Events - 'Two Cultures'

1.)  50 years of Snow's 'Two Cultures', The Royal Institution, Thursday 12 November, featuring Prof Helen Haste, Dr Patricia Fara and Prof Frank James.

For more information and to book tickets, please visit here. The event is open to all and tickets cost £8 standard, £6 concessions, £4 Ri
Members.

2.) Beyond Two Cultures: a multi-disciplinary symposium re-examining the extent of C P Snow's science/humanities divide

 Friday 11 December 2009, Room 1.71, Franklin-Wilkins Building, King’s College London, Stamford Street, SE1 9NH

Open to all. For full details see here. To book visit here or RSVP to leonie.taylor@kcl.ac.uk.

'The Poetry of Science' - Creative Writing and the Artistic Naturalist

6pm, Thursday 5th November, The Linnean Society.

Further details here.

Object Stories

Further details about the Object Stories workshop can be found at Kelley's blog here.

MURE (Morus nigra, L.)

A smooth shiny base, turned like a chess piece,

Is the stage where this mulberry dances

A sumptuous papier-mâché fruit

Seducing us with sugary glances

Her stalk is set at a jaunty angle

Clothed in long stripes of dark green and lime green

The dark spots run through it like Brighton rock

Above it the bulbous fruit reposes

Dark red and black, exploding with sugar

Labels revealing the inner contents

Of the graine ouverte, péricarpe osseux,

The embryou lodged in its secret heart.

Daniel Friesner


The world puzzle
The world was split: brutally, along lines of latitude and radii that ran through the Earth’s core. It lay, set out, upon the table, a dissected planet. The divisions ran sharply across continents and oceans,  cuts of a geometrical sphere that ignored geography and tore over the structures of the Earth’s surface. 
Somehow, gradually, the detail began to creep inside. Line-tendrils from the surface began to snake into the interior, crawling across the blank surfaces of the raw partitions.  Slowly, with muted colours resembling those of lichen, the confusions of the surface crept into the Earth’s interior. A great elephant appeared at the Earth’s core. From America, a vast tree grew into the interior, and on it sat a Native American, talking to a monkey. Last of all, the writing appeared, fitting between the spidery pictures and explaining them. The barren Earth was filled with vegetation, people, and descriptions; the puzzle had solved itself.

Simon Crowhurst

RUR - online

John has helpfully pointed out - for those of us who went to see Rossum's Universal Robots last night - that the full text of the play is online here. Spot the (many) differences...

2nd November

Join us at Homerton College (room MAB119) from 7.30-9pm for our second meeting of term. We'll continue our analogical explorations with Dedre Gentner's "Are Scientific Analogies Metaphors?", from D. Miall's edited collection on Metaphor: Problems and Perspectives, pp. 106-132 (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982). This is available online here.

All are welcome!

Registration open - Nature and the Long Nineteenth Century

Nature and the long nineteenth century is a one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference exploring intersections of the natural world with nineteenth-century literature and culture.

University of Edinburgh, Saturday, 6 February 2010.

Keynote speakers: Dr Martin Willis, University of Glamorgan, Dr Christine Ferguson, University of Glasgow, Professor Nick Daly, University College Dublin

In the twenty-first century, environmentalism and the impacts of climate change form a nexus of intense debates about relationships between human culture and the natural world. However, the centrality of the natural world to the nineteenth century imagination has long been acknowledged by scholars, way-marked by Lynn Merrill's The Romance of Victorian Natural History (1989) for example, while Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002) demonstrates the relevance of nineteenth-century research to the modern world.

This conference probes the significance of nature to the long nineteenth century and to our study of its literature, history, science, art, and other media. How did the natural world influence people in the nineteenth century?and how did nineteenth-century culture shape attitudes to the natural world? Have twenty-first century questions over nature, climate, and the environment changed the way we view and study the cultural products of the nineteenth century, or offered new avenues for research, especially interdisciplinary research?

Postgraduate and early-career researchers are invited to submit 300 word proposals for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels to natureconference@ed.ac.uk by 16 November 2009. Please include a brief biog with your abstract.

For further information including the full call for papers and registration details, see: www.englit.ed.ac.uk/other/NatureConference/landingpage.htm.

Conference organisers: Claire McKechnie, University of Edinburgh and Dr Emily Alder, Edinburgh Napier University. We are grateful for the support of the British Association for Victorian Studies, the British Society for Literature and Science, and the Centre for Literature and Writing at Edinburgh Napier University.

Play - Rossum's Universal Robots

This week the ADC Theatre here in Cambridge is showing 'Rossum's Universal Robots' as their late show at 11pm.

"In a dark future, Old Rossum has discovered the secret of life. Now his factory manufactures artificial people. Known as 'robots', they toil to ensure that humans live a life of luxury. Once, Helena Glory sought revolution among the robots; now, married to the factory manager, she is complicit in their servitude. But she still dreams of a world where robots are no longer enslaved. And now, as discontent stirs afresh among the robot masses, there is the danger that such a dream will be realised, with devastating consequences for mankind.

First performed in 1921, R.U.R. is the play that invented the word robot. An enduring cautionary tale, it deals with the human desire to dominate and the costs of domination. This dynamic production will find innovative ways to re-tell this classic story, in order to create a new vision of a bleak alternative future."

Some of the Science and Literature Reading Group are attending the play on Thursday evening, and it would be great to see others there!

To book tickets, see here.

Call for papers – 'Booms' of Popular Science Publishing

We are seeking contributions to a one-day symposium on 20th century popular science: the morning devoted to the apparent post-Einstein boom in popular science publishing, the afternoon considering post-Hawking works.

We are keen that this event should help foster connections between the wide range of people who study and think about popular science: historians, science communication researchers, professional scientists, science writers and literary critics.

The event is to be held at Imperial College London on 31st March, 2010. It will comprise of a series of extended 30 minute talks, plus time for discussion.

The mention of Einstein and Hawking should not suggest an interest purely in the popularisation of physics, nor should it imply a focus
on biographical details of their lives, celebrity-science, or challenges of relaying especially abstract ideas in text. We are merely using these two iconic names in the history of popular science as a starting point for broader discussion in what can be a very diffuse topic of inquiry and a prompt to interrogate the reality of so-called 'booms' in popular science publishing.

Papers might explore the impact of other iconic scientists, popular science audiences, marginal scientists publishing through popular
texts, the role of journalists and science-writers and/or the role played by publishers, reviewers and bookselling contexts. We should
also note that we welcome papers which reflection on both the background context and long-term consequences of 20th century popular science. Papers on 19th or 21st century popular science publishing are still of interest, as long as they speak to themes raised by a 20^th century focus.

The broad range of topics potential papers might discuss include (but are not limited to):
* Relationships between scientists and their publics.
* Celebrity, public intellectuals and popular science authorship.
* Marketing and the role of consumer culture.
* Issues of culture and social class.
* Writing for children.
* Implied epistemologies.
* Publishing processes and cultures.
* Outsider-scientist writers.
* Science and Religion.
* The audiences of popular science.
* Popular science's impact on and reflection of science policy issues.
* Humour and comedy in science writing.
* Wonder and the sublime.
* Metaphor.
* Literary renderings of mathematics.
* Illustrations, diagrams, graphics and design.

Potential contributors should email a 500 word abstract (including, if necessary, bibliography) along with a 150 word biography to popularsciencebooms@googlemail.com by 11th December, 2009.

We are planning a special issue for a scholarly journal such as the Public Understanding of Science, based on the event. If you would be
unable to join us on the 31st of March, but are interested in submitting a paper for such a publication, it is worth dropping us an
expression of interest. These, and all other queries, to popularsciencebooms@googlemail.com.

Dr Hauke Riesch, NearCo2 Project, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.

Dr Alice Bell, Lecturer in Science Communication, Imperial College, London.

Darwin's Bards

 

Play - Inherit the Wind

The Old Vic

Kevin Spacey, David Troughton , Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Directed by Trevor Nunn

To view trailer click here For further information click here.

When science teacher Bertram Cates violates a state law he finds himself at the centre of a court case that not only shakes the United States but resonates across the world.

Considered one of the great American plays of the twentieth century Lawrence and Lee's gripping, relevant drama is inspired by the famous Scopes 'Monkey Trial'. In 1925 school teacher John Scopes stood accused of violating a Tennessee statute by teaching Darwin's theory of evolution to his students. Two legal Titans confront each other when this close knit community puts freedom of thought on trial.

A film version of the play released in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly received four Academy Award nominations. This production marks the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Darwin's 'The Origin of Species'.

'He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind:
and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart'
(Proverbs 11:29)

To watch Trevor Nunn and Kevin Spacey talking about Charles Darwin on BBC's Newsnight Review please click here