petri dish

arrows to atoms: 1957 and all that

I came across a large display model of this stamp a while back and got curious about it: I'm an historian of science at the University of Oklahoma, and the whole "arrows to atoms" motif as the state's semi-centennial motto came as a surprise to me. Not ever having thought of my adopted home state as particularly nuclear (next door New Mexico, on the other hand, yes!) -- especially as a key marker of state identity -- I wondered what the connection was. The advance of military technology from one form of indigenous American offensive thrust to a later version? New ways of picturing "Boomer Sooner"??? A timely shout-out to 50s rocker extraordinaire, Wanda Jackson -- Oklahoma's gift to rockabilly and female sass -- whose 1957 rendition of "Fujiyama Mama" was a cultural high point? (sample lyric: Well you can say I'm crazy, so deaf and dumb! / But I can cause destruction just like the atom bomb!). For more, see the always on-top-of-it conelrad, in their "Atomic Platters" section (and to hear the song itself, listen to this radio track.)

It turns out that this was one of the promotional themes for the Semi-Centennial Exposition, the Oklahomarama -- where you could visit the "Foodarama," a "Motorama," an "International Photorama," and "Soonerama Land," according to the encylopedia at the Oklahoma Historical Society: you just knew Oklahoma was on the verge of something big with that many "ramas" going on, right?  But what about the atoms? That had a newsy hook -- the award of a 16-ton "nuclear reactor for teaching purposes" to Oklahoma State University -- but it also seems to have had a more expansive interpretation as well, that of crossing the threshold of two "frontiers": as the New York Times put it, "an arrow, to represent Oklahoma's redskin frontier, and a variation of the familiar emblem which symbolizes atomic energy, to suggest 'new frontiers'" (March 24, 1957, p. 135). There was a special exhibit on "The World of Tomorrow" that featured atomic power, and the atomic spirit was made concrete in the form of a 200-foot tower (an arrow pointing upward to: tomorrow? space? heaven?) with a silhouette of Oklahoma's border contained within a giant (outdated) solar system model of "an orbit of golden atoms" which lit up at night (this and more described in the May-June 1957 issue of Oklahoma Today, the Semi-Centennial Souvenir edition.)

It turns out that the emphasis on atomic power was more than just a clever way to hitch Oklahoma's wagon to a radiant symbol of the new horizon, but that the wagon was being driven by corporate and civic leaders who were certain that Oklahoma could capitalize on the changing scientific landscape and get in on the ground floor of a new technology that would bring wealth and prosperity to an undercapitalized state, one of the new kids on the block: hence the creation of the "Frontiers of Science Foundation" in 1956 by Dean A. McGee (of energy industry giant Kerr-McGee -- they were the first oil company, in 1952, to mine uranium and they were the nuclear leader in Oklahoma); E.K. Gaylord, the powerful media boss and publisher of OKC's family-owned newspaper, the Oklahoman; Stanley Draper, manager of the city's Chamber of Commerce; and James E. Webb, who had ties to Washington DC due to his stints as U.S. Director of the Budget and Undersecretary of State under President Harry Truman, currently Chairman of the Board of Republic Supply Co. (a division of Kerr-McGee). The Foundation sponsored a "year-long, full time, all-expense-paid refresher-type-course seminar for high school science teachers" and "was first in the nation to go into a statewide testing program to identify youngsters of outstanding ability," reported an article in Oklahoma Today in Spring of 1958. They explained to their readers that this group, driven by a "strange, new, fascinating vision of a New West and the New Frontier of the Mind," had flown around the country making contacts, soliciting advice, and that there was:

"hardly a major nuclear plant, research center or policy-shaping government body in America which hasn't been literally overwhelmed by this 'big bunch of men from Oklahoma' who came dropping in out of the sky to ask the questions the scientists have been so eager -- and fighting so much public apathy elsewhere -- to answer."

Given the Foundation's mission, it is clear how pleased they were to focus the Semi-Centennial Exposition around their aims, which included a "Frontiers of Science" exhibit of their own and an International Science Symposium. The souvenir Oklahoma Today issue noted with pride that "an actual replica of the Earth Satellite, a model of the Vanguard Rocket to be used in launching the famed satellite, and a Solar Battery in operation" would be key draws for the Frontiers of Science exhibit. The Exposition was scheduled from mid-June through early July of 1957 -- after reading about the Vanguard display, I figured it must have been an incredible let-down a few months later to hear about the US being pre-empted by the Sputnik launch in October of that year, and then of the inability of the US to get a satellite up to answer Sputnik and then Sputnik 2 -- the Vanguard attempt blew up on the launch pad, prompting jeers of "Flopnik" and the like.

But that would be to underestimate the boosterism and savvy of the FofSF bunch! They argued that Sputnik --  "the greatest challenge facing Western Civilization" -- was not to be feared, given that the good guys in white cowboy hats had everybody's back:

"Some have wondered why, after Sputnik went up, President Eisenhower happened to select Oklahoma as the site for his sole major address away from Washington to reassure a worried nation. It was no accident. It was basically a tribute to a small group of Oklahomans who had quietly started three years previous, well in advance of any other state, to fuel up a rocket-powered wagon train out of the New West."

Because of the activities of the FofSF:

"half-a-hundred of the [scientists] whose names have since become almost as familiar headliners as Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield had come flying into Oklahoma from all over the globe for an endless series of lectures, conferences, inspection tours. Men like Dr. Vannevar Bush, considered the 'father' of modern American science; Dr. James R. Killian, M.I.T. president now President Eisenhower's top scientific advisor. . . [all of this had become so common that] the recent visit of one of the greatest scientists of his age, Dr. Niels Bohr, hardly provoked more among the general public than a pleasant nod of recognition. Where a few years back he might have been classed in the same category with a man from Mars, he was now viewed simply, with respect, as one of the 'home folks.'"

I would have liked to have seen a comparison by our state's leaders of where we had landed in terms of our aspirations from the Semi-Centennial to the just-celebrated Centennial. I'm sure that back in the '50s and '60s the efforts of the FofSF helped to identify individuals to help staff a new scientific workforce (and certainly all of this seemed to help James E. Webb, who ended up as the head of NASA), but how it all worked out educationally for future generations seems a mixed-bag from my end. Certainly, I've taught a number of students who had innovative science teachers in high school, but I've heard earfuls over the years from the majority of students who have a long list of grievances about how deficient their science classes were. Maybe 1957 is not so far ago, after all.

And then there's a little matter of a note that President Eisenhower made in that national security speech in OKC, where he called for Americans to close the education gap with the Soviets. He stated that:

"Young people now in college must be equipped to live in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles. However, what will then be needed is not just engineers and scientists, but a people who will keep their heads, and, in every field, leaders who can meet intricate human problems with wisdom and courage. In short, we will need not only Einsteins and Steinmetzes, but Washingtons, and Emersons."

We hear much the same rhetoric in these parts today about the need for better science education, in pursuit of economic competitiveness and national security. Not so much, however, about the need for Emersons. Maybe that was too radical for 1957. . . and for today.

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For more: The city of Tulsa felt left out of all the atomic celebration hoo-ha in OKC, and came up with a twist of their own for a Tulsarama celebration: they would bury a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere [classic photo here] and assorted memorabilia in an atomic-attack-proof vault, to be dug up later for Oklahoma's Centennial celebration in 2007. When the car was retrieved last year, it turned out that two feet of standing water had rusted the car straight through [must-see photo] -- guess it wouldn't have survived a nuclear explosion! (A film reel of the American Petroleum Institute's promotional video, Destination Earth did make it through, though -- here's the scoop. All this via Telstar Logistics, a whole adventure in itself.)

Images: The postage stamp image can be found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oklahoma_1957_Statehood_Stamp.jpg .

hollow heads? science, fantasy, and what's as plain as the earth beneath our feet

Newton's Principia Mathematica is rarely remembered today for having sparked speculation that we all go about our days traveling across the shell of what is a hollowed out planet --  but the devoted Edmond Halley improvised just such a theory in 1691 from the Principia as he pondered the mysteries of why the earth's magnetic field changes and the nature of such phenomena as the northern auroras.

Normally, in our surveys of the scientific revolution, we speak of a grand astronomical sweep from Copernicus through Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes that culminates in Newton's restoration of the broken Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmos by mathematically divining the universal laws of nature. Halley himself poetically proclaimed the same, and gets recognition for wrestling the Principia out from Newton's study and into publication before the world -- and is noted as well for his own heavenly insights into the nature of comets, recognizing their elliptical periodicity and precisely identifying the cyclical nature of the one that now bears his name. If you're here on earth in 2061 you can see it come round once again . . . about 1000 years after its 1066 appearance, which was recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry, an eleventh century blog. But I digress.

Hollow earth speculation doesn't typically come up when teaching the scientific revolution, even if Halley in his venerable old age points us in this sober portrait not to look above for evidence of his achievements but to look below our feet, perhaps believing at age 80 that it wouldn't hurt to remind attentive minds of some unfinished business that could be taken on. . . not that what he had in mind was students in a 21st-century class in science and popular culture as his epigoni. As I plan for next fall's scipop class (now in improved, hybrid form!), I've been thinking a lot about the ambiguity that attaches itself to nearly every historical and contemporary episode we've grappled with in that class. The official version of the history of science carries with it the aura of progress over time. Science in the vernacular fits awkwardly within that sober frame, and instead tends to be presumed to display degeneration over time: witness the hollow earth, from Halley's hallowed hands to Saturday morning kid's teevee.  

In becoming acquainted with Halley beyond his normal orbit -- in his speculation on the interior physics of our terrestrial planet, and its possible habitation by hollow earth beings -- we followed along with the scheherazadean legacy of hollow-earth thinking as related by David Standish in his book The Hollow Earth. In contrast to the stern geometric proofs of the Principia, Halley's inner-space speculation appears as an eccentric footnote, but whether that's due more to 20th-century perspectives that encountered hollow earthism-primarily in the light of pulp fiction -- making Halley seem a bit too much like an early Edgar Rice Burroughs -- than to his arguments themselves is a fair question. But perhaps Halley can be indulged his hollow earth eccentricities, given his seventeenth-century context and his intrepid pursuit of the realities of magnetism, which was such a mysterious entity. As one present-day commentator suggests: "Today, of course, one can rather easily see the flaws with a hollow Earth theory, but no one can rightfully blame someone living in the seventeenth century for believing such nonsense, especially if it explained certain mysteries." Thus, with just a bit of well-placed condescension what might look like Halleyan nonsense remains respectable -- if a bit on the free-wheeling side of respectable -- and therefore a forefather of the scientific revolution can maintain his rational bona fides. Even still, I'm not betting any serious money on it turning up much in historical surveys of the scientific revolution.

Tales of a hollow earth persist through the next centuries in varying proportions of fact to fictionality (and despite little scientific support). Halley's idea of a race of rational beings populating the hollow space of the interior planet resonated with widely-current ideas up through the nineteenth century about God's omnipotence, in which it was presumed that planets that circle a sun must support sentient life, as does our Earth: God does nothing without purpose, and it is clear, therefore, that God would have placed life on other planets so that they would be inhabited in the same way as is our own -- "the plurality of worlds" hypothesis. (This idea can be seen in works that tackle scientific subjects such as The Christian Philosopher of 1721 by American Cotton Mather, the influential Puritan divine -- and Fellow of the Royal Society.) Mather's popularization of ideas about scripture and science were read well into the next generations, and is a likely source for sparking John Cleves Symmes, Jr.'s fascination with hollow earth theory. Symmes, a former U.S. army officer and frontier trader, began turning out circulars on behalf of hollow earthism in 1818 (with one sent direct to U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams), and spread the good news that the interior could be entered into via holes at the poles. He kept up a vigorous schedule of public talks across the young republic until his death in 1829. The mantle (so to speak ;-) for proselytizing the theory and drumming up support for polar exploration had fallen more and more to an acolyte of Symmes's, J.N. Reynolds, a gifted public lecturer, as was sketched in 1826 by a newspaperman in New York city:

A gentleman of this city, who, never having heard the theory of the concentric spheres properly explained, had always viewed it as the wild chimera of a half-disordered imagination, lately attended one of Reynolds' lectures. He went, as he himself confessed, in hopes of hearing something sufficiently absurd to give good exercise to his risibles; but soon felt more inclined to listen than to laugh, and by the time the discourse was finished, became a thorough believer in what he had lately derided. Such sudden conversions, perhaps, are not the most permanent; but they are sufficient to prove that the above theory is more worthy of investigation than ridicule. (Quoted in Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, p. 125).

Reynolds would come to downplay the hollow earth / polar connection while becoming fired with even greater zeal for exploring the Antarctic regions as ends unto themselves, and he was so successful in selling the possibilities, that he convinced the Congress to fund an exploratory expedition to the regions of the southern polar seas, which set sail in 1838. Sachs sees Reynolds as a powerful embodiment of American Humboldtianism, and argues that it was Reynolds, "perhaps more than any other writer in the first half of the nineteenth century, [who] taught America the cosmopolitan value of seeing the world" (p. 21). But Reynolds's ideas  would reverberate transatlantically as well, if somewhat circuitously -- picked up at home by Edgar Allen Poe in some of his tales, and then translations of Poe's fiction into French caught the eye of Jules Verne, who would write Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, adding a popular new conduit for hollow earth lore: with it as a foundation of the new (or, to us, classic) genre of science fiction.

Puritan approval, Congressionally-funded voyages, one of the first works of modern science fiction -- the culturally-woven threads of the webs that gird the hollow earth lie not neatly laid out like longitude and latitude, but look something rather disorienting instead, a crazy-quilt line of Brownian motion. Once you get into the middle of this all, how do you determine "what's the bottom line"? Standish, takes a cool-kid kind of stance, introducing his book by stating nonchalantly:

There have been many books recently about important ideas or commodities that have changed the world. This one, I am happy to say, traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing -- but which has nevertheless had an ongoing appeal (in his Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface, p. 13).

The cultural history of scientific ideas that were wrong and changed nothing: in my darker moments, this characterization does seem indeed to capture the historical hamster-wheel that marks my scholarly preoccupations with science and popular culture. And yet. . .

The hollow-earth history actually led me back to a novel I'd forgotten about, which had first appeared anonymously, in installments, in the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper in 1880, and was published about a decade later in book form as Mizora (when the author was revealed to be Mary E. Bradley Lane, about whom little is known). In Mizora, Lane fashions an alternate female-only reality that exists inside the Earth (discovered by adventuring through the northern pole) in which science and technology have done away with the biological need for men for procreation, and which supports a utopian society. In some ways, the hollow earth setting can be seen as just another variation on the ancient dodge of fictional utopian islands, the point being the existence of some other unknown place beyond our sight where an author's idealized world can flourish. Worlds had been turned upside down before by social critics, and a world turned inside out was perhaps nothing much different. And yet. . .

I suspect that imaginings about alternative realities were quickened in the last centuries as the strangeness of the terraqueous globe on which we live began to be better-known and to come under livelier scrutiny. The fact that geology holds a less glamorous place in the hierarchy of the sciences in our own time obscures the fascination that pondering the mysteries of the planet which supports our own existence held in ages past. The vigorous trafficking in hollow-earth speculation in the 19th-century might well provide fertile ground for historians to capture glimpses of the ways in which new visions of an active terraqueous globe fascinated a wide range of people, who then turned their curiosity to imagining what sorts of changed environments would support changed forms of human beings, or of the ways in which ancient subterranean life and contemporary terran life might be connected. That is, hollow-earth tales and their ilk may well represent a kind of hidden history of science, where non-specialists play with a protean set of evolutionary-like ideas in public, impinging on the official story in unrecognized ways. Such stories little-resemble the kind of hoary historical set-pieces about evolutionary debate that populate casual remembrance, such as the anecdote about Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce monkeying around about who was on Darwin's team and why or why not. What did evolution from the people look like? Maybe some of the answers are right beneath our feet.

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For more: To delve back into the seventeenth-century debate on the plurality of worlds hypothesis, see Bernard de Fontenelle's charming introduction, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds from 1686, or satisfy your curiosity about what's known scientifically today about the earth's magnetosphere. For a quick explanation of the plurality of worlds hypothesis, see an essay from the Norton Anthology of English Literature. For a short explication of Halley and the hollow earth, see Patricia Fara, "Edmond Halley's last portrait," Notes Rec. R. Soc., 2006, 60:199-201. Professor Duane Griffin in the Geography Dept. at Bucknell has plumbed the scientific aspects of the hollow earth tales: see his "What Curiosity in the Structure: The Hollow Earth in Science" and "Hollow and Habitable Within: Symmes's Theory of Earth's Internal Structure and Polar Geography." Victorian science fiction as forgotten by historians of science is deftly described by Paul Fayter in "Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction," in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman. And yes, the Nazis had their own hollow-earth fantasies; that's a bridge too far for this post.

Images: The Halley portrait is from http://www.biographie.net/Edmond-Halley; the Bayeaux tapestry snip is from the wikipedia article on Halley's comet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tapestry_of_bayeux10.jpg; the Burroughs Tarzan hollow earth cover was from David Standish's book for posting here: http://archive.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page1558.html?theme=light; the Christian Philosopher title page is from the Open Library http://openlibrary.org/books/OL13520105M/The_Christian_philosopher; the last one is by William Reed, a latter-day Symmesian from 1906, posted at John Lienhard's Engines of Ingenuity site at http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2180.htm.

Note: Many of the links were updated and modified on September 4, 2018 | The entry was originally posted on June 12, 2011.

 

wondering about wonder

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

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

I’m not completely out to lunch on this – well, or at least I’m in the good company of noted physicist and author Chet Raymo, who made a similar point in his essay "Dr. Seuss and Dr. Einstein: Children’s Books and Scientific Imagination." Raymo notes that "we live in an age of information. We are inundated by it. Too much information can swamp the boat of wonder, especially for a child. Which is why it is important that information be conveyed to children in a way that enhances the wonder of the world. . . If a child is led to believe that science is a bunch of facts, then science will not inform the child’s life, nor will science enhance the child’s cultural and imaginative landscape." In my own childhood my curiosity about how the world works was powered by fantastic books like The Phantom Tollbooth (with its explanations of infinity and the daily recurrence of the dawn that I can picture even still) and the time-traveling mystery of A Wrinkle in Time and a lavishly illustrated Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies (by Jane Werner and illustrated by Garth Williams). It still has a pull for other sixties kids as well – if you can find a used copy from the 1950s/60s, it will run you upwards of $100, depending on the condition. Luckily, there are 21st century reprints!)

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

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

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

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For more: Madeleine L'Engle's acceptance speech, "The Expanding Universe," for the Newbery Medal awarded in 1963 for A Wrinkle in Time; Eric Carle's bulletin board idea exchange for parents and teachers using his books; Charles Dickens's mordant take on the meeting of fact-based science and children's fancifulness, in Chapter 2 of Hard Times (1854); and historian Caroline Walker Bynum's presidential address -- entitled "Wonder" -- to the American Historical Association in 1996.

Images: Cover illustration of Eric Carle's Mister Seahorse (Philomel, 2004) and Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (Delacorte Press, 1991) -- illustration by Peter Sis and a page from The Tree of Life at nyla's pinboard.

Note: Links updated on 8.19.2018 / Published on 2.6.2006

does the 'doomsday clock' keep the right time?

[originally published in 2007]

One of the most famous images from the dawn of the nuclear era is back in the news: it is no longer seven minutes to midnight, but five, according to the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who announced that they were moving the hands of their famed "Doomsday Clock" closer to Armageddon. The "Doomsday Clock" first made its appearance on the cover of the Bulletin in June of 1947, a kind of visual shorthand that expressed the anxiety of many nuclear scientists about the arms race that had made the world a more dangerous place through scientific progress.

In the last 60 years the hands of the timepiece now have been moved back and forth a total of eighteen times -- the extremes of the timeline have been when the hands of the clock stood at two minutes to midnight in 1953, after the Soviet Union had followed the United States in successfully testing a new level of nuclear weaponry, the hydrogen bomb; at the other end, in 1991, the hands then slipped below the fatal last quarter, when they retreated to seventeen minutes to the final hour, due to the end of the Cold War and movement toward disarmament through the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

It's always news when the Bulletin changes the clock's timing, but there was an additional news hook in this 2007 decision: the increasing threat to world survival was pegged as coming not only from nuclear events, but from such phenomena as global warming. As reported in the Chicago Tribune -- "Doomsday Clock to Start New Era" (Jeremy Manier, 1.17.07) --

. . . when the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveils the first change to the Doomsday Clock in four years, the risk of a nuclear holocaust will be just one among many threats that nudge the position of the clock's portentous minute hand. The keepers of the clock have expanded its purview to include the threat of global warming, the genetic engineering of diseases and other "threats to global survival."

It may be a stretch to put nuclear weapons and climate change in the same category, but that's one way the organization is trying to keep its 60-year-old clock relevant at a time when bioterrorism and radical groups can threaten the largest nations.

Indeed, this novel aspect of the nuclear experts reaching beyond the mushroom cloud to anoint climate change as a comparable danger, was duly noted and clearly highlighted by most outlets, as in this Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news story ("The Doomsday Clock Advances Two Minutes" 1.17.07):

Add a new crop of countries dazzled by nuclear technology to other global threats such as climate change and environmental degradation and the result, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is almost toxic.

"We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age," the board said in a statement.

The move from seven to five minutes from midnight was decided upon after scientists reviewed the current nuclear situation in combination with expected climate change, marking the first time the Doomsday Clock has ever reflected a separate world threat in addition to the bomb.

Even if, as Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg remarked, "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock has to be one of the most successful magazine public relations gimmicks of all time, right up there with Time's Person of the Year and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue" (1.17.07), the roll-out of the 2007 model was newer, bigger, and better, apocalyptically-speaking. Even still-newsworthy icons need a brush-up, it seems, whether design-wise, or content-wise, to garner sufficient attention. An added kick was gained by bypassing the traditional site for Doomsday announcements: as noted by the Chicago Tribune, "in an added bid to influence policymakers and draw an international audience, the Bulletin is moving this year's announcement from its customary place in Chicago to a dual event held in London and Washington."

The bi-lateral press events did indeed seem to generate substantial coverage in the English language world, but even with all the "doomsday clock enters a new era" emphases, it seemed to me as if the stories would have fit relatively easily within the past world of a bygone time. Yes, the emphasis on climate science was new, but the key educational lesson seemed to fit comfortably within the venerable scientific organizational chart that places nuclear physics at the top, with what physicists have to say counting for more than the words of scientists from other disciplines -- there was a literal sense in which physicists were speaking for their other colleagues, graciously deigning to share their authority and the stage (metaphorically at least).

I found most fascinating the pictures of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking from the London event, where photographers sought to couple Hawking the icon with the Bulletin's icon. Climate science may have been the newsworthy angle, but physics as arbiter was definitely a controlling visual metaphor. The photo at the left is one version, with the clock floating above somewhat like a heavenly image of doom; at the right is a different take, which very nearly manages to juxtapose the two, tightly framing the machine-bound thinker and the message that we have but five minutes of future to go before time expires and our brief history along with it. The third photograph, which accompanied an online bbc news article ("Climate Resets the 'Doomsday Clock' " by Molly Bentley, 1.17.07) manages to get the shot that everyone must have been after, whether conscious of it or not: the physicist's face and the timepiece's face, melded together in a doubly powerful dose of symbolism, his head held at nearly the same angle of incidence (so to speak) as the minute hand as it closes the gap counting down to the zero hour, literally overshadowing the scientific mind in the foreground.

Rather like nuclear physicist announcements of decades past, men appeared to dominate the photographic spotlight, whether through pictures of Hawking from London or by pulling old file photos featuring a male hand on the clock (for example, to the left; from Alaska Report, using a Reuters file image). In Washington, Bulletin Executive Editor and political scientist Kennette Benedict was also part of the stage presence, along with Ambassador Thomas Pickering and physicist Lawrence Krauss. These pictures tended to feature her rather awkwardly, as with this one that peers at her off in the distance fussing with unveiling the new time, with the men looking on as she finishes with the stagecraft. It looks somewhat like every tedious office meeting with middle management that you've ever had to sit through as they fuss with the flow charts. It just doesn't have the same authoritative impact as the others, diffusing the visual warning that the end of the world is nigh.

But the black-and-white analog 1950s feel to this news event also stems from the endless reiteration of the "doomsday" theme. Now the idea of doomsday has a long lineage -- one of my favorite examinations of the cultural resonance of this theme is Daniel Wojcik's The End of the World as We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (which includes discussions of secular apocalyptic themes in the nuclear era as well), and of course the idea of doomsday stretches back millennia -- but in the years after World War II, the growing awareness of the unprecedented destructive power created through atomic science -- especially with the H-bomb -- gave the doomsday scenario a new grasp on life (so to speak). As Wojcik argues:

The concept of a meaningless apocalypse brought about by human or natural causes is a relatively recent phenomenon, differing dramatically from religious apocalyptic cosmologies. Instead of faith in a redemptive new realm to be established after the present world is annihilated, secular doomsday visions are usually characterized by a sense of pessimism, absurdity, and nihilism. (p. 97)

The Doomsday Clock was an apt image for scientists to reach for in a Doomsday world circa 1947 / 1953 in which scientists saw it as their responsibility to blast the populace (and the policy-makers) out of what they saw as a complacent response of willful ignorance in the face of daily emergency; to the extent that scientists still address the public in such stark and urgent terms when informing them of scientific opinion on matters such as nuclear proliferation or global warming, then the Doomsday Clock certainly remains a relevant symbol. But if the Doomsday Clock is an accurate visual shorthand for the longer, more complex scientific arguments that undergird it, this does not necessarily mean it is (or was?) an effective communication device, in terms, at least, of engaging the public in a meaningful discussion of risk assessment, scientific expertise, political realities, and democratic decision-making.

A few years back I opened a discussion with the students in my history of modern science course about the continuing relevance of nuclear issues as a political matter by taking them through the timeline of the Doomsday Clock, and asking them to draw a picture of their own clock, and then write about what they thought the time should be and why. I was surprised to learn that many students resented what they saw as the manipulative nature of physicists choosing the last 15 minutes before midnight as their starting point. Many of them argued for placing the hands at 9:00 or 10:00 or 11:00 -- not because they were insisting that nuclear weapons were of little importance, but because they believed that their own starting points placed more faith in the power of human beings to maneuver within difficult straits. It might still be night, but we had been pushing back against the darkness and we were not at the last gasps before a total loss of control, of options, of hope. They were looking to be empowered, not diminished, as a motivation toward action.

In the eyes of the Bulletin scientists, no doubt my students would seem naive in rejecting the "minutes to midnight" framework. The Bulletin has an incredible amount of international political experience at their fingertips and intellectual mindpower at their disposal -- as the Bulletin's press release notes, the decision of the "BAS Board of Directors was made in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates." It is true that there were no Nobel Laureates on my class roll that year. But I believe that these students were articulating an important reality, one that places the thinking of their generation at odds with the cold war mechanics out of which the "Doomsday Clock" is constructed, and where the "two cultures" norm holds sway [the expression itself a cold war era contribution by C.P. Snow]: brilliant scientific minds needing to get the attention of inattentive or lesser minds (such as those with a shaky grasp of the second law of thermodynamics as Snow suggested) by prophesying immediate doom. In a recent article, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called their symbol "The People's Clock." After listening to my students, I don't think I would agree.

In his book Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema, author Christopher Frayling contends that:

Up until quite recently, real-life senior scientists have tended to present themselves like bewigged judges in court -- remote, out of touch, unconsultative, much given to pontificating and immune from criticism. And senior scientists have wondered why the public does not follow them every step of the way! Now there is much more consultation and much more emphasis on communications skills, but these tend to be confined to set-piece platforms or media debates in which the rhetoric of horror films -- on both sides -- takes over from serious discussion. 'Seeing into the mind of God' or 'destroying the planet' or 'my statistics are better than your statistics' or dismissive comments about lay people in the name of public understanding of science, tend to be the resulting headlines. (p. 226)

It is easier to re-animate old patterns of discourse, rather than to try, in a later phrase of Frayling's, to "break the flow" and find new forms of engagement. But if the public is truly to be a partner in a scientific conversation about pressing issues, then new strategies of discursive detente need to be deployed. In fact it may be time -- it may be past time -- to do so.
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For more: The Jan/Feb 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a very nice two-page layout on the history of the clock (even if I take exception with the title of the article), including a reminiscence from the artist, Martyl, who first created the image. There's an interesting historical artifact from Time Magazine online: a 1964 article entitled "Turning Back the Clock," which states that since "now there is less concern about Armageddon and less shock value to the power of the atom, the clock is ticking mostly for the Bulletin. Its funds low, the magazine is once more passing the hat." And speaking of whether or not the clock is outdated, Dood Abides at Unconfirmed Sources plays with the file photo of the Doomsday Clock to present, a new, shiny digital version for the 21st century :-) For more of Stephen Hawking's dire pronouncements about the fate of the human race, see "Prophet of Doomsday: Stephen Hawking, Eco-Warrior" by Geoffrey Lean in the Independent, 1.27.07. For an interesting undergraduate conversation by students from different majors about the "two cultures" idea, see this panel discussion, "The Two Cultures: Students Speak their Minds," from the University of Colorado.

Images: The very first image is from the homepage of the Bulletin, at http://www.thebulletin.org/; the original 1947 cover is from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, online at http://library.lanl.gov/libinfo/news/images/BulletinAS-cover.jpg. The first Hawking image is from the Telegraph ("Hawking: Doomsday Clock Closer to Midnight" 1.18.07) at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/17/nclock117.xml; the second Hawking image is from the CBC article at http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/nuclearweapons/doomsday-clock.html; and the third image from the BBC is at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6270871.stm. The file photo shown on the Alaska Report is at http://www.alaskareport.com/reu77351.htm while the trio photo from the DC press conference was carried on an msnbc.com article "Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16670369/.

child-sized depictions of charles darwin to grow on

The overwhelming number of recently-published children's picture books about Charles Darwin -- across a diversity of publishers and authors -- choose to feature his voyage aboard the Beagle, leading to a remarkable sameness in approach, in thematic choices, and in the texts themselves (particularly as they liberally feature Darwin's own words, from his journals and his published account of the voyage), even if as a species they offer a pleasing morphology of illustrative styles. As I wrote previously, when going through the books as I was putting together "home school" lessons on evolution for my 7- going-on-8-year-old daughter, the repetitive focus on "Darwin before evolution" that occurs by devoting the bulk of each book to the voyage seemed to me to leave discussions of the hard work of arriving at explanations for the transformation of life over time as a let-down, for that history was rarely able to compete with the descriptive and visual thrills provided by sailing the globe and collecting curiosities -- which disappointed me.

In general, however, the advertising copy and reviews insisted that this approach was exactly what would engage a child in Darwin's story: an emphasis on his youth, the globe-trotting, the familiar tug of nature stories that feature animals, and the exoticism of wild nature in all its startling forms. I was reminded of the venerable heritage of this framework with this post [thanks to the tip from the all-seeing-eye of evolution-on-the-internet, Michael Barton], from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, who had as a book of the week the late-nineteenth century volume, What Mr. Darwin Saw in His Voyage Round the World in the Ship 'Beagle' -- a work more than 100 years previous which also claims that doing a mash-up of Darwin's book on the Beagle voyage (with a special focus on the animal tales and pictures) lent itself to a perfect child's-eye view of Darwin. (And, perhaps not surprisingly, when I talked in 2009 with Bernie Lightman [see here for recent articles] about his work on biographical treatments of Darwin when he was on campus for our Darwin Anniversary lectures, his view of such 19th-century works of juvenile literature were that they allowed for a conservative approach, focusing as they did on the voyage and the doing of natural history, rather than evolutionary themes. That this tack persists into the 21st century is fascinating.)

But the adventuresome seafaring young Darwin didn't seem to make much of an impact with my
particular child reader at home, who, I realized one day when I saw a new computer art picture appear on the computer desktop, had come up with an illustration of Darwin on her own that seemed to owe less to the conventional voyage thematic than it did to three different, more original takes that a handful of children's authors had created. The first of these, Anne Weaver's The Voyage of the Beetle, takes Darwin on the by-now-too-familiar voyage, but gives it a sharper edge by working evolutionary theory right into the narrative, through the plot device of a talkative and knowledgeable beetle who has befriended Darwin (he names her Rosie) and who serves as his coach in seeking to make sense of the extravagantly diverse natural world he is immersed in. Rosie is not only an observer of Darwin's voyage, but a participant in it, literally sprinkling his research records with "footnotes," dipping her appendages in his ink bottle at night to add in details:

that Charles, as observant as he was, might have missed. Often, I would include a little clue to the mystery of mysteries for Charles to decipher, slipping clues on little scraps of paper between the pages of the diary.

The story that follows comes from these footnotes, and from conversations that Charles and I had as he sought the answer to the mystery of mysteries. In each of the chapters that follow, I have copied my clues for you to read. I suspect that you might be able to solve the mystery even before Charles does.

Although Weaver's book is imbued with some of the same conventions as the other voyage books (Nature "speaks" evolution to Darwin, becoming increasingly revelatory as he moves further along each waystation in his scientific pilgrimage), the clues to evolutionary theory that accompany the voyage offer a refreshing change, because both the child reader and Darwin are literally placed at the same level of asking questions and not knowing what the answers are. (An echo of this partnership is seen perhaps in the title my daughter gave to her drawing: it's not "Mr. Darwin discovers," but "discover with Mr. Darwin.")

Intriguing as well is that through the character of Rosie, Weaver inserts a female voice into a tried-and-true narrative that is almost relentless in its masculine vibe as presented in the children's books, especially when the 19th-century sailing ship focus commandeers the bulk of the text. What's interesting in Weaver's Rosie is that it is a female voice that has the scientific knowledge well in hand, and is the voice of authority -- although tactfully rendered as a guide on the side, rather than a sage on the stage, for both Darwin and the book's readers. In this imaginative provision of a fictional feminine presence for Darwin's voyage, Weaver re-creates this historical moment in an alternate key, one that perhaps keeps the celebratorily masculinist emphasis of the books for youngsters at bay in a manner that also allows for a depiction of cognitive uncertainty that is more human than the other triumphalist tales. In fact, to the extent that the reader identifies with Rosie and incorporates her knowledge, on second reading the former "audience" for the book likewise takes on the vicarious role of Darwin's tutor (as perhaps both the friendly bluebird and the artist who drew her is ready to do once Mr. Darwin has introduced himself in my daughter's picture).

Given that science is so often presented to children as an opportunity to "catch up" with what adults already know, it's a rare feat that a science book for children allows them to see a "real scientist" as being similarly at sea at such length regarding explanations about nature as they themselves often are. And in fact, Weaver's narrative ends with Darwin back in England and still unsure about how to solve the evolution puzzle (although readers are not left hanging, as Weaver sets out Rosie's clues once more, and provides Darwin's solution to end the book). It's a story that gets at the idea of scientific knowledge as real work, but real work on the order of being doable given curiosity, patience, thoughtfulness, care, and insight -- the antithesis of the idea that only a remote few have what it takes to make scientific contributions (the "Einstein" syndrome).

I was most amused to find that, despite the fact that the voyage figured extravagantly both in content and in the illustrations of the pile of children's Darwin books that I had brought home to study, the picture my daughter chose to draw owed nothing to the rainforest theme which would supposedly transfix childish imaginations, but instead depicted a much more sedate locale, fitting comfortably within the domestic backyard setting of a local neighborhood in the northern hemisphere. And here the influence I think of the second unusual Darwin book, The Humblebee Hunter by Deborah Hopkinson kicks in, for in this author's story the science literally does take place at home, as Darwin's daughter Henrietta and other family members join her father to investigate how many times a bee will visit a flower in a minute.

Once again, this story has fictional elements (while Darwin investigated creatures in his home environment, and the children sometimes assisted, we have no record of the observational study Hopkinson sketches), and the fictionalization allows for a girl "naturalist" to take center stage. (This is Hopkinson's second Darwin book -- the first is a conventional biography from 2005 with the voyage at the center, Who Was Charles Darwin?) The cover of the Humblee Hunter has Etty enlarged in the foreground eye to eye with a bee -- an image that resonates with the composition of my child's drawing -- with Darwin off in the distance, a smaller background figure. Her favorite stories, Hopkinson recounts:

were about Father roaming the world to collect fossils, shells, sea creatures and plants. I imagined myself beside him, touching the back of a giant tortoise, watching iguanas dive, or laughing at a blue-footed booby dance!

Darwin was still a collector, his daughter notes, although "most of all he collected questions." The illustrations (by Jen Corace) show Etty immersed in following her bee as it voyages from flower to flower, answering a question of scientific importance for which the answer is not yet known. It seems that the generation of scientific knowledge can occur in one's own backyard, with little more than a pocket watch and sharp eyes -- even if the eyes are those of a child. 

In thinking about the ways in which my daughter's drawing seemed to be inspired by a particular set of authorial choices -- here, Weaver's and Hopkinson's -- I realized that casting an analytical eye on each story was about more than figuring out what happens to the historical Darwin or to the theory of evolution when it is scaled down for children's consumption. Especially in the ways in which fictionalized elements in these books transformed the stories so that they provided imaginative springboards for children to see themselves as participants in science for real, and not simply as "practicing" science, they were about something even more important than the scientific content itself: they were about what the scientific content represented in relation to the readers themselves. Somewhere around the ages of 7-10 American children begin to identify themselves as being "a science person" or "not a science person," when each one of them should be coming into their own through opportunities to experience themselves as competent interpreters of nature. The point of being exposed to investigating the natural world is not simply to start future scientists on their path, or to enlighten those who will not become scientists as to "what the scientific method is": it should be to nurture the multiplicity of ways in which each of us can feel at home as lifelong students of nature, most of all in "collecting questions."

Just last year, the competency of child students of nature became a news story, when a scientific paper on the "Blackawton Bees Project" was peer-reviewed and published in a major scientific journal -- the project being an experiment created by twenty-five grade-schoolers in Britain, in which they studied how spatial and color relationships influence foraging behavior in bees. The project and its publication garnered a great deal of commentary -- see, for example, the accounts by Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science and Alom Shaha in the Guardian, along with the comments for each post-- about the state of school science, the atypical advantages of having a scientist-parent of one of the students to guide the project, whether the bar was lowered for the students to publish (there were no references to other work) and more. 

Our images of both childhood and of science come heavily-freighted, and we need to understand better what happens when we bring these two culturally-laden categories into contact with each other, whether as abstract idealizations, commercial products, educational efforts, or social reflection. Historians of science typically have spent little time thinking about science and childhood, given the seemingly sensible conclusion that science is adult business, not least in its post-graduate guise in the modern era. But I can't help thinking that we may learn more than we can currently imagine about science and culture by collecting questions about the intersection of scientific dynamics and childhood realities, and how we make and remake our world through both.

a child's-eye view of charles darwin

Last year was the 150th anniversary celebration of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (and the 200th anniversary of his birth), with lots of hoopla in the form of academic conferences, museum exhibits, magazine essays, and the like. A little-noticed side phenomenon in academia was a surge in the publication of children's books on Darwin, especially picture books for kids in the 6-12 age range. As an historian of science with a special interest in science and popular culture, including children's literature (and who had recently taught a class on science and biography in which I made sure to include children's science biographies) I was curious about what I'd find by taking a look through some of these recent books, especially as "Darwin" and "controversy" is such an unyielding theme in American popular culture.

But I was interested for a more personal reason as well: in 2008 I'd begun to pull together a "home school" program on evolution for my daughter (who was seven going on eight), because she wasn't satisfied that she understood how life changed over time just by knowing that there were different kinds of pre-historic fossils and that dinosaurs had disappeared at some point -- she wanted to know more about how it  actually worked. (We spend a lot of time in our house on "how things work," mostly when we come across various contemporary artifacts that have been taken apart in order for a certain someone to get a good "grasp" of the innards. It reminds me of what a young James Clerk Maxwell was supposed to have gone around demanding of elders who trafficked in vague and unsatisfactory explanations -- "yes, but what's the particular go of it?") The adventure of putting together what she calls "mommy science" goes into a future blog post, but in this one and the next I want to take up the question of the Darwin picture books as contributions to kids' informal science education.

The most striking dimension of the books is how so many of them are focused on Darwin's voyage as the core for the text and pictures. In some ways this must have been an overdetermined choice: a worldwide voyage has built-in appeal in terms of drama and plenty of room for the "exotic" to be on display as an attention-grabber; Darwin himself left behind an account of the voyage that has been popular since the 19th century, along with notebooks that allow the children's stories therefore to have the literal voice of the scientist inscribed within them for authenticity; and Darwin's role as naturalist on the voyage allows for a presentation that draws on familiar genres such as the nature documentary, animal tales, and picturing the globe as a patchwork of ecological habitats (not to mention resonances to more commercially-oriented fare such as Pirates of the Caribbean and the Rainforest Cafe). As an entry into the marketplace, using the voyage as the focal point for books on Darwin hits the educational/entertainment marketing sweet spot.

What I most appreciated about the voyage books in general were the opportunities for beautiful, sometimes inspired illustrations  -- the merging of science and art makes for a wonderful partnership in presenting both, and allows for each to become something more complex and enticing than each alone. Because I wish there was more attention to the visual imagination in introducing children to science, this aspect of the Darwin cache was a delight. Even a book that had a more cartoon-like/graphic novel tone that didn't generally appeal to me visually still had some striking images that did, such as a vividly blue iguana dominating the title page or an almost psychedelic drawing of "The Tree of Life" in all its wildly branching forms (What Darwin Saw: The Journey that Changed the World, by Rosalyn Schanzer as author and illustrator -- the link to the book includes both images on the website, just scroll down). In general, the books' illustrations tend to the slapstick-y more often than not (with varying levels of pulling it off), but the variety of visual approaches is a treat, from the "ye old wood-engraving" style of Alice McGinty's Darwin (illustrated by Mary Azarian in jewel-like hues) to the mid-tone pastels of the impressionistic What Mr. Darwin Saw (text and pix by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom) to the mixed-media collages that pop off the page of One Beetle Too Many by Kathryn Lasky, with illustrations by Matthew Trueman. In fact, in my science and biography class, we had a lively discussion of what might happen if the visual freedoms of children's picture book biographies infiltrated the adult book market (for some sense of the possibilities, the stunning and thought-provoking examples of biographies as art in the graphic mode of  G.T Labs' "true science comics" are stand-outs, such as  Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries and the Century He Shaped, and my favorite of the bunch, Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb. And, yes, I've assigned both of these at one time or another as texts in my history of science survey courses.)

But the examples mentioned above don't exhaust the number of entries in the "voyage that changed the world" category. Others were even more elaborate, kitted up as "travel albums," really going to town with the 19th-century naval adventure "life at sea" theme, such as Charles Darwin and the Beagle Adventure by 
A.J. Wood and Clint Twist (with hefty boards and little pockets and envelopes inside with pull-out memoranda, photographs, and such) and Lifelines: Charles Darwin by Alan Gibbons and illustrated by Leo Brown, which uses the conceit of a ship's cabin boy observing the scientist and diarying his observations (the cover features a brilliant blue butterfly "specimen" under a half-globe of plastic surrounded by a compass rose to inaugurate the field collecting vibe.)  And there are still others as well -- and after working my way through maybe one voyage too many, I began to have my doubts about the approach. The multi-layered cleverness of using the voyage as the focus began to seem to have another contributory current as well: with "the voyage" as the overarching frame, the potentially discomfiting aspects of the historical narrative regarding evolution are displaced by the focus on  Darwin before he was an evolutionist -- with the evolutionary "aftermath" rendered literally as a textual aftermath.

Focusing on the voyage seemed to diminish an introduction to evolution in two key ways. First off, the evolutionary ideas that result from the voyage get nowhere near the same interesting treatment in the books as does the voyage itself, being relegated to the final pages (if covered much at all), and thus one curiously gets books on this score that allow you a kind of "safe" look at Darwin, because it is the joy of collecting oddities of nature and experiencing globe-trotting adventures (silly sailor pranks crossing the equator! earthquakes! volcanoes! huge fossil deposits! gauchos on the Pampas!) that are front and center, rather than the evolutionary theories that Darwin and others will develop. And here, the emphasis on the sesquicentennial of the Origin itself encourages a truncated view, as Darwin says next to nothing about human evolution in the Origin, and it is in his later works -- which appear amidst a community of inquiry on evolution -- that you see him take on more controversial ramifications of "Darwinism" (which, of course, in and of itself, does not exhaust approaches to evolution in his own time period). The voyage theme elicits a child-safe book that enfolds evolution into a comforting Victorian patina of wonder at wild nature, with the difficult bits shoe-horned in later.

Secondly, by emphasizing the voyage as an empirical scrapbook setpieces /powerpoint slide presentation as instantiating how Darwin became the "discoverer" of evolution, a somewhat reductionist argument is embedded in the text, but especially in the pictures: that Nature displayed itself to Darwin, he saw and recorded, and evolutionary theory was revealed. (This is especially underwritten by how the visit to the Galapagos becomes the culmination of Darwin's intellectual journey, a kind of quest in which he has been tested and in the process increasingly honed his mind and body into a receptive vessel in which to receive the truth that the hand of Nature -- as we "know" with hindsight -- lays out before him on his pilgrim's progress.)  Thus, evolutionary theory was there "in Nature" all the time, simply hidden from view by the tangled vines of the south American interior, and by the blindness of the scientific community prior to Darwin's voyage, and by the obscurantist haze cast by "Christians" ( . . . and how religion and science is understood in the books tends only to exacerbate misconceptions about their relationship in this time period).

It is true that the books usually note that many years of study and hard work followed Darwin's voyage, and they may even present little capsules about some of the other scientists from the time -- although Alfred Wallace, whose own voyage of discovery as the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection could make up an interesting parallel in the books, usually only appears as a deus ex machina to get the Origin published, which is especially frustrating since "voyage" is the governing concept for the books and hence to bring in Wallace would seem to offer an intriguing point of comparison. But if you take the books on their own terms in regard to what the bulk of the pages feature and how they build to a crescendo -- and in what gets most intently presented in textual and visual form -- it is the voyage itself that matters most of all, not the later years. It is on his voyage that Darwin encountered nature's truth in its raw, self-evident essence, where the evolutionary facts are in plain view. They may need further consideration, but in the end, the scientific word is written on the rocks.

This isn't a perspective on the history of science with which I'm particularly comfortable, as it draws a veil over the hard work of how scientific knowledge emerges, is debated, and then rendered authoritative in a dynamic interplay along many dimensions. And it does, again, tend to make for a "safe" presentation of Darwin and science, rehabilitating him, perhaps, from invidious perspectives that have convinced many that the word "Darwin" is synonymous with hidden agendas that aim to hijack scientific thought for the purpose of destroying faith in God on dishonest pretenses. A depiction of a robust and engagingly curious young Charles who is almost a blank slate, aside from his fondness for beetles -- indeed, who is an orthodox believer at the start of the voyage -- as an alert conduit for Nature's empirical truth is hard to square with a vision of a sinister and conniving Darwin out to dupe the devout as the devil's chaplain. There's an undertone of scientific apotheosis that I'm not eager to pass along with lessons on evolution if that's what comes along with a child's-eye view of Charles Darwin.

My own reservations aside, I let my daughter rummage through the books and what she seemed to notice most was just the sheer bulk and repetitiveness of representations of Darwin and the voyage, Darwin being a relatively new name for her and his voyage as well: clearly here was something that mattered to adults, if it was repeated over and over for kids! One day, however, I came across an unfinished  image she created in her computer art program, titled "discover with Mr.Darwin." Interestingly, it was not the young Darwin, and it didn't come with a portrayal of ships and adventure, or the wild and exotic. Instead, a disembodied Darwin, his long white bearded face aloft in the sky just under a smiling sun (although with the beard blending into the grassy expanse below), is introducing himself by name to a rather large bluebird in a tree, eye-to-eye, in a perfectly ordinary neighborhood setting.

It seems as if it was another Darwin that she took to heart and made her own, from an alternate set of children's Darwin picture books than those above. These were books that took a different tack, one significant aspect being that they threw off the overwhelming "a boys' Darwin" tone that tended to be embedded within these voyage books, with their affection for nautical hi-jinks and male bonding and the idea of Charles as a salty adventurer. They brought, if you will, a differently gendered Darwin into view, one which was made possible by taking liberties with the historical conventions so dutifully enacted in most of the picture books. And they -- Peter Sis' The Tree of Life, Anne Weaver's The Voyage of the Beetle, and Deborah Hopkinson's The Humblebee Hunter -- deserve a blog post of their own.
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For more: For a short description of an undergrad book exhibit we put together at OU in the History of Science Collections, see The Children's Darwin. For reviews and notes on children's books about Darwin (especially around the recent anniversary-related publishing surge), see: School Library Journal Reviews; Bookslut; Children's Literature; the Dispersal of Darwin blog (the link matches up with a search for "children's books" on the site, so be sure to scroll all the way down to see everything), and the pdf list compiled at Charlie's Playhouse.

prototyping participation over presentation: "the children's darwin" & "undergrads at the collections"

As my academic department considers how to widen our outreach to undergrads with the proposed introduction in 2011 of a major in the history of science, technology, and medicine, I've been trying to work out ways to open up connections on our campus between the world we study and students from any background. I want to downplay bureaucratic brochureware in our online presence in favor of highlighting ways that anyone can enter the conversation about the constellation of ideas, issues, events, people, and consequences that make up hsci/med/tech -- entry points that could end up in direct connections with our department, but that could also foster other, user-directed connections just as easily. In thinking this through I'm working with a web 2.0 ethic in prototyping a set of loosely joined projects with digital components: think of it as roughing in the outlines of a dept. 2.0 identity, which opens up the possibility of changed relationships among those who make a learning community a learning community.

A web 2.0 attitude entails a shift from relying on default communication norms on our dept. website that focus on presentation (of "us" faculty and the dept. we have made -- "our" degrees, "our" research, "our" teaching, "our" priorities -- with pix of students sprinkled throughout, to be sure, to show we are student-friendly) to communication norms that facilitate participation: enabling our departmental digital presence to serve as a conduit for students themselves to experiment with defining what it means to engage in "exploring science : technology : medicine : past to present" in terms of their own experiences, their own connections, and their own pathways -- whether as majors, as minors, as individuals who might take a class or two with us, or just as someone who is curious enough about the area to find us on the internet. (Previous posts in this series can be found here and here.) This digital presence would also enable engagement by students with a wide array of others, both similar to and different than themselves, both on-campus and from beyond our hallowed prairie-ivy walls. How to start?

My primary effort has been aimed at creating an Undergraduate Portal for hsci/med/tech that will have its foothold on our department website, but will effectively be its own "start" page: a launch point for visitors to "do" things, rather than be told things. At the Undergrad Portal -- which will begin being phased in this fall, once our newly designed main website is functional -- the doing can run from obvious housekeeping matters such as finding out what next semester's classes will be or how you can declare a minor, to more expansive activities such as engaging in undergraduate humanities research (particularly by making use of digital resources -- in fact, the topic of digital hsci/med/tech research for undergrads will branch off into a companion website, hosted off the university server, because it is meant to be more than an institution-bound effort). A related, similar offshoot that I began piecing together first is "Undergrads at the Collections," which introduces possibilities for undergrad research using rotating themes, set up both as physical exhibits at OU's History of Science Collections at Bizzell Library and in a digital format via blog entries and supporting pages at the Undergrads at the Collections weblog site. The idea is that each version of the exhibit can stand alone, allowing for different forms of outreach, but that they can also be melded together, as discussed below. Our first exhibit is "The Children's Darwin," a display of children's picture books on the 19th-century naturalist, many of them published in 2009 with the peg of the celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species on which to hang their own appearance. The books are interesting artifacts for looking at how history of science is portrayed to a culture's youngest members.

The Curators of OU's History of Science Collections are genuinely welcoming of the public and all members of the university community, including students -- see their blog, for example -- but the Collections' space itself is nevertheless somewhat intimidating, what with visitors having to be buzzed in at the front doors, and with the books shelved away in stacks that need to be accessed by staff members, and with the items that are out front in the display cases being rare, fragile, and treated with reverence. On the other hand, the physical version of the Undergrad Exhibit, for which we've been allowed to homestead a small portion of the Collections' public reading room, is purposefully casual: the books aren't so valuable that they need to be housed behind glass, precisely so anyone can walk over, pick them up and literally hold them and browse through them, just as you would at your local library or bookstore. There is comfortable seating and tables that you can use to spend whatever time you'd like -- long or short -- with the books. There's an info sheet describing the exhibit, along with a discussion of how this kind of topic lends itself to research questions that connect up with real world issues, and suggests how the topic -- and offshoots from it -- offers useful starting points for user-generated content, if you will.

By adding a digital version of the exhibit, we can multiply its presence in several ways: by providing the ability for users to offer comments at the blog (our goal is to have an available laptop with the books so that visitors can add comments then and there via wifi) -- comments that live on the open web as contributions that make them more than a mere academic exercise (as with a typical class assignment one turns in to the instructor). Being on the open web, comments and queries from others anywhere at all with an interest in the topic or approach can also weigh in, adding to the interactive possibilities; and a digital version can also help to give members of the general public the same opportunity as the students to see what historical research can look like, demystified -- and comment themselves, if they'd like, and join the conversation, or use it to think with for their own purposes. Digitizing the exhibit also allows us to provide further links to research resources appropriate for undergrads or others interested in starting out on exploring the topic; and with digital versions, each successive exhibit can be layered on to the previous ones in an incremental fashion, creating a multi-dimensional archive that highlights the possibilities of humanities research by students, available to anyone brainstorming instructional projects.

This first display -- "The Children's Darwin" -- along with the next one or two Undergrad Exhibits, are occurring during what might be called the "silent phase" of our "academic department as web 2.0 campaign" -- rather like the early non-publicized period in a fundraising effort that quietly solicits donations so that the goals are already half-way met by the time that the endowment campaign is formally announced to the public. We hope to build up awareness bit by bit as we prototype, display, refine, and improvise on our way to providing working examples of how an interactive presence with undergrads and others can work -- so that when our department gets its window of greater visibility that will come with rolling out the major in a year or so we can already be experimenting in interactive terms, offering participatory possibilities in many forms, rethinking the variability and lability of what "open courseware" can be when the faculty, students, and members of the public create it together.

In dedicating a physical space specifically for undergrads at the Collections -- which is our department's "humanities laboratory" -- we want to literally demonstrate that, yes, you belong here; in choosing books that can be placed out for handling and interactive use, that are meant as starting points that can tell multiple stories simultaneously, depending on the individual pathways one chooses, we want to emphasize that humanities are for everybody; and by offering examples of research topics that demonstrate you don't have to be a faculty member to do history, we hope to make our discipline, and our research home itself, less intimidating to students, creating a space that facilitates the use of all kinds of media as social media. We often have our students visit the Collections and bring out treasures to show them, and some of us have even devised exercises that allow our students to use Collections' volumes as part of our class projects. But it is very rare that students come back on their own, or feel confident that they truly can be part of the research community, no matter how heartily we invite them to do so. Thinking in web 2.0 terms can change this, because our invitations will be more believable, visualizable, and doable, for students from any major. There's no reason not to think that in the near future we can have undergrads curating their own exhibits, sending their own queries and examples out onto the web, cultivating conversations among a diverse array of participants, and being members of a shape-shifting collective that helps us think of history as public history, belonging to all.

So that's some of the rationale as to the "why" of our Undergrad Exhibits prototype, "The Children's Darwin." There'll be a new exhibit for Fall 2010, so more on that to come; but how about the "what" of "The Children's Darwin" itself? You didn't think I could leave that topic before making an observation or two of my own, did you? That's coming!

watching the detectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

science in the everyday world

Usually scholarly articles are hidden behind subscription walls, so it’s nice to be able to share a recent piece that I wrote with Karen Rader that is open access, courtesy of Isis (the flagship journal of the History of Science Society) and the University of Chicago Press: "Science in the Everyday World: Why the History of Science Matters" (full text or .pdf). The essay is part of a set of articles that takes on the question of whether or not research in history of science might be of any value for working scientists, as opposed to an activity that is simply of interest to other historians. As explained in the introductory essay (full text or .pdf) to this "Focus Section," the impetus for this topic came from two scholars who have long been involved with thinking hard about this question, and who have worked closely with scientists: Jane Maienschein (currently president of the History of Science Society) and George Smith (who was director of the former Dibner Institute at MIT, which housed a library and funded fellowships in historical research). They brought together a group of two-dozen or so of us for a week-long workshop at Woods Hole, which then gave rise to these thinkpieces. Jane and George charged us with the task of writing our essays for scientists as our primary audience, rather than historians, even though they would be appearing in the pages of a history of science journal. This isn’t as strange an idea as it might sound at first, because of the fact that these essays would be open access and thus easy for anyone to retrieve and circulate, increasing the odds that discussions might follow beyond the normal circle of historians of science.

I’ve been off writing a book, but already there’s been some discussions started – which is a great credit to Jane, George, and Bernie Lightman, the editor of Isis who greenlighted this Focus section – and so while I’m taking a quick breather before diving back into writing chapters, I wanted to expand a bit on some of what has been raised in response to our contribution on popular culture (there are links to that commentary at the bottom of this post – if you know of others, just send them along and I’ll update this page). In addition, we’ve heard from colleagues that the essay will be useful for teaching interdisciplinary classes – that’s great news! And Karen will also be posting some further thoughts below in the comments, so be sure to take a look.

We had a head-start on thinking about how to present our topic to scientists because so many of the participants in the Woods Hole workshop do science, which included such formidable figures as a Nobel Prize- winning physicist (yes, really!) and the head honcho of one of the National Science Foundation’s Directorates. (I know I can speak for both Karen and myself on this point: that we really appreciate the ideas that were generated by all of the workshop participants in helping us think through different dimensions of the popular culture question, and also would send a big vote of appreciation to the third member of our "popular culture & scientists" mini-group, Bernie Lightman.)

One thing we knew we had to do in our essay was to present some of the backstory of why historians of science study popular science, and where we’re at today, since we couldn’t presume that a scientist would be as familiar as we are, say, with debates over "the deficit model," or the classic Cooter and Pumfrey article, or the state-of-the-art work being done in Victorian science and popular culture. We also chose two 20^th -century areas to focus on, one based on Karen’s on-going research on science museums, and a second from mine on images of "the intimate scientist" in more ephemeral forms of mass media (magazine articles and television shows). I see each of the sections in the essay as exemplifying a common emphasis across time and place (even as they diverge in important ways): that is, an insistence, on the part of public audiences, on seeing science as a humanistic activity, with important light to shed on questions of personal and cultural meaning, even as science is at the same time based on technical, experimental, and quantitative practices. As evidenced in these popular domains, the search for scientific knowledge is deeply-implicated in philosophical questions that people are concerned about, and want to discuss: How do we know when we know things? How is truth defined? How should we expect nature to behave? What does it mean to say that something is natural or unnatural? What is a human being? How are human beings different from animals? From machines? What relationships make society possible? What is our place in the universe? . . .well, you get the idea.

So I would say that the first answer to the question of what value research in science and popular culture might offer to scientists is that the study of popular discourse demonstrates the existence of a persistent challenge to the idea that science is a powerful but (merely) technical activity in which various creative individuals spend time trying to unlock empirical puzzles so as to understand and control nature – leaving "cultural meanings" as downstream epiphenomena that are separate from the practice of science, and thus of no relevant concern to practitioners, who simply wish to get on with their jobs. In short, from the vantage point of various publics there is no humanities/science split: science is humanistic. What happens, then, when an insistence on thinking about science humanistically in the public sphere runs up against professional norms that privilege presenting science as a technical activity (a body of problem sets, methods, results, further questions)? I believe that a number of ramifications follow (hence, the chapters of that book I’m writing that I need to get back to :-) but in the compass of this short, suggestive reflective essay in Isis, we propose at least one: that you get a pattern of unresolved tensions that characterize relations between science and the public in American culture today, despite the high esteem in which science is held generally.

If this vernacular discourse about the humanistic aspects of science exists, and if it doesn’t match the expectations of the professional community about how they would prefer to conduct a public discussion of scientific facts, then how might understanding this history be helpful to scientists? We offer a prescriptive answer: scientists should think about listening to this conversation and participating in it. I know, I know – who are we, as mere historians, to be so forward as to tell scientists what to do? Well, remember, that was what we were asked by our workshop conveners to do: to be so bold as to venture an historically considered opinion! So, why should scientists do this? Well, the most straightforward answer is that we do not believe that the tensions that emerge between these two competing approaches can be worked through successfully if: scientists don’t take more seriously the commentary on the scientific enterprise that circulates in the public domain; if they don’t recognize how crucial that the discussions of the humanistic dimensions of scientific activity are in this regard; and if they don’t begin thinking about how they themselves can engage as participants in public discourse and also think about how to engage the public as participants in science. In large part, because those who run the scientific enterprise are the ones who set the terms of access, that is why, like it or not, the burden is on the scientific community. Where to start? One method has been to call upon the sociologists to run surveys of public opinion and do related research and to use these results to provide insight into what the public is thinking and also about how best "to reach" the public (see, for example, the sections on "Public Attitudes and Understanding" in the NSF Science and Engineering Indicators reports, which come out every two years. Here is the one for 2008.). In my view, that only gets you so far, and in the essay a key argument of ours is that the analytical tools of a humanistic discipline like history are crucial components to understanding the terrain of popular culture, which serves as an "intellectual commons" for commentary by non-experts on the scientific enterprise.

Certainly, there are mediating infrastructures that have grown up during the twentieth century to deal with these issues – specifically, science journalists, science communicators, and science educators – and there are certainly some scientists who even find it worthwhile (or at least useful) to engage with these mediators. In our essay, however, we didn’t include this aspect of the question of science and the public simply because we believe that the question of popular culture encompasses a much wider set of questions, topics, and dimensions in terms of the circulation of scientific knowledge than do traditional definitions of what constitutes science communication. There is a tendency on the part of scientists, when thinking about science communication, to pose inquiry in terms of what the best practices might be to follow in order that scientists can most effectively convey their views to the public, so that the public has an understanding that is as close as possible to that of the scientists who are seeking to deliver information from origination point A (them) to destination point B (the public). In short, typically they look to research in science communication to learn how to clarify and amplify the scientist’s voice. Alternatively, analysis from the vantage point of the history of popular culture suggests that there would be value in scientists thinking of themselves not only as points of origin for communication but as destination points as well. The argument in our article is that scientists need to think not only about what they want to say, and how to say (frame?) it, but to think also about why (and how) they should listen to what non-experts have to say to them. At heart, this is an issue in the politics of knowledge, and the ways in which those politics stunt or facilitate democratic participation.

What are the possible ramifications of this listening exercise? That is really the point at which we ended the essay, because we would only know what new sets of questions would be opened up if scientists chose to take up this issue. To spell it out in a bit more detail: What if, in listening to the public’s questions and answers about humanistic science, scientists find that this discussion challenges current ways of doing business? How would scientists respond to this circumstance? If we reach a crossroads in which values and expectations diverge, what consequences are we willing to accept given which directions are taken? It is the case that the essay doesn’t lay out a blueprint or mount a manifesto about what comes next. But just getting to that starting point seems plenty big enough of an obstacle to me. (In the British and European contexts there are quite explicit debates on these political questions – for an excellent analysis, I recommend Mark Elam and Margareta Bertilsson, "Consuming, Engaging and Confronting Science: The Emerging Dimensions of Scientific Citizenship," European Journal of Social Theory, 2003, 6:233-251; abstract.)

Do circuits of communication currently exist outward from science to the public? – indeed, and blogs are certainly a new form of this outreach as some of the commentary to our piece suggest. And yet: to what extent does this outreach consist of listening to non-experts as well as broadcasting to them? That’s one question that I think should be asked much more often than it is, and that’s the one we put forward in our essay. In the end, is this question about public engagement only of relevance for the scientific community? No! Each year that I have been an historian of science I have become more and more concerned with the distance that exists between historians of science and the public, and that’s what I spend most of my time thinking about (see, for example, my 2005 plenary address to the joint meeting of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology: "'What Have We to Do with Mr. Everyman, or He with Us?’: Reflections on Professionalism, the Public and the Digital Age.") Professionalization and specialization pose difficult problems for the healthy functioning of a democratic society, and if experts insist on engaging only with other experts then the promise of democracy will be a hollow one.
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For more: Here are links to discussions that began about our piece in the blogosphere and that prompted some of what I've written above: see Will Thomas at ether wave propaganda; Michael Robinson at time to eat the dogs; and Alexis Turner at red-headed stepchild. More general discussions can be found by Benjamin Cohen at the world's fair and by John Lynch at stranger fruit (which also includes links to further discussions). 

Image: A bit of science that circulated in the everyday world, evoking "the intimate scientist": an autographed copy of the December 1965 issue of National Geographic with Jane Goodall on the cover, which also carries a streamer promoting the television special. From andycarvin's photostream at flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andycarvin/2518666389/