“How scientific objects end. A workshop”

Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
December 3rd and 4th, 2018

 In his 2009 paper “We have never been Whiggish (about Phlogiston)”, Hasok Chang pointed at the difficulty of writing a history of the Chemical Revolution in terms of winners and losers, of new and old, of Oxygen and Phlogiston. Similarly, the forthcoming book Ether and Modernity (OUP, 2018) portrays a more complex image of the presence of the ether in the early twentieth century than usually depicted. Phlogiston and the Ether are indeed two favourite examples in traditional philosophies of scientific change: new theories and experiments supposedly proved those entities never to have existed and only wrongly considered as scientific. Post-hoc histories of such objects and the processes of their abandonment, however, are not necessarily neutral on the ontology of the objects and can often create a new entity, one that is certainly dead, but not necessarily equal to the one that was supposedly killed. In other words, writing about dead scientific objects can turn into a process of object formation that perfectly demarcates the properties of the dead object in new ways.

This workshop addresses the afterlives of scientific objects by paying attention to the role played by the histories of defunct objects in their configuration qua deceased entities. Such narratives include not only later historical accounts but also the early ‘obituaries’ of the objects (written by the actors involved in their rejection), laboratory and museum catalogues (in the cases of instruments and other material objects), and pedagogical and popular accounts.

Please send expressions of interest either to attend or to present new research at the workshop to jaume.navarro@ehu.es by September 15th, 2018. Registration will be required but free of charge.

Confirmed speakers:

• Theodore Arabatzis (University of Athens): “Do scientific objects have a life (which may end)?”
• Daniel Belteki (University of Kent): “Lost in the production of time and space: the transformation of the Airy Transit Circle from a working telescope to a museum object.” 
• Hasok Chang (University of Cambridge): “Is the Voltaic contact potential dead?” 
• Moritz Epple (Göethe Universität): “Have Vortex Atoms ever been alive? On an unstable existence between the Unseen Universe and new mathematics.” 
• Alexandra Ion (Romanian Academy and University of Cambridge): “Itineraries after death: thinking about time and agency through anachronistic specimens caught in anthropological collections.” 
• Jaume Navarro (University of the Basque Country): “The historiographical relevance of the early obituaries of the ether.” 
• Mat Paskins (London School of Economics): “Dyeing Off: the death of dyestuffs as chemical objects.” 
• Greg Radick (University of Leeds): “There was no such thing as the Mendelian gene and this is a talk about it.” 
• Jennifer Rampling (Princeton University): tba 
• Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge): “The object of death in oriental natural history.”
• Richard Staley (University of Cambridge): “The Undead in Climate History: The death and afterlife of the Medieval Warm Period.”