Science is not fun

No pasa cada día que el CEHIC estrena en el Telediario de TVE1. Hoy es uno de estos días raros. En el Telediario de las 3 y de las 9 habrá una reportaje de 3 minutos sobre restos humanos en museos. Como por ejemplo el gigante de Extremadura. El esqueleto enorme de Agustín Luengo Capilla (1826-1854) todavía se exhibe en el Museo de Antropología en Madrid.

La periodista de TVE1 habló también con migo – sobre el caso del Negro de Banyoles. Vamos a ver que voy a decir. Me imagino que solo quedarán 20 o 30 segundos de una entrevista de una media hora. (Espero que no me quitan completamente a causa de mi mal castellano.)

Nos vemos!

Oliver Hochadel

For starters: An impressive site and a formidable building provide an welcoming feeling. Buses full of kids of different ages prove the popularity of CosmoCaixa. The entrance fee is remarkably low, similar science centres in Germany would probably cost up to five times the price. All this makes appetite for the second course. Llegir més »

Etiquetes: Cosmocaixa

In his book El Negre i jo the Dutch journalist Frank Westerman tells us about his investigations on the infamous “Negro de Banyoles” and about Francesc Darder who brought the desiccated “bush-man” to Catalonia where he exhibited him first in Barcelona in 1888 and later in the Museum of Banyoles. Llegir més »

Etiquetes: Darder, Darwin

Farà cosa de gairebé tres anys vaig veure per televisió l’entrevista a la monja Teresa Forcades que va fer en Joan Barril al seu programa literari, «Qwerty», on el presentador va afirmar que ja no feia falta creure en les Sagrades Escriptures per què per això ja estava el Big Bang (com si el problema de la relació entre ciència i religió es solventés amb aquesta afirmació). La germana Teresa podia haver respost que la ciència forma part del pensament crític, que no construeix veritats absolutes, inclòs el Big Bang. No va dir res. Llegir més »

I have just came upon a recent book on Stephen Jay Gould. There, I found not only contributions on evolution, but also reflections on science in the public sphere. Here is a sample, in which Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins advocate for the Jay-Gould model of scientist-popularisers. Llegir més »

Etiquetes: Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould

Down with the deficit model! Nobody ever formulated it this way yet this slogan sums up at best the trend in science communication over the past twenty years. Deficit model? To outsiders this may sound like financial theory. Yet what this model represents is the idea that the general public does not know enough about science. Therefore its deficit in knowledge has to be remedied by science popularization. Sometimes it is also labeled the top-down-model: knowledge is distributed from above (science) downwards to an ignorant public. Llegir més »

Amb pocs dies de diferència, assisteixo a la projecció a la Facultat de Ciències de la UAB del documental Universo extremo, produït i dirigit pel físic de la UB José Ignacio Latorre, i a una lectura dramatitzada de Copenhaguen, l’exitosa obra de Michael Frayn sobre l’encontre entre Niels Bohr i Werner Heisenberg a la Dinamarca ocupada pels nazis de 1941, amb les armes nuclears com a teló de fons. Llegir més »

Etiquetes: Copenhagen, Michael Frayn, Universo extremo

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a starting grant for the project entitled ‘The Earth Under Surveillance (TEUS): Climate Change, Geophysics and the Cold War Legacy’, which will be held at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM, University of Manchester) in collaboration with the Institut de Recherche sur les Sciences et la Technologie (IRIST, Université de Strasbourg) and the Centre d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).

This is one of the largest ever grant awarded in Europe for research in the history of science and technology and the first assigned within the ERC programme to a project in this disciplinary area.

The five-year TEUS project will support the establishment of an international research team including Simone Turchetti (as principal Investigator), Soraya Boudia, Néstor Herran, Jérôme Lamy, Sébastien Soubiran and Leucha Veneer. Some PhD scholarships will also be advertised in the running of the project.

The research will seek to track down the ancestry of scientific studies on the earth and the environment, especially by examining how the Cold War shaped research and funding trajectories. If the recent rush towards earth science studies has been propelled by the environmentalist discourse, a big leap forward in geophysics took place because of strategic imperatives deriving from the confrontation between superpowersOur historical study aims to map the rise of geophysics in Europe in the light of these contextual factors. Among its innovative features will be a focus on the interplay and mutual shaping of the geosciences and intelligence programmes, especially in the organisation of geophysical explorations.

Normalmente yo entrevisto a los científicos pero esta vez era viceversa. Se lee los artículos de Michele Catanzaro con Salvador Moyà-Solà sobre sus descubrimientos recientes y después conmigo sobre la “nacionalición” de los fósiles humanos.

At the moment there is a well done exhibition in the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid to commemorate the Darwin year 2009 entitled “La evolución de Darwin“. I was pleased to see that the curators had picked up on some of the context of Darwin’s work. For example that Darwin spent most of his budget in the year 1866 on postage. This is a memorable fact that reminds the visitor just how important letters were for Charles Darwin and how much he profited from the British postal system that literally connected him with the rest of the world. Hence he could gather information from remote corners and also receive specimens of certain pigeons or some exotic animal from South-East-Asia.

The exhibition also tries to make a connection to 19^th century Spain and its naturalists. In one of the cases we see one of Darwin’s works opened on a page where there is a footnote that refers to one of those Spanish naturalists. Wow! one feels inclined to exclaim. Darwin mentions a Spanish naturalist.

Another chart shows how many of the hundreds and hundreds of people Darwin corresponded with over the course of many decades come from which country. Germany beats France easily. The Spanish-speaking world is also listed but it makes up less than one percent of his correspondents.

This is one way of representing the interaction of Darwin with Spain, and it is a telling one. The result is rather meager and it might be fine for an exhibition to point out this kind of interaction, however peripheral it actually was for Darwin and his work.

Yet what should Spanish (or Catalan) historians of science do in 2009? There probably isn’t all that much to say about those few letters exchanged. Well, then we have to study the reception of his ideas. In the second part of the exhibition (El darwinismo en España) there is a nice assembly of the translation of Darwin’s works from the late 19^th century through the period of the dictatorship until the early 21^st century. This also includes a section of translations into Catalan as well as Basque. In a very nice case that centers on the visual representation of Darwin’s ideas apes and monkeys appear on Spanish consumer goods, works of art an so on.

This is interesting to browse and certainly a well-worth object of study. Yet again the historian of science might not feel too comfortable with this “receptionist” approach. It reminds us a little of the rather out-dated top-down-model of scientific communication. The great ideas come from above (in this case from abroad) and trickle down (in this case into Spain). It is a one-way-communication and does not allow for interaction. It also leaves little room for looking at how exactly Darwin’s ideas were appropriated. Maybe this is asking too much from a museum that has to keep the interest of the common visitor in mind. Yet it is certainly not too much to ask of a historian of science to search for more that translations and references made to Darwin in Spanish or Catalan sources. Any suggestions?