Taught by Colin MacCabe, Robert Bud, John Dupre, Frances Gooding, and Peter Morris
The course aims to introduce students to the accounts that historians and philosophers of science offer of the role played by experiment in the natural sciences. By taking four moments in the history of science from Galileo to the present day, the course hopes to reflect on experiment in relation to both artistic and scientific practice.
1. Experiment in 1876 and 2010
The first seminar will locate us firmly in the science museum with Clerk Maxwell’s introductory essay in the book that accompanied the exhibition of scientific apparatuses in 1876 and which has some claim to be the foundation of the Science Museum. We will also look at the middle section of Ian Hacking’s book representing and intervening which wishes to award a very different kind of primacy to, and understanding of, experiment.
Reading
James Clerk Maxwell, ‘General Considerations Concerning Scientific Apparatus’ in South Kensington Museum, Handbook to the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus 1876 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1876), pp. 1-21. Available online here.
Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983)
2. Galileo and Milton
In the fabulous world of Paradise Lost, we can encounter most of the mythical beings from both the classical and the Judeo-Christian tradition. There are, however, only two contemporaries represented: Milton, himself, and Galileo who Milton had met as a young man on visit to Italy, just before civil war broke out in England. The class will look at how both Galileo and Milton might have understood experiment and how those different understandings reflect on the Royal Society’s elaboration of experiment in the first decade of its existence.
Reading
Peter Machamer, ‘Galileo Galilei’, Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy here.
Milton Paradise Lost Book 1 lines 1-315. Available online here.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985), chapter 2, pp. 22-79. here.
3. Darwin and Narration
If notions of crucial experiment have some plausibility with regard to physics and chemistry, they have little when applied to the history of biology. Famously Popper once thought that evolution could not count as a scientific theory because it was impossible to imagine how it could be falsified by experiment. Over the past four decades the role of narrative in Darwin’s thinking has been an increasing focus of literary study and it is that role that will be examined in this seminar.
Reading
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter 1. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), chapter 1. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
4. Einstein and Picasso
The cubism of Picasso and Braque was a revolution in the pictorial representation of objects in space. It was not only closely contemporary with the revolution in physics associated with Albert Einstein, but took place in a Parisian milieu whose leading lights took a close interest in recent developments in non-Euclidean geometry and ‘the fourth dimension’. This session aims to examine the cubist vision as a visual counterpart to the new representations of reality in early 20th century science.
Reading
Linda Dalrymple Henderson. ‘The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Cubist Theory and Practice’, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 74-103. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
Arthur Miller, ‘Picasso and Braque Explore Space’, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 74-103. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
Meyer Schapiro ‘Einstein and Cubism: Science and Art’, The Unity of Picasso’s Art (New York: George Braziller, 2000) pp. 49-151. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
Albert Einstein, ‘Geometry and Experience’, Ideas and Opinions (London: Souvenir, 2005), pp. 232-46. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
Henri Poincaré, ‘Space and Geometry’, Science and Hypothesis (London: Walter Scott, 1905), pp. 51-71. Available online here.
5. Biology and Computing
Contemporary biology, like many parts of science, is increasingly dependent on computer technology. Among many sites for this interdependence, probably the most significant is the growth of high volume, high throughput molecular data generation, of which the best known instance is high speed gene sequencing. The question what to do with this data has spawned the boom in systems biology and has led many to question orthodox assumptions about science as hypothesis-driven. As biological models become ever more complex, the philosophical question also arises whether scientific explanation should require the possibility of (human) understanding.
Reading
Barry Barnes and John Dupré, Genomes and What to Make of Them (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), chapter 2, pp. 47-74. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
Maureen O’Malley and John Dupré , ‘Fundamental Issues in Systems Biology’, BioEssays, 27 (2005): 1270-76. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
Gordon Bell, Tony Hey and Alex Szalay, ‘Beyond the Data Deluge’, Science, 323 (2009): 1297 – 99. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
Doug Kell and Stephen G. Oliver, ‘The Complementary Roles of Inductive and Hypothesis-Driven Science in the Post-Genomic Era’, BioEssays, 26 (2004): 99-105. Available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
Sabina Leonelli, ‘On the Locality of Data and Claims About Phenomena’, Philosophy of Science 76 (2009), forthcoming. Draft version available on Birkbeck Blackboard.
6. Conclusion
We will use the Crick/Watson model of DNA in the Science Museum to question the role of models in scientific thinking. This example will be contrasted with a contemporary experiment in writing, art or film.
