Picturing science: comet watching

Cross-posted from The H Word blog.

‘Looking at the comet till you get a criek in the neck’. Detail of a caricature by

Thomas Rowlandson, 1811. Source: National Maritime Museum

Having begun my series called Picturing Science, I realised that I have stolen the title of another website, which does at least give me an excuse to point those interested in imagery in the history of science to the Origins of Science as a Visual Pursuit project. This fascinating academic project is looking in detail at images as an integral part of doing science, while my series is – for now at least – more focused on science in the public sphere.

Thus, while last week’s fanciful image was produced in the sober, educational context of an encyclopedia, this week’s takes us from the heavens right down to earth. It is a caricature by Thomas Rowlandson, published by Thomas Tegg in 1811, and can be viewed in full here.

On one level the print satirises the increasing popular interest in astronomy in the first half of the 19th century. With telescopes increasingly affordable, and comets in the news, there were undoubtedly more individuals than ever who, like this man in his nightcap and nightgown, were straining to view the heavens until they “get a criek [sic] in the neck”.

1805 had seen what is now known as Encke’s comet and Biela’s comet, two years later there was the much more spectacular Great Comet of 1807. In the year that this print was published, another bright comet, with a remarkable reddish colour and broad tail, was visible to the naked eye for around 260 days. This was the Great Comet of 1811.

As so often, in history and even today, the appearance of a bright comet was connected to particular events on earth. 1811, for example, saw a particularly good wine vintage, and so Comet Wine was marketed. However, it was also interpreted as having portended Napoleon’s invasion of Russia the following year – not least by Napoleon himself – and became known as Napoleon’s Comet. However, something else of earthly – or, perhaps, earthy – concern is happening in this caricature.

While the old man’s eye is glued to his telescope, and his mind contemplating the heavens, another man takes advantage of the situation, paying lascivious attention to the astronomer’s young and attractive wife. Just to make the relationship clear, her fur stole appears to add a tail to the older man – a symbol, like horns, of the cuckold.

This joke, about astronomers and enthusiasts being so wrapped up in their ideas, views of nature and gadgets that they fail to see what is going on under their noses, is an old one. It appears in Gulliver’s Travels among the inhabitants of the floating island Laputa, who I mentioned inmy post on Swift and satire. It is, unsurprisingly, a common trope of caricature, something I discussed with some other examples in an old post on caricaturing astronomers.

You can see some other distracted astronomers and some 19th-century comet imagery from the National Maritime Museum’s collections and elsewhere on my Pinterest boards. Also on Pinterest are some morePutti of Science, collected by Danny Birchall after last week’s optical putti.

Picturing science: the eyes have it

Cross-posted from The H-Word blog.

Detail from an engraving depicting ‘Optics’ from the Encyclopaedia Londinensis.

Source: National Maritime Museum

In a series called Picturing Science, that seems appropriate to tired eyes at the end of the week, I am going to explore some images from the history of science. In this I am taking advantage of my role as a curator, and the kind permission of the Picture Library, to draw on the object and art collections of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

The imagery surrounding science has changed hugely over the course of history, and it is undoubtedly the case that the way it is depicted influences our ideas about it. The colouring, the context, the associations all play their part in giving signals about what science is, who does it, who should care about it and why.

The picture heading this post is a striking detail from the centre of a print, one of a number that were my first cataloguing project on joining the Museum back in 2008. You can see the full image here. It is dated 1820 and, although not a particularly fine or rare image, is a long, long a way from how we might choose to depict the subject – Optics – today.

It was published in Encyclopaedia Londinensis, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, published in 24 volumes between 1810 and 1829, complied by the printer John Wilkes.

I am not sure who wrote the long treatise on optics, and would be grateful if anyone can let me know here or @beckyfh. However, we do know one of the readers: George Biddell Airy, Astronomer Royal from 1835-1881, recalled that he owed much of his early education in optics and the other sciences to the Encyclopaedia, writing in hisAutobiography that it was “a work which without being high in any respect is one of the most generally useful that I have seen”.

The print engraver is J. Chapman, who was responsible for most of the plates in the Encyclopaedia. The artist of many of the more technical illustrations, such as this one, was J. Pass. However, this rather more fanciful image is credited to A.D.M. Whoever this was, they had a splendid way of imagining the science of light: rainbow nymphs surrounding an eye, in the corners putti demonstrate instruments and phenomena.

This putto shows off a camera obscura, a device for projecting an image onto a surface to aid the artist.

This one shows us the phenomena of refraction, with light appearing to bend a stick as it passes through water.

This chap seems to have his telescope trained directly on the charming sight of the red nymph (take a look!).

And, finally, in the bottom left corner, this putto has created the whole scene by holding up his prism - the iconic instrument of of optics – to split light into its seven colours.

It is a science not disembodied but, apparently, teaming with people, even if they are of a distinctly mythical sort.

 

Update:

The artist, A.D.M. is identified on the Wellcome website as Ange Denis Macquin, who seems to have written (or illustrated?) a book on animals and a Latin poem on gastronomy… The Hebrew at the top of the picture appeared to be, as might be guessed, “And God said ‘Let there be light’, and there was light”.

 

Gulliver’s travels in science and satire

Cross posted from The H Word blog.

For historians of science, Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels is well known both as a work of what we might call proto-science fiction and as a satire on the experimental philosophy that was being promoted by the Royal Society at the time of its publication – two years before the death of Isaac Newton.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a talk at the very same Society that Swift had mocked as wasting time on projects such as the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers. It was given by Dr Greg Lynall, a Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is author of Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, which looks well-worth a read from the review posted on the website of the British Society for Literature and Science.

Swift was a High Church Anglican and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Knowing this, some might leap to the conclusion that here was someone who did not and could not understand the important work being done by Fellows of the Royal Society, that here was a clash of world views and evidence of a natural hostility between science and religion. This, of course, is completely off track. It ignores the complexity of Swift’s views, the validity of some of his targets and the fact that, while sectarianism might be rife, the importance of religion per se was not in question.

In many ways the whole of Gulliver’s Travels is a satire on the scientific approach of the Royal Society. It is presented as a travel narrative, reporting on extraordinary sights and experiences in foreign lands in a calm, detached and, whenever possible, quantitative fashion. The Royal Society had often encouraged travellers to make such records and reported on information collected in circumstances that ranged across formal experiment, mathematical proof, astronomical observation, field work, library work, happenstance and even hearsay. Curiosities and natural monstrosities took their place alongside Newton’s crucial experiment.

The most significant section of the book from the history of science point of view is Gulliver’s visit to the floating island, Laputa, where the inhabitants are enamoured of mathematics, measuring, quantifying, experimenting and astronomical predictions. The island floats by magnetic levitation, in what seems to be one of the only ‘practical’ applications of their knowledge – their obsession with accurate measurement has led them to apply the use of quadrants to the art of tailoring, resulting only in badly-fitting clothes. Their heads literally in the clouds, they have to be woken up from their speculations to communicate with Gulliver.

Swift was satirising the ubiquity of Newtonian philosophy in polite society of 1720s London, but he was not being ‘anti-experimental philosophy’, just as no one today is ‘anti-science’. Yes, there was fun to be poked at some of the extravagances and plain oddness of the new philosophy and some its followers, just as in Thomas Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso, which targeted Robert Hooke. However, it works as satire because of genuine concerns lurking beneath – and some of those concerns remain legitimate today.

Most obviously, in Laputa, Swift criticises a world of mathematical and philosophical endeavour that does little or nothing to better people’s lives, especially those of their subjects in the colony Balnibarbi, located beneath the floating Laputa. In fact, satirising the power relations of Britain and Swift’s native Ireland or, more broadly, the rich and poor, we find that Laputa is used to subdue Balnibarbi by threats to block the sun or rain, by throwing down rocks, or even crushing rebel cities by lowering Laputa onto them.

While, in the real world, there was much rhetoric around the beneficial usefulness of new knowledge and, indeed, much focus on practical problems like navigation, mining and agriculture, Swift was surely right that useful applications of the new knowledge either seemed a long time coming, or were clearly in the interests of King, government, military and landowners (who, after all, are much more useful patrons of science than the poor).

Lynall’s talk made it clear how political much of Swift’s satire was, even when the focus might appear to be science. While often associated with the Tories, Swift was suspicious of party politics and the patronage and jobbing that went along with them. Newton became one of the targets of his attacks not because of his science, but because of his influential and very well remunerated position as Master of the Mint, bestowed on him by the Whigs.

Swift once claimed that he had a “perfect hatred of tyranny and oppression”. Lynall showed that if the knowledge or authority of experimental philosophy were used in backing it, that too should be called out. A key episode was where Newton presented evidence to back William Wood’s application for a valuable contract to make new coinage for Ireland. Corruption and bribery – including involvement ofthe King’s mistress – were widely rumoured, as was the claim that the coins were of inferior quality. Swift took Newton, and what he viewed as his fraudulent use of technical evidence in the assays he carried out in Wood’s favour, as legitimate targets for denunciation in his Drapier’s Letters and vicious satire.

Swifts targets were political and often very personal. But, where he smelt corruption, it would seem that the sins of blinding people with ‘the science’ or impressive credentials only made a bad job worse. Meanwhile, the folly of being satisfied simply with the wonder of astronomical prediction, experimental apparatus and exact measurement, while outside people continue to starve, is one we should always be reminded of by the best critics and satirists.

 

Three centuries of innovation and education at the Museum of Childhood

I recently visited the Museum of Childhood and took a few snaps of things that stood out (with apologies for the poor, beyond-glass images: it turns out that none of these items have been photographed for the V&A collections site yet). There were, of course, plenty of science-related toys on display. Chemistry sets, optical toys and a whole case devoted to lantern slides are just the tip of the iceberg. Children are surrounded by the new and by nostalgia, by pastimes that are meant to inform and which reflect the world around them

As a response to the novelty of hot air balloons, so well described in Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, I enjoyed this sampler. Samplers are designed to keep children still (probably usually girls, although we have an early 20th-century sampler in the family worked by a boy called Percy), are rigorously formal in their reproduction of letters and numbers and yet there was, presumably, some freedom in choice of decoration.

This sampler was sewn by Mary Hall in 1786, just three years after the first flight of the Mongolfier brothers. However, as the catalogue description notes, there is an interesting juxtaposition between the excitement of manned flight and the verse, ‘Fragrant the rose is’, above: “in a melancholy poetic tradition that dwelt on the brevity of mortal life and was particularly popular in Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries”.

Although they weren’t on display, the Museum an incomplete astronomy-themed sampler, which is pictured and discussed in this post: Star-gazing girls of Georgian England.

I was also pleased to come across this copy of Lessons on Objects (1840) by Elizabeth Mayo, who ran Cheam School in Surrey with her brother, together with a c.1850 box of specimens designed for educational use. Both were following the pedagogical methods of Yohann Pestalozzi, a Swiss reformer and idealist who advocated child-centred, hands-on, experimental and practical learning. The book encouraged children to use all their senses to explore the world around them, before being led to more systematic understanding. Mayo’s approach influenced the School Board for London, founded in 1870. The pre-prepared specimens includes all kind of materials: wax, gum, spices, fibres, paper, fur, metals (including mercury) and more.

My final object is a bit different. It is a board game from the 1970s that never quite took off, and gloried in the name Vagabondo. In case you want to know, the catalogue description gives the full rules of the game. It was a strategy game, “easy to learn and exciting to play” that could be adapted for 2, 4, or 3, 5 and 6 players. It seems to have been motivated by some high ideals, though what I am not entirely sure. Although it was not a commercial success it won the Queen’s Award for Achievement in 1978. Most fascinatingly of all, the box front includes not only a picture of the proud inventors but also a series of endorsements from a slightly bewildering range of famous individuals, who had clearly been informed of the ideas behind it. My pic wasn’t very legible, so here’s one I found online:

The celebrity endorsements were from Dame Margot Fonteyn De Arias (who “commends your reasons for inventing it”), Roald Dahl (“a splendid game”), Sir John Betjeman, Alan Whicker, Prof Desmond Morris (“certainly better than most other recently invented board games I have come across. I rate it as highly as the very successful Master Mind”), John Pertwee (“a very good game”), Hammond Innes (“a good one”), Poul Hartling (ex-Danish Prime Minister – “most interesting and enjoyable”), and Alfred Hitchcock (“I promise to spread the word, surreptitiously of course, among my friends here in California”).

What an odd collection of people! And what a wonderful collection of objects to explore in east London.

The trouble with ‘science’

Cross-posted from The H Word.

Test tubes? Check. Pipette? Check. Safety glasses? Check. White coat? Check. Random coloured liquid? Check. Photograph: Alamy

I find that I am nearly always on my guard when I come across the words “science” and “scientist” in a sentence. OK, maybe not nearly always; after all, I call myself a historian of science, I write this post in the science section of the Guardian’s website and am forever using the words myself. Nevertheless …

“Scientists say …” is a phrase that hides far more than it explains. Which scientists, working in what field, where and why? Geologists are unlikely to be saying much, for example, about cancer, although if they are we should probably assess their comments differently from those emanating from a medical research lab. One group of chemists/astronomers/climate scientists may say something very different to another. Scientists can be academics, working in industry or for government departments, military or civilian. They can be pursuing original research or making use of routine techniques.

“Scientists say” is little more use, in fact, than “they say”. It just sounds more authoritative. Strangely, though, while use of the term is usually unhelpfully vague, the iconography of science and scientists is very often too specific. Thus test tubes and white coats have become the overriding symbol for people and activities that may have nothing whatsoever to do with these objects.

The words also start my historical sensibilities twitching, on the alert for anachronism. “Scientist” is a particular problem, being a word of fairly recent invention. While it was coined in the 1830s, by William Whewell, it was barely used at all until the end of the century, as this Google Ngram indicates.

Using “scientist” when discussing a period when the word was not used can be seriously misleading. We risk loading an individual’s views, status, ambitions and work with associations and ideas that would have meant nothing to them. The word allows us to forget to enquire whether they did something else to make their living, or were personally wealthy, and that science was not a career or vocation. Not only did the word not exist but there was no equivalent and no such idea.

Of course “science” is equally problematic. The root, “scientia” is simply knowledge or understanding, and what we now think of as science was, until the 19th century, natural philosophy and a range of more specific and practical fields: astronomy, mathematics, chymistry, physick and so on. Its meaning is historically unstable, and what counts as scientific in one period is not the same as what counts in another.

All this naturally makes it somewhat dubious that we should call a discipline that includes research on the pre-modern period history of science. It is shorthand, of course, but not for “the study of everything that looks like science to us today” or “the study of everything that we can trace as having led to today’s science”, but something more like “the study of humanity’s ideas about and interaction with the natural world”. Our definition carefully avoids connotations of the professional contexts that are surely ubiquitous in the word’s meaning today.

This leads me to another common misuse of “science”, which is as a synonym simply for “nature”. An example, as my fellow H-Worder, Vanessa, pointed out on Twitter the other day, is the Facebook page I fucking love science, which often seems to confuse the two. Our knowledge about nature is certainly mediated by science, but the two are not the same thing – nature gets on just fine without anyone watching, and our ideas about it have changed over the course of history, and will change in the future.

If it’s not “Yay science!” being written on a picture of a wild animal, it’s “science” being celebrated for our mobile phones, or blamed for not having given us rocket packs. These things are, of course, technology, which, historical research suggests, is more likely to be a driver for than any kind of simple or direct outcome of science. If you really want a particular gadget what you need is goal-oriented R&D, not “science”.

Maybe these expanded definitions reflect a similar shorthand to the one I described for “history of science” above, or maybe they simply show that the word “science” continues to have fluctuating boundaries. But it is worth being clear what we’re talking about when “science” is used to create authority, leverage funding, concentrate concerns or promise solutions. So, while I don’t want to ban its use, let’s think what we really mean.

School history: what worked for me

Much has already been said about the proposed new history curriculum. This piece by David Cannadine in the TLS is a good place to start, as is the Historical Association’s forum on the topic and, of course, Richard Evans in the FT. There is not much point in my adding to all this, but I did want to share something that looking at this contents-page of a curriculum made me recall.

As many of the critics of the proposed curriculum have pointed out, it all begins promisingly enough: it should allow children to “understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance”, and “how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed”. But what follows seems specifically-designed to undermine such aims, with a chronological list of names, abstract ideas and events that kids from as young as six are supposed to get through in just an hour a week.

There is much concern that this dry list, with often often age-inappropriate topics, will be a complete turn-off and that numbers taking history at GCSE will plummet. It will now be much harder for primary teachers to make history come alive by finding their local history, talking to people who remember past events, taking advantage of local museums, or discussing topics that fit the age of the children being taught – evacuation, for example, might be a powerful topic to discuss with children young enough not to be able to imagine leaving their parents. Instead, seven-year-olds will be discussing “concepts such as civilisation, monarchy, parliament, democracy, and war and peace”.

Thinking about what I don’t like about this curriculum got me thinking about my own experience of history at school. It didn’t make much of an impression on me at primary school: I got most of my history at home and on family trips to museums, monuments and galleries. It is this kind of thing, which many children will not have had, that Gove claims his education reforms make up for but, of course, it is never presented as a chronological ‘island story’. It involved going to places, asking questions, haphazard connections.

The little history I remember from primary school seemed equally haphazard, but that is no bad thing. You gain a sense of historical perspective not by slogging, over years, through a long chronology, but by thinking one day about Roman gladiators and then thinking about how different the world was when Henry VIII was on the throne, or when your house was built, or when aeroplanes were invented. The things that stick most in my mind had a connection to where I lived: the history of the city, the use of the buildings surrounding me. On one class visit to Edinburgh Castle, we dressed up as the French prisoners kept there during the Napoleonic Wars. We offered, as they had, our craftwork for sale and, of all things, sang the Marseillaise as we walked up to the gates.

At secondary school I started to really enjoy history, sometimes because of excellent teaching, sometimes in spite of it. Things were worst when we had to slog through a topic that covered a long period of history and when we were mostly obviously cramming in facts, people, dates and themes to prepare for exams. Things were best when we had discrete topics that we could cover in sufficient detail to get a feel for the period, the people involved and different perspectives.

Another post today from a fellow history of science curator – Charlie Connelly of the Science Museum – suggested one approach to counter that of Gove’s curriculum. This was to tell good stories, something with which many a watcher of TV documentaries and reader of popular histories would agree, not to mention many public historians and those who come to history outside the usual school and academic route. Charlie explains that it was good stories, even if ‘bad’ histories, like Sobel’s Longitude that got her to change her mind on history, having given up at 14 “finding it an unbelievably dry and tedious subject”.

I am a bit more doubtful, as readers of this blog will know, about using misleading stories as a hook. I also don’t recall “stories” being something that got me interested in history at school (although I do remember frequently getting a book called “100 Great Lives” out of the library over and again, undoubtedly a text Gove would have approved of). In fact, the thing that really excited me about history was that the more we know, the more we see that stories can be questioned. That was a powerful feeling.

Three lessons in my first year of secondary school stick out. For each of them the teacher prepared packs of images and texts and allowed us to go through them and draw our own conclusions, before class discussions and his conclusions. The first lesson was based on a fictional crime. We were given a range of evidence from the scene and about suspects and had to see if we could solve the crime. The next lesson did something similar, but with real images, newspaper reports, letters and statements, about the assassination of JFK. The final one looked at the assassination at Sarajevo.

For the real cases it became abundantly clear that the evidence we had was contradictory, that it could be very different in form and that different narratives could be created. This was exciting. We weren’t being taught facts, we were investigating, doing our own thinking and drawing our own conclusions or creating our own narratives based on the evidence we had. Aside from the fact that the evidence was given to us on coloured paper rather than our finding it ourselves in the archive, this really is a little bit like what real historians do.

It is also a little bit like what we all do, when we see the news, read newspapers, talk to friends and family and try to understand the world around us. These are the kinds of skills and the type of knowledge (not knowledge of facts but the knowledge that you are equipped to question or investigate) that school history can give to citizens and future voters. It goes without saying that they are also useful for many kinds of work. In what possible way can Gove’s curriculum compete with that?

Goldacre, Gove and evidence

Something about Ben Goldacre’s recent report on Building Evidence into Education has left me feeling concerned. This feeling is not just caused by the “I love teachers” and “I wrote this lovely paper about lovely teachers” tweets, or the sense of medical research approaches and the “gold standard” RCT [edit: corrected from RTC, when it is, of course, Randomised Controlled Trial.]  coming to the rescue of the floundering field of education research, or the suggestion that there is no quantitative research expertise within existing academic education departments. It wasn’t even the fact that his report fails to mention things like Ofsted, teaching unions, teacher training, curriculums or do more than nod to the huge changes to the profession that would be required.

The thing that really worried me, I suppose, was that this report was commissioned by and launched while sharing a stage with Michael Gove. This is the same Gove who has consistently ignored evidence and expert advice in education policy on a whole host of issues, including, of course, the writing of a ludicrous history curriculum. As David Cannadine, who led a research project on the history of history teaching, wrote in the TLS a few days ago, Gove has in this case taken a course that is “the exact opposite of what has been repeatedly recommended by people who know what they are talking about”.

Is it simply that Gove has a greater respect for the evidence revealed by RCTs than he has for that produced through historical and sociological research? I am not wholly convinced. Does it seem likely that this government will start supporting state schools sufficiently to allow them time and resources to engage in research trials, not to mention the kind of pay scales that might be commensurate with a profession that undertakes such work and is listened to? Again, not convinced.

The report was launched at the Bethnal Green Academy, and it is interesting to put this report alongside Gove’s commitment to academies and free schools. It is surely schools of this sort, along with private and independent, rather than state primaries and secondaries – tied to government-defined curricula and competing  on the most unlevel of playing fields – that would be in the best position to attract and support the kind of teachers who could undertake research. This would only exacerbate the divergence in provision, with teachers in different kinds of schools working in increasingly different circumstances. In addition, it seems likely that evidence more likely be produced from particular kinds of schools, lacking any real randomness in the trials.

If the model is medicine, these schools are, like general practice surgeries, businesses. They too will be testing products and techniques offered by private companies, which, like pharmaceuticals, are in the business of finding ever-more conditions that require intervention. Meanwhile, Goldacre’s urging of teachers to take the initiative and ape they betters is as get-on-your-bike, pull-your-socks-up and self-help as any Thatcherite would like.

I’ll admit that this is not a topic I know enough about, and the foregoing may be complete twaddle. If so, I apologise, but would be interested to hear other views. I know that the schools I went to (long, long ago) and the school my son goes to today would not be capable of adding research – quantitative or qualitative – to what they already, just about, manage to deliver. I also know that much of education and education research is already a commercial business. Goldacre’s report won’t shift policy, but it is sobering to think about where it might sit in Gove’s world view.

————

Postscript [18/3/13 20:58]: Ben Goldacre has today published a piece in the Guardian on his report, which, despite a tweet that stated “People keep asking what I think about [Gove] and evidence. Here:”, did absolutely nothing to suggest he has thought deeply about the politics, about Gove or, indeed, about the school-based, education-focused context of his topic.

Since publishing this post, I’ve had some interesting discussions on twitter and been pointed to some useful posts and articles. Here is some further reading:

Behavioural Insights Team, published in collaboration with Ben Goldacre and David Torgerson, Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials – a policy paper from June 2012 that is fairly similar to the education piece, arguing that RCTs should be used widely in public policy, debunking some ‘myths’ about them then explaining how they should work in an ideal world.

Tom Bennett, ‘Thinking in the right direction; just don’t put all your faith in RCTs. Ben Goldacre’s vision for evidence based learning‘ – a post from an education blog that highlights the problems and impossibilities of the Goldacre vision. His description of Bethnal Green Academy – “Nice looking school; it’s got BSF written all over every plane and pane. The livery outside the school shouted every second sentence of the latest Oftsed report.” – was one of the things that got me thinking about the positioning of Goldacre’s report for Gove, although he also felt that Gove’s very presence was a positive sign for research and evidence in education.

Paul Cotterill, ‘The dangerous Dr Goldacre: Cohranian hero or just peddling garbage‘ – a post that points out the politics always and inevitably (and rightly) inherent in education and social policy, and that “a worthy aspiration can all too easily be hijacked by … governments (not just the current one) very keen on the idea of using research evidence to impose their own views of what success in education looks like, and less, but much less keen on the development of the kind of ambitious, democratically oriented research governance infrastructure that he advocates”. It also quotes from the following:

Will Davies, ‘The problem of evidence centres‘ – a post looking at the recently-announced evidence centres and the “somewhat naively optimistic view” that RCTs are a universal solution. But what are, and how do we define, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes in the many facets of educational experience?

Warren Pearce and Sujatha Raman, ‘Evidence: a means of making expertise public? The RCT movement in public policy‘ – outline of paper forthcoming at the  International Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference that will be asking “How can RCTs deal with the problem of expertise if experts are still needed to produce, interpret and apply evidence in particular circumstances? What sorts of institutions of epistemic governance might berequired to ‘open up’ RCTs vis-à-vis other forms of evidence for policymaking? To what extent have classical concerns about the ethical challenges posed by RCTs in social context been addressed in therecent literature?”

Dave O’Brien, ‘Drowning the deadweight in the rhetoric of economism: what sports policy, free swimming, and EMA tell us about public services after the crash‘ (Jan 2012 £) – an article that, exploring the Coalition government’s plans and decision-making processes in public service provision, notes “a specific rhetorical use of economic evidence to present controversial decisions as technical exercises”.

Making it personal: historical over-identification

Cross-posted from The H Word blog.

Richard III enthusiast Philippa Langley with a reconstructed face of the monarch

at the Society of Antiquaries in London. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

 

Historians attempt to be objective in their reading of sources, even as we admit the hopelessness of the task. We may succeed in keeping our minds open in the search for answers, but we inevitably frame our questions in response to contemporary concerns. This is what makes our work meaningful and is, in any case, unavoidable in research of any kind. But what about when it becomes personal?

At the end of my viva, I admitted to my thesis examiners that one of the historical figures that I had studied had been a favourite. When surprise was expressed, I was pleased that I had managed to avoid obvious favouritism. I had acted professionally and had successfully put my personal feelings and commitments to one side.

This need to keep a professional distance was one of the reasons why some parts of Monday night’s Channel 4 documentary about the uncovering of Richard III’s skeleton were uncomfortable viewing. In particular Philippa Langley, Secretary of the Scottish Branch of theRichard III Society, was openly emotional about the deceased monarch, and clearly partial. This was not, she was sure, the face of a tyrant.

Langley deserves credit for driving the project forward (although we might judge this differently if, like the Spitfires in Burma, the king had turned out not to be in the car park). Although her penchant for feelings, signs and symbols (the ‘R’ painted on the tarmac, the desire to drape the remains with a royal standard) were a little extreme, she is far from alone in her attitude to Richard’s memory. As the Richard III Society states, it has “been working since 1924 to secure a more balanced assessment of the king” than that coloured by Tudor propaganda.

There are “several thousand” members of the Society, and they take a high-minded view of their mission. The website quotes their patron, the current Duke of Gloucester, in saying that they share “a faith that even after all these centuries the truth is important. It is proof of our sense of civilised values that something as esoteric and fragile as reputation is worth campaigning for”.

The Channel 4 documentary showed how seriously, and how personally, many of the members identify with this. As Tim Skellett wrote in a post reflecting on the academic response to the Richard III announcement, “Richard III has become – rightly or wrongly – a symbol of truth-seeking and resistance to propaganda”. The meaning of such symbols is a fascinating topic of historical research in its own right.

Exposing injustice is a key element for generating interest and enthusiasm beyond the academy. If someone usually held in high regard (Tudor monarchs, Shakespeare) is thought responsible for the oppression of a rediscovered, wronged hero, then identification with and emotional attachment to the story can become particularly intense. This is true of the mission to rescue Richard, and in history of scienceexamples are Robert Hooke and Nikolai Tesla, seen as victims of Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison respectively.

These individuals are now championed strongly by non-academics, taking up scholarly evidence that the reputation of these individuals had been undermined by previous writers of history. It has become the business of history to question sources, find hidden stories and ask how history might be rewritten. This is, itself, the result of changing attitudes to authority. When, back in the 1830s, there was an attempt to rescue John Flamsteed’s reputation from Newton’s tyranny, political, class and religious allegiances were closely bound to a discussion about personalities and science.

If, however, the research becomes a mission there is a risk of tipping the scales too far. Just because someone’s reputation has been eclipsed by enemies, it does not follow that they were a saint. This simply replaces one set of uncritically-accepted heroes with another. Richard III becomes incapable of acts that would have been perfectly normal in his circumstances; Hooke becomes the inventor and discoverer of almost everything.

Perhaps it is the awareness of the need to resist the impulse to identify with your characters that makes professional historians less forgiving than they might otherwise be of such enthusiasm, even while we make use of it in supporting our research and preservation of heritage. And yet we are only human, and I, for example, have found myself going some way down the line toward rescuing Nevil Maskelyne’s reputation, after, in the process of reviving John Harrison’s reputation, Dava Sobel’sLongitude unfairly presented him as a villain.

I do my best to keep my judgements sound, and ask myself why it should matter that Maskelyne seems to have been, in fact, a rather nice man. After all, that favourite figure in my postgraduate research wasAugustus De Morgan - not only for his jokes and doodles, but for his constant emphasis on the historian’s necessary attempt at impartiality.

Heritage and the Royal Institution

Cross-posted from The H Word blog [first published 29 January 2013].

The Royal Institution in about 1838, by T H Shepherd. Source: Wikimedia Commons

It has been interesting to observe reactions to the recent news about the financial troubles at the Royal Institution potentially being so severe that they might have to sell their Georgian premises on Albemarle Street. There have been calls and petitions to save the building based on an appeal to history and nostalgia. Equally, there have been questions (e.g.here, here, and here) about the RI’s modern role and whether this is well-served by a vast Mayfair building and the traditions that it celebrates.

Without treading too far into the question of what the RI does or should do as an institution for the communication of science in the 21st century, it is worth thinking about it as a site of scientific heritage and ask what makes it unique and worth preserving even if the Royal Institution itself should cease to exist.

Scientific heritage can be a difficult thing to assess, preserve and interpret. Removed from their context, old scientific instruments are apt to lose much of their meaning. Those which survive in museums are often not those which were ever used, for outdated equipment tends to be replaced and thrown away. The large technology and infrastructure of modern science poses enormous challenges for collection and preservation. Buildings in which scientific work has been done are often unexciting architecturally and opaque to the uninitiated.

Unesco, responsible for the inscription of World Heritage, has recently begun to notice that scientific heritage is under-represented on its lists. The problems of aesthetics and size are pertinent, along with the fact that science is often not understood as a manifestation of human culture in the same way that palaces, art works or technological sites like bridges and railways are.

When Unesco weighs up the importance of world heritage, it does so with the aid of three categories: immovable, moveable and intangible heritage. The first includes buildings, monuments, sites and landscapes. Plainly some of these are movable, or at least alterable, but they are associated with a particular place and very often the linking of a set of buildings or their placing within a landscape lends them greater significance than they might have on their own.

Moveable heritage, broadly speaking, consists of things that could end up in museums, such as paintings, objets d’art, textiles, scientific instruments, furniture, books and manuscripts. While individual items of immovable heritage may be hugely important or valuable, their inclusion within a larger collection, or their placing within a particular location can greatly enhance their significance and meaning.

Finally, intangible heritage is the stuff that is harder to pin down. Unesco defines it as including “living expressions and the traditions that countless groups and communities worldwide have inherited from their ancestors and transmit to their descendants, in most cases orally”. Things inscribed as intangible heritage include dances, festivals, recipes and a bewildering variety of traditions.

Intangible ideas and traditions can also play an important role in assessing the significance of items in the other two categories. Given the fact that the history of science is associated with many intangibles (i.e. things that we no longer touch or hold) – such as people, ideas, skills, discussions and so on – it is clear that this third category can be an extremely useful concept to bear in mind.

Arguably, when all three of these types of heritage come together, we have something particularly valuable. I am lucky enough to work within a World Heritage Site which includes a site of outstanding scientific significance. The Royal Observatory includes buildings designed for science, which are enhanced by their housing historic instruments used on that site, and other wonderful objects. On top of this there are the intangibles associated with the work of the Astronomers Royal and with the concepts of the Prime Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time.

The RI has a similar combination. It has a building long used for scientific and related purposes, parts of which were designed specifically for their role – most obviously the lecture theatre. It also has significant book, object and archive collections, made more significant by their close association with the place in which they are displayed or stored.

The building and objects are associated with the intangibles surrounding the people and scientific research undertaken at the institution. While Faraday’s electrical work and the discovery of 10 elements are usually highlighted, there was a wide range of work done in analysis and testing materials and techniques, often for private or government clients.

In addition to this, of course, the RI had a key role to play in the story of the relationship between science and the public. It is hard to think of another historic site that has combined these roles over such a long period of time and, especially, one that is still inhabited by the same institution. The RI’s intangible heritage is undoubtedly heightened by this fact.

It is true that the RI’s primary audience was a privileged one, catering for a very different market to, say, popular attractions with scientific content or working men’s institutions. It is not, perhaps, a tradition we would be keen to perpetuate (and the RI certainly does not do so exclusively), but we can recognise that getting society leaders on board with the messages of Davy, Faraday and their successors was hugely significant for British science in the period of its nascent professionalisation.

While science communication and outreach can and should take place beyond such hallowed halls, there is benefit in having at least some of it flavoured and informed by science’s heritage. It reminds us that science is not disembodied, pure knowledge, but that it is created by people in particular times and places, with particular equipment and in response to the demands and possibilities of the society in which they inhabit. The heritage of the RI also shows that science has to be communicated – and that this is a business with a long and often rather repetitive back story from which audiences and communicators alike can learn.

The combination of types of unique scientific heritage at the Royal Institution should be cherished. I also suspect its continuity on one site both enhances its significance and may be the best chance of its preservation.

Drawing Mars in Greenwich: recreating an experiment for Stargazing Live

Cross-posted from The H Word blog.

Filming for Stargazing Live at Queen’s House in Greenwich. Photograph: Marek Kukula

This week [NB This post was first published on 7 January 2013] sees the return of the BBC’s highly successful Stargazing Live. It starts on Tuesday, in an episode that follows last year’s biggest astronomy story by focusing on Mars.

In thinking about the search for possible life on Mars, the programme will include some of the historical observations and debates that I discussed in a previous post. I’m delighted that the programme gave us at theRoyal Observatory a chance to recreate a key Greenwich contribution to the story.

This was the 1903 experiment carried out by E. Walter Maunder, an assistant at the Observatory, exploring perception at the limits of vision. It was one element in his campaign against the then-dominant view that the Martian surface was covered with immensely long, wide and straight “canals”, thought by many to the work of an advanced civilisation.

Maunder was not alone, being joined by Eugène Michel Antoniadi andWilliam Campbell, together described in Michael J. Crowe’s The Extraterrestrial Life Debate as “the leaders of a wrecking crew” that demolished the Martian canals.

Maunder, with the assistance of the headmaster of the Royal Hospital School in Greenwich, asked a number of the school’s pupils to draw from different depictions of Mars, placed on a board at the front of the room.His results suggested that, particularly at certain distances, the eye tended to resolve indistinct waves and dots into straight lines, suggesting that the “canals” were an optical illusion rather than real surface features.

Ever since I heard about this experiment, I have wanted to recreate it. Asking people to undertake an exercise like this is a wonderful way to understand the problems and contingencies surrounding astronomical observation and recording (imagine not only peering at this small image, but it flickering in an unsteady atmosphere, and having to keep taking your eyes away in order to represent it on paper). I also wondered if it really worked as Maunder described.

Maunder claimed in his paper that the boys, aged around 12 to 14, were all “wholly and entirely ignorant of the appearance of Mars in the telescope, and of the discussions which have taken place as to the markings on his surface.” I have always wondered if this was true, given the widespread popularity of the Martian canal idea at this period.

Our guinea pigs were probably familiar with what Mars looks like when photographed today, but less likely than the 1903 schoolboys to think of drawings or canals. An interesting difference was their age and the fact that most of them were art students. This probably produced different results than had we picked people off the street but might compare interestingly with the naval cadets. The latter were encouraged by Maunder, and probably by their education, simply to draw what they could see. Our art students may have been more likely, despite my instructions, to attempt to interpret the image and to consider different graphic approaches to its re-depiction.

It is likely that the experiment took place in the school’s old gymnasium. This no longer exists, so the BBC team opted for another of the school’s former buildings – the beautiful Queen’s House. They set up the experiment pretty faithfully, with distances and scales as specified in Maunder’s paper. Told to draw, our students obliged, and demonstrated that their eyesight and drawing ability was a good deal keener than mine.

Did our results back Maunder’s? Sort of. I didn’t see the generation of any “canals” where little or nothing appeared on the original image, but there were certainly more straight lines. In our small sample, it also appeared that the middle rows were more likely to see these lines than those nearest (who saw more detail) or those furthest away (who saw little distinctly). It could be argued that these distances mimicked the experience of observing with particular-sized telescopes, creating the conditions where the eye tends to resolve indistinct detail into non-existent straight lines.

Maunder’s report of this experiment apparently brought a key ally to the campaign against Martian canals – the veteran Canadian-American astronomer Simon Newcomb. It was, however, just one of the arguments brought – one of the simplest being the point that if straight canals like those reported by Percival Lowell did exist on the curved surface of Mars, they ought to appear curved to the observer on Earth.

In his writings, Maunder focused on scientific evidence and his own experiences as an astronomical observer. He chose to stay clear of the philosophical and religious dimension of the debate, despite the fact that his popular writings in astronomy were usually framed with natural theology and Biblical references.

Religious beliefs could support either position in the debate about the existence of life on other planets. However, it was clear that Maunder, an active member of a small pentecostal, adventist sect, believed man’s relationship with God and place in the universe were unique. He could not countenance intelligent, canal-building Martians – and thus his scientific arguments were motivated by religious belief.

Watch on Tuesday to see how the experiment went and how it fits into the long history of observing Mars and the search for extra-terrestrial life. Also visit Alien Revolution a small, free exhibition at the Royal Observatory, opening in March.

In the end the section of the film that included the experiment wasn’t run live on Stargazing, due to lack of time. Happily, the whole thing was made available online and you can see it here.