more varied. One middle-aged adult, the student interviewer noted, made a particularly "interesting point. She believes science fairs did a good job of facilitating thoughts about science throughout the progression of the projects and into the exhibition, but felt that without further reflection on the experience in the classroom, she lost much of what she had gained during the process." Another student suggested, however, that "I don't believe it is absolutely necessary for science fairs to bring about additional curiosity within students. As long as they are actively participating, they are gaining valuable knowledge." The student author also was surprised to find, within her admittedly small sample, that the male science fair participants went on to maintain a strong interest later in life in science, while her female participants had not. I love it when the students turn up data that surprises them! It gives me hope that they'll keep thinking about this stuff even after we've all said good-bye...

One issue the student reported back concerned the dynamics of whether or not the science is fair is held as part of the regular school curriculum or outside of it. As one high school principal who was interviewed stated about science fairs:

"Most of ours have been out of school and optional because of the amount of instruction time needed to prepare for projects. End of [term] instruction testing requires most teachers to use every minute of instruction time to prepare for the test. Unfortunately, when projects are prepared outside of school it's hard to determine how much parents have done instead of the students."

Another student recruited her colleagues in the local chapter of Alpha Sigma Kappa (Women in Technical Studies), where she found little enthusiasm for the traditional science fair, which appears to have not been optional. She reported that:

"the general consensus was that teachers mandating a submission from students, in addition to little guidance in terms of expectations, led to the fair being approached as an assignment. The easiest approach to this assignment would be to submit the simplest project, which required the least amount of effort, possible. Oftentimes, the 'individual investigation of something of interest,' which the fair tries to promote by not providing much guidance results in using experiments found in science fair books. . .These books defeat the 'inquiry process' by providing the problem and solution to the readers."

And she's not kidding! When I checked on amazon.com there were a slew of titles offering to show you the way: from Glen Vecchione's 100 Amazing First-Prize Science Fair Projects to Joe Rhatigan and Rain Newcomb's Prize-Winning Science Fair Projects for Curious Kids -- or, if you're not overly ambitious on the prize front, perhaps Science Fair Projects for Dummies by Maxine Levaren will do -- and then those who haven't proceeded in a properly organized manner (waiting for inspiration to strike?) can pay the surcharge for overnight shipping and the advice offered by Sudipta Bardhan-Collen's Last Minute Science Projects: When Your Bunsen's Not Burning but the Clock's Really Ticking. . . and there are more!

This student made a further insightful point: Looking back from her vantage point as a college senior, she argued that the science fair misses the mark in emulating scientific work in several ways:

"in comparing my personal experiences with conducting research in microbiology with my memories of science fairs, science fairs are not representative of 'real-life' scientific work. In presenting my senior thesis, I had to defend my decisions made while conducting my research and the interpretation of the results afterwards to established scientists in the field.To maintain objectivity in judging, contestants [in a science fair] are not confronted by the judges, and therefore, a winning project does not require the contestant to have a thorough understanding of the project. Additionally, 'real-life' science requires teamwork, and science fairs give an unreasonable impression of individual work."

The issue of judges looks like it varies depending on the school district and whether or not it is a formal competition, but the issue of teamwork is a striking one (being mentored by a professional -- allowed in most cases with science fairs -- is not the same thing as teamwork with colleagues). The answer to this artificiality: she suggested that a more compelling experience that turns the teamwork issue inside out was found when she joined the newly formed robotics club at her school, and they competed in three competitions: Botball, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) and BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology). Botball is particularly of interest here locally since it is the brainchild of University of Oklahoma Engineering Professor David P. Miller, the Wilkinson Chair and Professor of Intelligent Systems and Chief Technical Officer of the KISS* Institute for  Practical Robotics [KISS being an acronym for "Keep it Simple, Stupid".] My student reporter writes that "the purpose of Botball is to be both inspirational and educational through building and programming autonomous LEGO robots. The entrance fee for teams includes a training workshop for teachers and robotic kits so that teachers can continue creating robotics projects year-round." The robotics competitions look like they have a whole different feel to them than do the science fairs, and yet they too are seeking to foster creativity and problem-solving. I'm very interested in learning more about this, as it appears that robotics competitions can reach a wider variety of students and sustain their interest and intellectual curiosity and confidence longer than the science fair, at least as traditionally conceived. I love it when my students turn up data that surprises me -- it gives me hope that I won't stop thinking about this stuff after we've all said goodbye!

But the biggest twist was one student's report about how her small Catholic school, through the inspiration of their junior high school science teacher, create anew each year a natural history landscape through their "Hall Project" that brings the idea of teamwork to a whole other level: her project paper was entitled "How to Inspire Nature Lovers, One Papier Mache Animal at a Time." This is how she described the habitats they created inside the ordinary four walls of their school:

"Once the hallways are completely decorated with cellophane rivers, plastic grass, papier mache rocks, and braided vines, they are now ready to be filled with their inhabitants that the students have spent weeks molding and painting. Fish are laid in the rivers, while the birds are hung with fishing line from the ceiling. Lastly the mammals and reptiles are strategically placed within the forests and meadows. It is now, as the last little lizard is placed on top of a nestled rock, that the hallways have been entirely transformed from manila brick walls into a maze of forests, oceans and plains that mimic the wondrous nature rare to the human eye."

She relates that she had been anxiously waiting for her chance to participate since third grade, being primed by observing the hours her brother had spent in the garage making two blue-footed boobies for his year, the first one which "stood with its head turned sharply right to look for predators while perched on a tree trunk, and the second flew, wings spread, over the nearby waters to catch fish." She was, she recalls "ecstatic" when her time finally arrived: "The Hall Project was something that every younger student adored...it is humorous to reminisce, seven years later, about how obsessed my classmates and I were with all aspects of it. The Hall Project seemed so enjoyable since it wasn't just another science class of sitting quietly and taking notes; it was creative and stimulated the adolescent, keen sense of curiosity which made us want to learn more." She contributed two Australian Sooty Owls, which hovered over a river where her friend's platypus swam. She astutely points out that the Hall Project "unconventionally revealed the importance of respect for the environment, in the sense that [we] built it, so it was [our] job to take care of it...[we] learned to respect the 'habitat' by protecting [our] animal creations from swinging backpacks or trampling feet between classes."

The Hall Project educated on multiple levels, as students crafted their animals and the habitats, wrote up note cards with interesting facts about an animal's life that they could convey during tours they conducted during the school's "tourist season" for the elementary school children and for their parents at open house weekend. My student notes that: "The Hall Project made it acceptable for its adult tourists to not have all the answers, as children and society expect of them; so parents were given the opportunity to continue their learning and experience something new, which is often forgotten about and trivialized in the world of raising a family and paying the bills."

She was very proud that her work had allowed her mother "to 'visit' the Galapagos Islands and Australia simply by wandering our halls. For her, as a working adult, this allowed her to imagine these distant lands. As she described her memory of the Galapagos Islands Hall Project: 'I did not know anything about that place, but it opened my eyes to a wonderful island that I never would have a chance to experience otherwise."

A decade later, this college student states, she still carries with her the message of this novel twist on the science fair:

"Nature should inspire awe in people, children and adults alike. If we could love and cherish our simple papier mache exhibits, those feelings should be exacerbated by the knowledge that each of those creatures actually exists. The Hall Project gave [our teacher] a creative way...to warn her students about dangers to the environment. Following in the belief that knowledge is power, the more children (and adults) know about the world and its wonders, they grow more interested. With interest comes love, with love comes respect, and with respect for nature people are more willing to save it ..."

In doing it themselves, I bet they experienced the natural world in a way that -- even with all their big budgets and spectacular camera work -- an Animal Planet or Discovery Channel documentary can't match.

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For more: Here's a blog entry on the 2006 student essays from my scipop class, "Student Anthropologists: Through the Looking Glass." For a bit on the history of science fairs, see this blog entry at Women in Science on a 1951 Popular Science article on some female science contest winners in the World War II era; here's a reproduction of the original article itself: "Wanted: Science Talent." Intel has a downloadable glossy brochure from 2001 on the Science Talent Search (which it took over from Westinghouse): Celebrating 60 Years of Science [it's a pdf file with a bit of a download time]. If you're interested in more descriptions and discussion see: "Six Decades of Science Contest Prowess" from the New York Times as well as "A Fine Hour for Squishy Sciences"; "'Go for it, kid': Looking Back on Five Decades of the Science Talent Search" from Science News; and "Is Science Talent Squandered? How Future Scientists Come Undone" from Science News Online.

Images: The first image is from the resource page on Science Fair Projects from the Athens Public Library System, at http://www.clarke.public.lib.ga.us/images/klscifair.jpg. The second one is of a 1950 finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, located at http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/qf/c/MechanixIllustrated/8-1950/lrg_tick_tack_toe.jpg. The third one is the cover image at amazon.com for the book 100 Amazing First-Prize Science Fair Projects, while the fourth and fifth are from the Botball site which has a gallery of their best photos. The last two are of a lesser sooty owl from Nov. 22, 2007 at the Politics and Environment blog and a papier mache dodo, which is the work of British sculptor David Farrer, who specializes in using recyclable materials to make papier mache trophy heads -- a very clever green project.

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. 

the beasts and the birds will teach thee

When you consider the magnitude of the increase in scientific knowledge and technological progress that marks the last century or so it seems logical to claim that "we live in an age of science and technology." At least, that's the conventional wisdom, and a point that Michael Shermer -- founding editor of Skeptic magazine, and the author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time -- argues for. And yet, if this actually is the case, he asks:

"why do so many pseudoscientific and non-scientific traditions abound?. . . One may rationalize that compared with the magical thinking of the Middle Ages things are not so bad. But statistically speaking pseudoscientific beliefs are experiencing a revival in the late 20th century" -- with astrology, ESP, communication with the dead and so forth being held as credible by large numbers of people, along with "other popular beliefs of our time that have little to no veracity in evidence includ[ing]: dowsing, the Bermuda triangle, poltergeists, biorhythms, creationism . . . UFOS, emotions in plants, life after death, monsters, graphology, crypto-zoology. . ."

In short, Shermer concludes that such excursions beyond the bounds of intellectual propriety "are more pervasive than most of us like to think, and this is curious considering how far science has come since the Middle Ages" [my emphasis]. This point is one that comes up frequently when the topic of science and popular culture is on the table, and seems so self-evidently sensible that nothing more need be said. But let's take a few minutes to look at the medieval and the modern together and consider some variations on this theme, using the circulation of bestiaries as our point of departure.

Bestiaries were illustrated books of creatures both common and fantastic that were enormously popular during the 12th and 13th centuries. These illustrations were accompanied by descriptions of the entries that combined natural history, legendary stories, and travelers' anecdotes and that imparted religious lessons in allegorical form. The rationale for treating animals in this way came from passages in the Bible that were read as indicating that God had given them particular characteristics that were to serve as lessons for how humans should conduct their lives; see, for example, Job 7:12: "But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the birds of the air, and they shall tell thee/ Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee." These lessons were imparted from animals known to exist in real life such as the peacock and the wolf, and others that were seemingly beyond the reality of everyday experience, such as the phoenix (illustrated above from the Aberdeen Bestiary): 

. . In addition to providing intriguing interpretations of animals, bestiaries offered tales about the existence of bizarre and loathsome creatures, many of which appeared in medieval art. The basilisk, for example, which was equated with the devil, could kill by its very smell, by a glance, or even by the sound of its hissing. The manticore, with the face of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion, possessed a seductive voice likened to the sound of a fine flute. It represented the siren song of temptation that surrounded the Christian soul on its perilous journey through an earthly existence. [Melanie Holcomb, "Animals in Medieval Art," Metropolitan Museum of Art's Timeline of Art History.]

As intriguing as the strange creatures are that turn up in medieval bestiaries, it isn't surprising to modern eyes to find elements of the fantastic contained in what seemingly look like works of medieval natural history, since we assume that in an age of alchemy and astrology a belief in something that can't be captured or witnessed -- like unicorns -- is simply part of a pre-scientific, only partially logical mindset in which magical creatures could be imagined as existing somewhere off the known map in terra incognita. [This description is partly caricature -- in both the ancient and the medieval periods there were some who considered descriptions of such strange beasts to be nothing more than lies or tall tales, and viewed them with a skeptical eye.]

However, at the end of the 20th century on into our own time period, it would seem certain that we live in an "age of science," and that our society would have left such child-like fairy-tale imaginings behind us. Or . . . have we? Let's see what the fantastic birds and beasts contained in modern-day bestiaries can teach thee and me. . .

There are two paths to consider in thinking about "modern-day bestiaries." The first fork in the road leads to fantasy literature, films, and games (think Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and such) which are enormously popular. These worlds of high fantasy feature magical and mythical zoologies populated by monsters and fabulous animals that make earlier bestiaries seem rather tame in comparison. While the modern-day bestiaries that accompany the worlds of Middle Earth and Dungeon gaming fill a niche designed for entertainment rather than instruction, it is interesting nonetheless to note how many hours that many moderns have spent with dragons and basilisks and elves -- no doubt more than most folks in the middle ages themselves would have. Another interesting aspect of the popularity of high fantasy in an age of science is the fact that fantasy as a genre outsells the literature of wonder that is supposed to be the companion of the rise of the scientific worldview in the 19th and 20th centuries: science fiction. You can find a number of places on the web where vigorous discussions have been held about the reasons why fantasy outsells science fiction (for example, here and here). A characteristic analysis that argues that many fans of fantasy are science/technology averse can be seen with this comment to a thread at sfsignal.com:

"Technology horrifies too many modern men, and our culture, as a whole no longer prizes the use of reason to solve problems. Fantasy is naturally a literature of the heart, in that it deals with problems solved by emotion, or faith, or magical thinking. Frodo does not outsmart Sauron: he prevails because his heart is pure, and because Supernatural Fate intervenes at the last moment. One might think fantasies like LORD OF THE RINGS would appeal only to the most nostalgic of conservative tastes: people who admired the romance and mystique of monarchy. But the sense that modern civilization has poisoned the Earth, that technology is Mephistopheles, that we all need to return to the Earth and Get Back to the Garden is a widespread idea among in academia and in Hollywood. These ideas have a natural resonance with a fairy-tale version of the middle ages: if only magic actually had worked, then we could all live as hobbits or elves, in union with nature, without the factory-smog of Mordor tainting the air."

David Brin, a science fiction author, agrees, in his article "J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress." Reflecting on the popularity of the high fantasy genre, he remarks:

"Indeed, the popularity of this formula is deeply thought-provoking. Millions of people who live in a time of genuine miracles -- in which the great-grandchildren of illiterate peasants may routinely fly through the sky, roam the Internet, view far-off worlds and elect their own leaders -- slip into delighted wonder at the notion of a wizard hitchhiking a ride from an eagle. Many even find themselves yearning for a society of towering lords and loyal, kowtowing vassals.

Wouldn't life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly 'scientists' do today? Weren't miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of being commercialized, bottled and marketed to the masses for $1.95?

Didn't we stop going to the moon because it had become boring?"

Brin goes on to cite a similar interpretation, from Vivian Sobchack, a professor of film and television studies at UCLA: "Change and technology are so pervasive a part of daily life that for the most part there's no magic to it anymore . . . The promise of science and technology has been normalized. The utopian vision we had didn't come to pass. The magic would have to come from somewhere else, and we found it in fantasy."

Our second path in thinking about "modern bestiaries" leads not away from science but toward science, in the form of what was christened in the 1950s as "cryptozoology": the study of hidden animals -- most famously, such contested entities as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. (These unverified critters are called "cryptids" by those who search for them.) Such (elusive? imaginary? mythical?) creatures are well-known beyond the crypto community, given their high-profile starring roles in many a cable special, not to mention untold numbers of newspaper and magazine articles. And these shadowy beasts have a whole new stomping ground in which to roam more widely than ever before, thanks to the ecology of the Internet.

Even though cryptozoology has failed to garner academic respectability, its enthusiasts nonetheless believe that the search for evidence of the existence of cryptids should be considered to fall within a generous understanding of what is meant by scientific exploration, or at least should be understood as proto-science. However, in a piece on the nature of cryptozoology and science, Ben Speers-Roesch notes that although "cryptozoology is usually held to be scientific by its practitioners," most professionals "find it difficult to call cryptozoology science, often with good reason -- much of cryptozoology is rife with credulous thinking and illogical conclusions." A particular problem in regard to its scientific status is the fact that much of the basis for cryptozoological investigations rests on eyewitness reports and anecdotal evidence, which are considered to be mushy grounds to stand on, scientifically.

Roesch argues that "the idea that giant unknown primates, living dinosaurs, huge thunderbirds, and lake monsters share the Earth with us are fantasies that are at odds with a great deal of accepted paleontological and zoological evidence" [my emphasis]. This recalls the remark above, that "fantasy is naturally a literature of the heart," and suggests that cryptozoological ventures, if driven by wishful hopes rather than objective reasons, are matters of the heart, not the head: how could they be scientific then, under any definition?

We are left therefore with the knowledge that an interest in creatures of dubious reality -- that nonetheless inspire wonder because of speculations about their fantastic natures -- is one with a long heritage, with dynamics still visible today, despite the fact that the spread of the scientific worldview should have encouraged us to move beyond an enthusiasm for the mysterious and incredible. How to explain this? Peter Dendle, in a literary exploration that compares medieval bestiaries with modern-day cryptozoological encyclopedias -- "Cryptozoology in the medieval and modern worlds" -- points out that indeed "No age has been without its share of hidden creatures, and confirmation of purported species has been a vital and consciously debated issue among the collectors of human knowledge for thousands of years." But a key difference between then and now is that, for the most part, professional science sees matters such as fantastic creatures as falling outside the realm of real knowledge, suitable only for the rubbish heap of pseudoscience:

"Whereas in the Middle Ages the educated scholar was as likely -- or as unlikely -- as an illiterate peasant to believe in a given unconfirmed species, in the post-Enlightenment world there is a conspicuous disconnect between academic science and popular belief on a surprisingly wide range of topics. The ubiquitous popular belief in ghosts, psychic ability, alien encounters, communication with the dead, and astrology, to name but a sampling of the 'paranormal,' documents a resistance to the canons of belief doled out by the orthodox structures of contemporary academic science."

In fact, Dendle argues (and note the similarity to the arguments above about fantasy),that "Cryptozoology thus fulfills an important role: it represents a quest for magic and wonder in a world many perceive as having lost its mystique."

In the Harry Potter books, the magical world exists not in some long-distant past time, but right alongside the non-magical world of modern-day ordinary folk, who are called "muggles." It's just that muggles can't see this world, since the wizarding community conceived of means to conceal it, including "all magical beasts, beings, and spirits," as described in Newt Scamander's (pseudonym of J.K. Rowling) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (p. xvi). Magic is presumed not to exist, even though it surrounds the mundane world, the two intersecting only at odd times, as when the "world's largest kelpie continues to evade capture in Loch Ness [since it] appears to have developed a positive thirst for publicity" (p. xvii). Perhaps it's an apt metaphor for where we are today, presumably so long past the middle ages on into the "higher" ages: magic has seemingly disappeared from the cultural map, at least when a scientific overlay is placed on top of it -- and yet it exists even still, for those who have the inclination to spy out its traces on the palimpsest, making it part of their speculative lives, whether in terms of entertainment or their intellectual passions.

The question of what to make of the persistence of the fantastic, the magical, and the wondrous isn't going to be solved by consigning these facts of human life to the realm of pseudoscience. After a hundred years of working the problem that way, it doesn't seem to have borne much fruit. Like the medieval readers of the bestiaries, I think we will have to listen to the beasts and the birds, and try to discern what they have to teach us. To be continued, then . . .

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For more: Note: A recent report indicates that only 72% of Americans are scientifically illiterate today --  that is, unable "to understand approximately 20 of 31 scientific concepts and terms similar to those that would be found in articles that appear in the New York Times weekly science section and in an episode of the PBS program NOVA" -- as compared to 90% in 1988. At the same time, however, the survey reveals that there has been an "unsettling growth in the belief in pseudoscience." See also the chapter in the 2006 NSF Science and Engineering Indicators report on "Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding." For historical background on, and examples of, bestiaries, in addition to the beautifully reproduced Aberdeen Bestiary noted above, see David Badke's The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages; the Getty Center's bestiary pages; the University of Wisconsin's reproduction of T.H. White's The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts (1960) -- which for a long while was the only English translation available of a medieval bestiary; and a recent exhibition on Bestiaries by the Bibliotheque nationale de France. It turns out that the phrase we all think appeared on early maps -- "here be dragons" -- is one of those historical myths that is hard to shake: see Erin C. Blake's essay, "Where Be 'Here Be Dragons'?" at maphist.nl (a discussion group on the history of cartography), and for more, see Michael Livingston's "Modern Medieval Map Myths: the Flat World, Ancient Sea-Kings, and Dragons" at strangehorizons.com. Don't know much about Dungeons and Dragons? Then catch up with Peter Bebergal's "How 'Dungeons' Changed the World" from the Boston Globe in 2004 (the 30th anniversary of D&D's introduction). For introductions to cryptozoology see here and here, and for a bit of fun, see the spoof "Department of Cryptozoology" site at the University of Birmingham :-)

Images: The phoenix picture from the Aberdeen Bestiary is located at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/comment/56rbirdf.hti; for the 1987 D&D pamphlet cover, see the Dungeons and Dragons online archive at http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/dd/dd-ac10.htm; the Tolkien picture is the cover of The Tolkien Bestiary by David Day; and the Harry Potter book cover is from the UK -- a BBC Children's book: Harry Potter: Magical Creatures Hanging Pop-Up from amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/Harry-Potter-Magical-Creatures-Childrens/dp/1405902051. The "photo" of the Loch Ness monster, now largely held to be a hoax, is reproduced on the PBS companion website for the video "The Beast of Loch Ness," at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lochness/legend3.html.

go fish

Having finished watching the dolphins pirouette and sweep around their tank from the underwater viewing windows at the Vancouver Aquarium, our group began traveling up the ramp back to the main floor. As we did, everyone walked by a nondescript case off to the back containing an odd-looking rhinoceros-type fish, without anyone taking notice of it at all . . . well, that is, everyone but me. I noticed it because even though I only caught it out of the corner of my eye, my heart did a little jump, just like it does when you unexpectedly see someone you love. And this was one of my first loves: a coelacanth.

( Not sure what to do with the Latin? It sounds like this: see-la-kanth :-) 

In the late 1960s, there were only a handful of places in the United States that someone who was nine or ten years old could have seen a coelacanth, but I happened to live in the harbor town of San Pedro, not terribly far from the Natural History Museum at Exposition Park in downtown Los Angeles -- that's where I came across my first coelacanth in person. Sure, the dinosaur exhibits were memorable as well, but not anywhere near as captivating as the coelacanth, with its lavishly fringed tail fin, its primitive looking eyes and teeth, its armor-like scaliness, and the fleshy lobe fins that seemed for all the world like they could be dwarf legs. As Samantha Weinberg remarks in A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth:

"In appearance, at least, the coelacanth is less a fish than a bizarre confection of mismatched parts -- modern, ancient, and unique. As one of the deckhands . . . said after hauling it up off the southern African coast in 1938, 'It looks like a giant sea lizard'" (p.196).

Coelies aren't cute and cuddly like waddling penguins or grinning dolphins or furry baby seals; it certainly wasn't looks that led to them becoming pop culture icons in the 1950s and 1960s. It was the fact that, in 1938, a creature that scientists assumed had died out 65 million years ago in the great Cretaceous extinction, like the dinosaurs -- known only through its fossilized remains, dating back 400 million years -- had suddenly emerged from the ancient sea and onto the front pages of 20th century newspapers. It would not be until 1952 that a second coelacanth was captured and preserved in a way that it could be properly studied, adding to the anticipation that the first arrival had caused. (No one has been able to keep a coelacanth alive outside of the ocean to study it; a few films of live coelacanths in the water have been made. Over the years, about 200 coelacanths have been caught and studied. A new initiative in South Africa has created a major program of coelacanth research, which may result in much more information about the life cycle of coelacanths.)

Dubbed "old four-legs" in the popular press, it was more than the fact that the coelacanth was a "living fossil" that caused such a stir. The possibility that coelacanths might well be the "missing" evolutionary link between the first sea creatures and the first tetrapods that had crawled out of the ocean and on to land, giving rise eventually to human beings, made them the source of widespread fascination. And perhaps the coelacanth's renown was given an extra boost in that the Leakeys were unearthing "early man" in Africa, and the idea of being able to at last fill in significant gaps in the great evolutionary story of life (the ones relating to us :-) seemed to be at hand.

When I became a scholar and began thinking about the nature of science in popular culture, my enduring interest in coelacanths has never been far from my mind. For one thing, the existence of coelacanths represents one of the scientific experiences that spurred my interest in studying nature -- and most of these experiences had nothing to do with the science I learned in the classroom up through high school, via textbooks or laboratory demonstrations. The science I most loved rarely showed up in class; the science I was exposed to in class rarely enthused me (don't ever get me started on the tedium of rolling steel balls down inclined planes or of titrations of potassium permanganate).

It was as if my ideas about nature existed on two tracks that rarely crossed: scavenged from museum visits and National Geographic's School Bulletin (and later the grown-up magazine itself) and television specials and visits to the ocean and books from the library and camping trips in the Mojave desert with the Girl Scouts or hiking the high Sierras with the YMCA . . . or instead properly trained into me (more or less) through bench-pressing facts from big fat textbooks and successfully executing one multiple choice test after another.

So what happens when the two paths rarely cross -- or two species of thought fail to cross-fertilize? Welcome to my world! I'm still working on it. In many respects, that early love of coelacanths put me on the path to wanting to understand science in the vernacular.

I think that one important idea that the coelacanth conveyed to me, in the midst of the self-congratulatory high that the space race brought to the US in the 1960s, was of how little we knew about our own planet, particularly the three-fourths of the globe covered by oceans and seas. My own sense of nature was overwhelmingly shaped by my proximity to the ocean as a growing organism, and I was beginning to suspect that a vernacular-derived metaphysics and epistemology that was aqueous-based differs from those that are terra-formed or aether-filled. This has got me thinking, so look for a blog entry sometime this spring on "Thinking Like an Ocean," which will be part of the analysis for the next book I'm writing.

Interestingly, South Africa's Minister of Science and Technology, Mosibudi Mangena, sees study of the coelacanth as a way to promote science in society (I was just born too early, and near the wrong ocean):

The South African Minister however deplored the low standards of science in his country and Africa at large, given the lack of resources. "Public scientific output remains low, and in critical areas, such as securing patents, and new fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, there is a limited institutional capacity to respond adequately," he complained.

The African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme however stood out as an important and well-functioning "high-profile flagship programme" for science in South Africa and the region, Mr Mangena pointed out. Through ACEP, science authorities had caused popular excitement by "ships, sea exploration, sophisticated instrumentation, and new discoveries that extend the frontiers of science to capture the imagination of the youth, and inspire them to take an interest in science."

Coelacanths continue to surprise us, popping up in 1997 10,000 kilometres away from the African coast in Indonesia, where UC Berkeley researcher Mark Erdmann spotted a coelacanth carcass being hauled off to market. The existence of the Indonesian coelacanths surprised the scientific world, although it turns out that Sulawesian fishermen were quite familiar with the fish they called raja laut, or "king of the sea" -- the Comoran fishermen also had a name for the oily, inedible fish they sometimes accidently caught: gombessa.  Makes you think about what it means when we say that a species has been "unknown" -- unknown, that is, until it is discovered by outsiders.

An aside: "My" childhood coelie appears to have been the result of a UCLA researcher in 1964 initiating the first major international expedition to the Comoros Islands off of Madagascar, the coelacanth habitat that had been previously open only to French scientists (see Malcolm S. Gordon, "The international program of research on Latimeria in the 1960s," Environmental Biology of Fishes, 1993, 36:407-14). After their analysis was complete, their coelacanth was sent to LA County's Natural History Museum, and no doubt would have been something of a local celebrity when I visited it.

Ten years later, as a UCLA student, I walked through the doors of the campus Life Sciences building, and came face-to-face with another coelacanth, much to my surprise (it was probably a cast taken of that first one). It still had the power to give me a small electrifying jolt, unlike the dozens of other students who passed it by without a second look. Every now and then, I'd visit it, just to take a small step back in time amidst the stress of the present; it always pleased me to see it there. I wonder if it's still on display?

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Further info: NOVA produced an episode on coelacanths, "Ancient Creature of the Deep," and there is a companion website. Want to make your own paper coelacanth? Courtesy of the Yamaha Motor Company, you can -- see the example to the right. I know what I'm going to be working on over Christmas vacation :-)  Other odd moments in coelie pop culture include the Pokemon Relicanth and a slew of musical tracks which feature coelacanths!

Images: The top left image is from the front page of dinofish.com, a great place to start in your exploration of all coelacanthish news. The second one is from the wikipedia site on coelacanths, and is a coelie that is on display at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. The paper coelie can be found at the papercraft "rare animals of the world" Fun From Yamaha site at http://www.yamaha-motor.co.jp/global/entertainment/papercraft/animal-global/index.html.

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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student anthropologists: through the looking-glass

I always look forward to the final project papers for my Science and Popular class -- watching the students take the wheel and report on their topics always turns up different angles and additional dimensions of the class for me. The projects take in a wide swath of territory, including (as just a few examples) high-spirited analyses of mathematics in Hollywood movies (Stand and Deliver, Good Will Hunting, Mean Girls, Proof and more), to nuanced explications of science fiction stories new to me (this time, of Ursula K. Le Guin's "Newton's Sleep") and to explanations of the popular culture moebius (s)trip that is Futurama -- an animated series that depends on its audience's sophisticated grasp of pop science even as it contributes in its own ways to science and popular culture.

I found a subset of papers that were especially intriguing, though, for their format: future professional scientists (in primatology, paleontology, and neuroscience) reflecting on their observations/interactions with members of the public in settings related to their professional scientific interests (a zoo, a natural history museum, and a science center).

The future primatologist set out to observe visitors at the Oklahoma City Zoo, and found himself reflecting on the differences between his own responses to the zoo as a child and as an adult, and then noting when the responses of the visiting children and adults diverged in certain situations. Outside the snake house, one of the snake handlers brought out a boa constrictor, and within three minutes 25 kids had touched the snake, but only 5 adults. This wasn't due simply to kids being more "hands on" than their elders: when he visited the aquatics area, an equal number of adults and kids had physical contact with the seals. Later, over at the gorilla display, "the [Gorilla] babies brought up an interesting topic that caught my eye. . . the adults were more fascinated with the baby Gorillas than the children were. The reason this caught my attention was due to the fact that most of the time children are more fascinated with babies, not adults." He wasn't sure what to make of all of this, but I bet he'll think about it from time to time. I like students leaving the class with answers; I like it even better when they leave with questions (especially self-generated ones!) as well. It gives me hope that a little piece of the class will travel along with them once we've all said good-bye.

Now, his visit to the zoo's "Great EscAPE" was more than just one stop on his itinerary -- as he finally revealed at the end of the paper: "I want to tell you why the Gorilla exhibit is my favorite part of the zoo. This is the whole reason why I am attending college and studying to become a Zoologist. I want to become a Primatologist and study Gorillas." It was here that he found himself out of sympathy with the zoo's visitors, much to his surprise, for it seemed like the public had trouble knowing the proper term for the Gorillas. He decided to sit at the entrance and record what happened: "I observed twenty-five people total, and out of the twenty-five only five people (three kids and two adults) called them Gorillas," instead speaking of them as "monkeys." A small point, you might think, but he was stunned, as he reported back: "Those numbers were a shock to me." This kind of loose talk grated on his burgeoning professional sensibilities; a few years earlier and a few years closer to the public side of the public/professional divide, and he might not have been bothered by it, let alone have noticed it.

The future paleontologist set off to interview visitors to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, and he had his own unsettling moment, in some of the responses to his request for them to "Describe what you think of when you hear the word paleontologist" . . .  for when "some people answer that they do not even know what a paleontologist does it is a shock to me." Taking a more activist approach than the silently observing primatologist, he reported that "You can believe that I took that opportunity to educate them on the basics of what a paleontologist does." The ones who answered "Sam Neill" or "the guy in Jurassic Park" got to slide by :-)

Some of his respondents were fanciful, as with "one kid [who] said that he saw a T. Rex eating a paleontologist because the T. Rex did not want to be found," or "the little old lady" who was visiting the museum because "her grandkids call her an old fossil so she figured she'd come in and see the family." Speaking of dinosaurs and how they viewed them when they were children, one adult woman "said that she was always fascinated by them and actually wanted to study them, but got a little boy crazy and that quickly changed. Another woman said that due to religious beliefs she was not allowed to like dinosaurs." Interesting little bits at the intersection of science and popular culture that you don't know about if you don't ask! In his discussion of his interviews, the future paleontologist frequently switched back and forth from describing his interviewees' ideas to recalling his own early encounters with paleontology (it was seeing Jurassic Park when he was 11 years old that inspired his interest in his future profession). It was interesting to see him grapple with the idea of whether he could still be both a member of the public and a non-member of the public at the same time.

The future neuroscientist was staffing an exhibition table at the Oklahoma City Omniplex Science Museum as part of "Brain Awareness Week" (organized by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, and locally coordinated by the Oklahoma Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience, "to advance public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research"). His table featured the "human brain station," which presented:

three human brains that have been donated for scientific use: a whole human brain complete with the outer meninges, a brain with a cutaway exposing internal anatomy, and finally a brain from which the brainstem and cerebellum have been removed from the cortex. . . [I discovered that] the brain as an icon for science elicits a wide range of responses. My favorite of all of these, however, happened when two couples approached the table. As the women recoiled, the men went through the 'who is more macho' routine, looking and sounding just like the younger boys who try to persuade their buddies with 'double-dog dares'.

He noted that this was a repeated theme:

when asked 'Do you want to touch a real human brain!?' . . . Most children respond[ed] with a resounding 'Wow!' or 'Cool!' and fight over the box of gloves in an attempt to get the first finger on the wrinkly pink mass. Other children simply disappear behind their parents' legs, silently answering me in the negative. More often than not, these children are girls.

Our exhibits are gender neutral; we don't tie pink bows around some brains or strategically place male or female volunteers. Our explanations do not vary from child to child. However, it seems that the idea of science being a male pursuit still seems to influence scientific interest. Sometimes, the parents seem to foster these values. 'You don't want to touch a yucky brain do you?' says one mother to her daughter. Conversely, boys who are afraid to touch the brain may be admonished by their fathers,'What's a matter? Don't be a sissy. Go touch the brain.' And this is where boys and girls begin to learn about how they should -- or should not -- interact with science.

In a fascinating turn of events, even as he was an observer of how attitudes were being formed about what is and is not appropriate in approaching science, he found himself in the uncomfortable position (uncomfortable because of his heightened awareness of himself as both an observer and as a participant) of administering lessons as an expert on the proper relationships between scientists and the lay public. Two incidents in particular caught him off guard:

After they began to touch the brain, one of the men asked me a question. I had practiced my demonstration several times, and as a future neuroscientist, I felt confident that I could field any question the 'uninformed' public could throw at me. This man, though, threw me a curve ball. 'So, uh, d'you believe in that whole evolution thing?' the man asked. I froze. Of all the questions I had been asked about where the brain came from or which part of the brain controlled what, I was completely taken aback by the seeming randomness of the question. I knew how I answered could have an effect on how these people perceived science. What's more, I felt torn between the desire to defend biology's most powerful theory and sidestepping the social landmine that this man had planted. His question and my reaction are indicative of the larger cultural battle between evolutionary theory and recent fundamentalist Creationism alternatives. That the image of the brain can serve as the catalyst for the dialogue, however, still continues to amaze me.

The second incident related to his observation that personal values often surface when "parents may redirect any of my mini-lectures over an exhibit." Who knew it would happen at the pig-eye dissection table? There:

an older man interrupted my explanation of the inner anatomy of the eye to offer, 'You know, they say the eyes are the windows to the soul.' I again got a little defensive, hoping that I could somehow steer the conversation back into the realm of the scientific, replying 'Well, uh, yes. If you look here at the back of the eye, you'll notice the optic nerve, which transmits all the information from your eyes and sends it to the brain to be sorted out.'

"Granted," our brain expert remarked, his response "was not as poetic as the old man's account, but I felt like the romantic aphorism needed to get" -- in his memorable phrase -- "a swat of science." In the end, he suggested, "the man and I played the roles of dry empiricist and artistic poet battling it out for the right to explain nature."

I'm always quite grateful that the students are willing to take a leap of faith with me that studying this science and popular culture thing will prove to be worth their time and effort, given that we're exploring an area that still exists off the map in any kind of meaningful way for most historians of science. To see students willing to begin reflecting on their own scientific images and go through the looking-glass -- well, it was a real privilege to share some of their glimpses. And who knows where next semester's students will go? I can't wait to find out.

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Image: A John Tenniel illustration from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

welcome back to me and you

Summer's over, school's started, and I'm happy to say that after experimenting with petri dish last term, I've decided to go ahead and add it into my routine on a regular basis (say, three or four times a month). So, I'll start sorting through my backlog to get some posts up that I've been itching to get to, about some work my students did in their final projects in the spring for my Science and Popular Culture class, and travels to Flatland and the travails of A. Square and then Sasquatch as a turn-of-the-millennium poster boy.

It seems especially fitting to get petri dish up and running again in the aftermath of the great Pluto planetary debate, since my first blog post ever, To Infinity and Beyond, was about Pluto's shaky status. The planets are no longer nine in number, as Pluto has been demoted to something called a "dwarf planet", and now has to sit at the children's table (see Steve Breen's clever editorial cartoon -- scroll down the page).

A lot of commentary focused on the sentimentality of the public in regard to the planetary status quo, and yet I wondered just a little bit about a kind of stubborn commitment to the idea of a couple of handfuls of planets on the part of the astronomical community itself: better 8 "really real" planets, than to open the door to an untold chaos of planetary plenitude in the wake of Xena. Here's an excellent discussion of the question of what the category of "planet" should mean, and an innovative suggestion for how to reclassify planets completely -- abandoning the traditional view of an 8 or 9 object planetary system -- by Jeff Foust of the Space Review, in his piece on "Demote Pluto or Demote 'Planet'?":

What if, though, the IAU had taken a different approach? Perhaps astronomers could have decided not to make a formal definition of the term “planet”, finding it to be too general and vague. Instead, the IAU could have adopted specific definitions for classes of planets, based on their size (using the hydrostatic equilibrium criterion, for example) and other key characteristics. One might imagine three broad classes of planets: “gas giant planets” for gaseous worlds like Jupiter, “terrestrial planets” for rocky worlds like the Earth, and “ice planets” for worlds like Pluto. Under such a system we would not have an eight- or nine-planet solar system, since “planet” alone would have no official meaning: instead we would have a solar system with four gas giant planets, four (or five, depending on how Ceres was classified) terrestrial planets, and several ice planets, including Pluto. (One could add up the number of three different types of planets to determine the total number of “planets” in the solar system, but such a figure would be greater than nine, and would lead right back to the issues surrounding the original IAU proposal for the definition of the term planet.)

Instead the focus was on "up or out" for Pluto, rather than anything more radical.

I have to admit, I also enjoyed Tom Tepeen's snarky take on the whole thing:

In their haste to rob Pluto of its standing and then run away like highwaymen, the astronomers categorized it as -- and this is official now -- a "dwarf planet." This is a division that requires for entry only that the object orbit the sun and be round. By those standards, half the American adult population qualifies.

Fellow "dwarf planets," unite :-)

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Image: The image is of the "Plutopia" mousepad sold by End of the Month Creations at cafepress.com. Or take a look at cafepress.com's Pluto page for all their vendors (there may not be billions and billions of items but there are hundreds and hundreds and more hundreds!). On the flourishing trade in Plutoniana, see this quick take from USA Today on the gravitational pull of merchandise displaying cultural disaffection with expert opinion.