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1:16
LUBAABA: Good evening, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you all to the virtual Royal Society this evening for what promises to be a fascinating journey through time as we define science through history. My name is Lubaaba Al-Azami and I'm a cultural historian at the University of Liverpool and University of Oxford specialising in England's early interactions with Asia. I'm also editor of
2:25
Early Modern Orient, or memorients.com, a journal on early interactions with the Islamic world. We have a guest, Professor Simon Schaffer, who considers the global rather than the Eurocentric realities of history, of science and the formation of the modern world. So we are very privileged to be joined by Simon this evening and I will ask him to introduce himself in just a moment but before we do that, just a few housekeeping rules. We would love to hear from you this evening
2:58
and invite you to submit any questions that you may have using the Slido link in the video description. The access code for this evening is #A432, we know, we've already had some questions in and we're very much looking forward to the questions that come through this evening. We might not be able to cover all the questions but we will do our absolute best to cover as many as possible and there is also the option to upvote questions,
3:20
so if you upvote them we can also prioritise according to popularity.
3:25
We have live captions happening this evening, by the tech magicians at the Royal Society and if you would like to see these please click the subtitled or closed captions button at the bottom of the bar and if you would like to tweet today's event we would love for you to do that. There is a hashtag for this evening that's #rshistsci, so please do tweet away and continue the conversation online.
3:55
So to begin with, let's bring in Professor Simon Schaffer and ask him to introduce himself. Simon, would you like to tell us a little bit about your career and the research you have done that kind of led towards you being awarded the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture?
4:15
SIMON: Sure. This is a very gracious and, of course, flattering event for me, and I'd first of all like to thank the Royal Society and thank you, Lubaaba, for hosting the event and awarding me this remarkable prize. I feel the crushing weight of the previous winners of this award - several of whom are personal friends - and I would just like to shout out to them and express my appreciation of their work, too. And, of course, to the folk after whom the prize is named,
5:03
John Wilkins, one of the first secretaries of the Society, and Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law.
5:12
Desmond Bernal, a great crystallographer and patron of a great deal of progressive science and work for international peace, and winner in the 1950s of the Stalin Prize, and Peter Medawar,
5:32
the supreme, I think, exponent, apart from all his other extraordinary achievements, of the popularisation and public understanding of science over a very long period. So a prize named after all three is really something to celebrate. So thank you very much, everyone.
5:54
It's self-indulgent to be asked to talk about one's other career, so I will try to be brief.
6:00
I was trained as a natural scientist, and it so happens that at the University of Cambridge,
6:11
the field of history and philosophy of science is offered as an option for natural sciences students - it was then, it still is - and that proved to be both invaluable and deeply attractive for me. It's interesting to think why that might have been, back in the 1970s. I think there were general, as well as specific reasons. I think the general reasons had to do with the emergence in the period of the 1970s of a sense that the very position of science, technology and
6:52
medicine within society was in question. And was absolutely the subject of major intense cultural, social, intellectual, political debate, not just in Western Europe, but perhaps even more intensely worldwide, and it might be interesting to think about why that was. It therefore seemed absolutely obvious to someone who was studying the natural sciences, especially the physical sciences, as I was, but who was being given the opportunity by very impressive
7:26
groups of teachers and supervisors to discuss the wider implications, both in time and space, of the position of the sciences, that that might actually be a research option for me. I spent a year at the history of science programme in Harvard university in the middle of the 1970s, where, once again, there were genuinely major issues about the place of science and technology in society being debated. It just so happened that the year I was at Harvard was also the year
8:03
in which town in which Harvard is situated, called Cambridge, was being subjected to a really intense political debate about whether there should be controls
8:17
on research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on recombinant DNA
8:24
and the relationship between many of the issues that we were looking at in the history of science and science studies programme, and those kinds of issues were rather obvious. Some of our teachers were actually involved in those public debates about the legitimacy, or otherwise, of public scientific research. I was also very convinced that understanding the place of the sciences would involve making better sense, if I could contribute, to where that status came from
8:59
and I came back to Britain, back to Cambridge, to research the relation between the natural philosophy and the political theology of the pre-eminent Cambridge man of science, Isaac Newton. I finished my PhD in 1980 and I managed, amazingly, it just seemed extraordinary to me, to get a job in the early '80s at Imperial College and I taught there for several years - once again, teaching history of science to a group
9:37
of science students, which was a treat, and beginning to pursue some of the lines that have characterised a lot of the work I've done since. LUBAABA: I mean, that's absolutely fascinating. So you began as a scientist and then you shifted your interest in science into a historical space, and I mean, I think because a lot of what you do is sort of discuss how science and society interact and it seems to me that even within your journey you have that - that actually plays quite an
10:10
important role, that the place of science and tech in society was being negotiated and so it would seem that in response to that, you went down this route. I would love to hear a bit more about what sort of contentions in this debate that you were experiencing in the '70s that you mentioned? SIMON: Well, it just so happens I'm no authority as an historian on what was happening around the sciences, so I'm in a very intriguing position, because I'm now in the position
10:44
of being what some anthropologists call a 'native informant' and we're trained to treat the kind of reminiscences that I'm sharing here with both admiration and scepticism in roughly equal measure. So you have to bear that in mind. LUBAABA: Of course. SIMON: But I think two of the issues that seemed salient to me and to the people I was working with most closely, fellow students and colleagues at that period, both here and in the US and in
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France, two of the salient issues were, first of all, as I've already indicated, what is at stake when scientific and technical decisions involve the interests of very large groups within society. There was a whole series of debates, of which the recombinant DNA/RNA debates were a pretty good example - though a very troubling one - where questions of who has the right to speak
12:02
and who has the expertise, and how that expertise should be treated, were absolutely the stuff both of science policy and more widely of politics. Secondly, perhaps even more importantly, there were enormously difficult and challenging questions about training, about education, about the path that education should take. So by the late '70s/early '80s, a whole series of reports, not just in Britain, but also in Britain, were put together addressing
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issues of what was then called, as I've mentioned, the public understanding of science
12:48
and that turned out to be a very difficult and a very important set of debates.
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Including debates which I think have stayed enormously important and have certainly stayed very high on the agenda for anyone who's interested in the past and the development of the sciences, which is the relation between the two senses that that very phrase might have. On the one hand, public understanding of science might mean the extent to which various different groups in the public understand, are aware of, comprehend and can make sense
13:29
of the lessons that the sciences wish to teach, and the content of their knowledge,
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and we are going through a series of crises right now where it is barely necessary to point out how important that series of questions is. But, on the other hand, the notion of a public understanding of science, at least as it was then construed, might also mean the extent to which folk understand how the sciences work, in other words not just what they say, what they claim, but also how they function. The relation between understanding how the sciences work
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and understanding the basis of the claims that they are making seemed extremely important in the debates in which we were involved in the '70s and early '80s and they of course still do. LUBAABA: Absolutely, because it strikes me that these are very pertinent questions for today in the world that we're residing in right now, so if you will forgive me, I'll keep you in the time frame that you are not usually working in, and we'll talk about
14:39
your specific specialist time frame in the next question, but just to draw you into the present, we're in the throes of a global health crisis, obviously the coronavirus, and there's much talk in the news about vaccines and one of the key aspects of your work is how to connect historic scientific inquiry and social political context, and I'm wondering if you can talk about that in the context of the pandemic and with regards to the
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public understanding of science that you mentioned, how does the media and social media impact upon our understandings of science? SIMON: Yes, those are really important questions.
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The first, about the relation between the current pandemic and contributions, I think, that historians of science and an historical understanding of the sciences can make - I think that's absolutely fundamental. As we've already said, there's a profound relationship - we've been living through it throughout this year, if not well before - between understanding the ways in which practising scientists reach the conclusions that they wish to propose,
15:58
and also, perhaps even more fascinatingly, the way in which those conclusions are linked to the material techniques that are used. And an understanding of the way in which the sciences themselves are organised, the way they work, the kind of deference, or not, that should be
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developed with respect to their claims and also their products. So we are, for example, about to enter a rather lengthy period of adoption, implementation,
16:33
mass manufacture, vaccination and so on, when these issues will be absolutely central, if they aren't already, and the track record in these cases is not uniformly impressive or comforting. Quite the reverse. So when we hear phrases like, "We follow the science," we need to think very, very carefully about what that might mean. And the way in which those phrases are based on quite different ranges of models of what counts
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as medical, or technical, or scientific authority. I think these are absolutely fundamental issues. Generally, we think of those very often as problems of training, problems of education, problems of background, problems of understanding. What I think one aspect of this part of the current crisis and related issues that the crisis has thrown up, one thing that's pressing is that
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social institutions don't have the luxury of time
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and therefore, to go on to the second part of your question, issues of information networks and the trustworthiness of information networks have become peculiarly pressing. Certainly one of the themes that I've been trying to do some work on over the years, and colleagues have worked on - colleagues in my field have worked on a great deal is precisely the issue of trust.
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And to challenge or revise perhaps over-simplistic models of scepticism and trust with respect not only to what one is told, but also the processes in which one participates, because the complimentary aspect of the pandemic crisis is that everyone, as a citizen, is being called on not just to take a view, but to participate.
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That, I think, has brought these issues of trust, deference, scepticism and critique right to the centre of the most important political debates that we have at the moment. LUBAABA: Absolutely, and so you've brought up the issue of trust and I think that's really a very crucial point right now in the midst of this pandemic, and particularly as this vaccine is coming out and people are considering the effectiveness of the vaccine, et cetera. We know
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that there are problematic debates that can take place online, which may not be very scientifically grounded. So what I'd love to know is, what role do you see the history of science as having in the current social and political climate and how do you think it can contribute to a discussion of the credibility of science knowledge? SIMON: Well, I think there is a general slogan, it is a very familiar one, which is, "Those who don't know the past are condemned to repeat it".
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LUBAABA: Yes! SIMON: That is a slogan due to the Harvard philosopher Santayana. It is more than a century old.
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He wrote down that view in a book with the extremely telling title Reason in Common Sense, which was a pragmatist analysis of the ways in which reason and common sense relate to each other - they are' not synonyms, they are not the same thing, they stand in very complicated relationship, and one needs to work out in any given social setting, especially if one is being instructed about, say, what the sciences teach or what we've learned from
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the past, one needs to be very careful about how those lessons are applied. So one of the things historians of science can surely do, should be doing as actively as they possibly can, is to ensure as far as possible that the appeal to imaginary pasts - like the appeal to imaginary futures, which plays such an important role in our current debates - is as well informed and materially grounded as it possibly can be. That often puts the historian in
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a difficult position - to the extent that she's listened to. She very often is either saying, "Oh, well, we've seen all this before," she's often telling stories that sound as if this is simply a criticism of neophilia, that we need to know the situation in which we find ourselves is not at all unprecedented, and that there are lessons to be learned, and on the other hand I think what the history of science can do is by specifying as precisely as possible the situations
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in which apparently similar issues and crises were confronted, by specifying those conditions. We can make sense, much better sense, of what distinguishes our current predicament from past predicaments. One of the key words I think historians of science can and should think about quite a lot is the word 'we' here. Because an enormous amount of debate about the sciences, technology, medicine, its application, its development, its status, its trustworthiness,
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very often uses the word 'we.' "We know that". "What we've found is.."..
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and that collective pronoun often conceals as much as it reveals. Because what it wants to do often is to draw attention both towards and away from the source of authority, by making better sense, I think, of exactly how forms of trust and authority are distributed in this and other societies, it's possible to make better sense, I think, of the quality of debate, which clearly needs improvement. LUBAABA: Absolutely.
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And just drawing on the pronoun of 'we' and also you mentioned imaginary pasts,
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some of the work that you do draws on a globalised understanding of history and of interaction and
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sort of transcultural interactions and engagement, so I would love to talk a little bit about that.
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So one of your books is The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, and that
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caught my eye a little bit, and I love what you say when you talk about the value of go-betweens in these transcultural changes. So, for example, you speak about the author who writes about Faisal Hussain(?) and part of what we see is a translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica, and I think that is a great exchange of scientific knowledge, so could you talk a bit about this,
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and give any examples of scientific exchange in the opposite direction as well, from Asia into the Western world? SIMON: Sure. So, tragically, I cannot rely on the entire audience having direct access to, let alone having read, the book that you are kind enough to mention. LUBAABA: I highly recommend it! SIMON: Thank you, you are very generous. This was a work which was - this is important,
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it was a collective work, which drew on the expertise, the editorial labour, the collaboration with a substantial group of historians of science and medicine over an extended period,
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and I want to emphasise that partly to give credit where credit's due, to the co-editors, and to our contributors partly to make the point, again, that a great deal of work in this and other fields is collective work. It's about exchange - exactly as you say. My contribution, amongst other things, looked at the development of relations between British and Indian astral sciences, astronomy,
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in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It was well known to some scholars that Hussain Khan, a Shiite scholar originally from Kashmir, who had worked in Delhi and in Calcutta had in the late 18th century, set out to translate a number of British works into Arabic, the language of scholarship and of high culture, and one of these was Newton's Principia. That immediately drew my attention for a number of obvious and perhaps slightly less obvious reasons. One
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reason was that this was such a striking case of not just transmission, but interaction.
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That this was a collaborative effort between Tafat Zul(?) and a group of other scholars,
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by no means all of whom were British, who together began to develop more sophisticated and more fascinating models of the astral sciences' content and also their historical development. These were people who were fascinated simultaneously - it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, who were fascinated simultaneously by the content of this highly advanced science and by its history. And understood, which I think is very striking, that in order to understand
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the content of astronomy, you also have to understand where it came from. It also means that Arabic would be the third, possibly the fourth, certainly very early language into which Newton's Principia was translated - a fact which I think is worth dwelling on because,
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if I can dare to point this out, at the moment when I was working on that study, there were those who were arguing, astonishingly, and entirely erroneously, that Islamic science had essentially finished with Al-Ghazali, and it seemed worth making the point rather publicly that this is completely false, historically, and here is a rather striking example of just how false that is. That was already a two-way process. What was happening in Bengal and in
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Avad(?) at that period was a multi-directional process of what my colleague called 'circulation.'
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There were inordinately many examples of the response to absorption of debates about implementation of practices in Britain, for example, that would not have been so adopted had these encounters, many of which were uneven, violent and exploitive, taken place.
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Surely, the most relevant example that might come to mind at the moment is inoculation.
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Which was, after all, a practice, very widespread in what the Europeans choose to call the Middle East, and which was adopted in force, and controversially, in early 18th century north-western Europe after its implementation elsewhere - for example, in Turkey.
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So that's a striking example, and there are many, many others. As you've already said in some of your comments, the issue of a certain kind of Eurocentric story about the emergence and achievements of the modern sciences I think also has to be absolutely centrally on the agenda of historians of science. It isn't - let me emphasise this point - simply a question, or perhaps even ever a question, of calibrating different cultures according to the level of their scientific
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development. That's not the thought. The thought is, rather, to be historically honest and to be
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involved in an understanding of the ways in which interaction and communication and circulation are the fundamentals of the pursuit of reliable natural knowledge, right through the period that I've been trying to make sense of. Let me give another quick example of the way in which this works and doesn't. When the British first encountered the great observatories built under the orders of Jai Singh in cities such as Jaipur,
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they assumed that these extraordinary astronomical monuments must be ancient because they assumed they must be sophisticated and they assumed that the astral sciences they had encountered were decadent and had declined, so those built in the 30s and 40s, were initially assumed by the British tosh hundreds if not thousands of years old. The reason why these British travellers and our officers made that assumption is because of a view
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about Indian and subcontinental sciences in particular that was erroneous to be sure, but it underwrote a version of imperial and European legitimacy which in important ways still holds sway over accounts given of the relation between, say, European and Asian knowledge systems. I think that's a task for history of science, as well as a research task for historians of science. LUBAABA: With regards to the Eurocentric-ism of history and we discussed this actually earlier
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today, that in history part of it is for us to have a form of history which is accurate and also that has an impact on public thought and public perception of themselves and of other nations. So I mean I would love to hear some of your thoughts on that in terms of the longevity of history and historical inquiry and how it sort of impacts people's ideas of themselves and the wider world. SIMON: Right. I think, again, you'll have noticed
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that there is a pattern to my answers. There are two related aspects to that question, which is very general, but obviously extremely urgent and pressing. One aspect that has preoccupied a lot of my own work has been the notion that the exotic is the same as the remote and the ancient.
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And that was what my story about Jaising's observatories was supposed to illustrate. In other words, the assumption, to turn it into jargon, that far away is long ago.
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The way in which models of scientific and technical development have underwritten that appalling thought - because that thought goes along with models of cultural, economic, indeed intellectual, personal, development which is very often associated with versions of racism.
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That in order, as it were - this was said in the 1790s and early 1800s by several European writers,
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in order to see where Europeans came from, it was argued, one should go to the ends of the earth, because the populations who lived there, so it was claimed, show Europeans what their immemorially ancient ancestors must have been like.
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Now, that idea that there is a linear path that all civilisations and cultures trace that path and that one way, an important way of measuring that path, is techno-scientific development, is underwritten by those versions of history, and those versions of history clearly demand profound critique and revision and I think in particular historians of science and technology have a role to play in reorganising those kinds of narratives so that they're not used for those
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kinds of purposes. The complementary aspect of that, which again some of my work - certainly not enough - has tried to make sense of is the way in which all scientists are also doing history.
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To be slightly superficial about it, history is citation, history is footnotes, and the way in which claims about what is the case about the world, devices that work in the world, are built up out of all the immense labour of very large numbers of predecessors.
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These predecessors could be last month or 500 years ago. Better understanding of the lineages, the ancestry, the provenance of all that work, I think, would improve massively understanding of - we come back to the issue - relations of trust or deference or authority or collaboration in the sciences. To be very quick, one can say that, surely, one of the most important functions of history is massively to increase the cast list of our mental theatre
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that is constantly playing when we think about who we are and the society that we belong to.
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The phrase that the great historian EP Thompson uses about, "Saving the past from the infinite condescension of the present" by studying those people, whole classes of people, who tend to be left out or minimised or denied the right to have a history, that is a profound contribution that I think historians can make to our models of what counts as science, technology, medicine.
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LUBAABA: I'm going to now bring in some of the questions from our viewers, and I think it's quite an opportune time to make this segue because we have some questions from teachers, including primary school teachers, and how we disseminate this knowledge to the next generation is, I think, a very valuable point to take here. So we have a question from Jemma who said, I'm a training primary schoolteacher who is researching the benefits of exploring science history with
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children to benefit science teaching. How do you think having an understanding of science in the past could benefit their children in both their understanding of history and science? SIMON: Well, thank you, Gemma, for that really, really great question.
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I think one of the ways in which understanding past sciences can really help is to get children to understand the way in which the rights to take part in debates about issues of science, issues of technology, issues of medicine are theirs and by going back over
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episodes from the past of the sciences, seeing what interests, what purposes, what materials were involved, seeing, for example, how particular technical solutions were reached, and above all seeing the often vast networks of resources from people who, as I've just said, are not always included in these stories,
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that, I think, can really improve the way in which citizens see themselves as part of a world in which they can take part in these debates and help make decisions on these issues. While at the same time understanding what categories, like expertise, experience and judgement, really amount to. Those are, I think, profound pressures on teaching in general and presumably primary school teaching in particular. I'll just put in a word here for the admiration we
40:24
all, I'm sure, share for people doing the work that Gemma is doing, and how important it is, if I may risk saying this, that people who are doing Gemma's work are properly rewarded and properly resourced - especially at this very moment when their work is so indispensable. LUBAABA: Absolutely. I mean, our primary school - I have children myself and I can only admire how primary schools teachers are dealing with educating children particularly in this
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time during this pandemic so I absolutely agree with you that our teachers need to be properly resourced to continue the work they are doing. To continue on this theme of educating children we have a question from Peter who says I am worried that in children's teaching around the world there is a great emphasis on the shiny points of science and hardly any time devoted to the process of science or more generally how science works, would you agree and should
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science education accordingly be overhauled? SIMON: I absolutely agree. Overhauling science education is the same as the way in which science education has developed. It has been in a state of permanent overhaul for as long as there is a record of science education, as we know very well.
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I share, in particular, the thought that there are penalties, there are real difficulties
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by concentrating solely on end products, and that has effects right across the sciences and right across the social condition of the sciences. Some of my most eminent and distinguished colleagues in the history of science and technology have argued - and I think very persuasively - that
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a focus on the cutting edge alone, a bias towards the absolutely new, can do enormous damage to our understanding of what science, technology and medicine are about. That we massively overestimate very often the significance of the most recent big new thing, without understanding the complete place that scientific and technical culture plays in the world and, once again, what that does is often to draw attention from the labours, from the contribution
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and the significance of a very large number of people who are contributing to social welfare and to scientific understanding and material production. So I think there is a politics there
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as well as a pedagogy. So I think this was very well put. Thank you for that contribution.
43:32
LUBAABA: Just continuing on the point you just made with regards to the social context, we have a question on climate change and I thought that was another very pertinent and timely question to bring in and an opportunity to also discuss a project that you're engaged in. So this question is, are concerns around climates and climate change feel like a thoroughly modern issue - how far back can concerns on climate change be traced? I believe you're working on
44:02
a project, Making Climate History, so this would be a great moment to hear about that as well. SIMON: So let me name-check Making Climate History, and thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding it, it launched at Cambridge across the Department of Geography and the Department of History of Science last year and it is staffed by a number of extremely impressive colleagues of mine, and it's a pleasure to work with them. Part of the concern of the project
44:39
is precisely to try and answer the question that has just been asked.
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That is to say, to try and make sense of exactly how concerns with changing climate have developed, what their long track record is, and perhaps, above all, what is the productive relationship between accounts of climate that reckon that it is changing, and practices that change the climate.
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That seems to be an absolutely central question that geographers as well as historians can contribute to in really quite profound ways. Let me give a couple of tiny examples. First of all, until about 1800, roughly,
45:36
the word 'climate' in English and in many other European languages meant 'geographical region.'
45:45
And therefore changing climate was impossible in principle. Not because people didn't think climate changed but because of what they thought 'climate' meant. So if you look in Dr Johnson's dictionary,
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the definition of 'climate' that Johnson gave was exactly that - climate is a geographical region, it is a zone on the earth. But gradually, notions of climate as atmospheric condition, weather and so on, began to emerge and in the years after 1800, 'climate' was now understood as something that could change and, indeed, that some changes were due to human action.
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So the answer to the substantive question that has just been asked is: At least 200 years. In 1845, for example, a book was published called The Changes in the Climate of France. A title that would have made no sense whatsoever in the 17th century. The book argues not only that the climate of France was changing, but that a great deal of these changes were due to people, to humans,
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and that orthodox established science was wrong-headedly denying that climate was changing and wrong-headedly denying that humans could have an effect on climate. That was 1845. Clearly there are massive differences - scientific, technical, environmental, political - between what was going on in the early 1800s and what has been happening over the last
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three or four decades, and we need to make sense, exactly as has been said in this conversation, of what those differences are. What's new is not the idea that climate is changing, nor the idea that humans can change it, and are changing it. What's new is very specific issues in the content and aims and methods of sciences and the content, aims and methods of political economy. LUBAABA: Thank you very much. So moving on to
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a question that has been upvoted quite a bit - we did mention one of your books, The Brokered World, so now we mention another, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, which brought together many discourses at a time when the understanding of science was at a crossroads between positivism and social constructivism. Can you say more about how this crossroads came about and how you situated yourself and the values you tried to put forth? SIMON: Thank you, Alice. ‘Popular’ is perhaps not
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quite the word that I would choose to describe that book!
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It was composed in London and Edinburgh in the first half of the 1980s
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and on a train. Do you remember those?! LUBAABA: Yes! I think all the best books are written on trains, aren't they? SIMON: Exactly, travelling between London and Edinburgh. That was a period, exactly as Alice says, of intense debate not only within philosophy, history, science studies and so on, but clearly across a very broad agenda, as was mentioned earlier in this conversation. My co-author especially - Steve Shapin, who I want to
49:37
honour - and I were certainly affected by, and wished in some important ways to contribute to, wider debates about the condition of scientific knowledge and the relation between scientific knowledge and the social world in which people ply their trade. In particular, one of the issues that we wanted to address and try and make sense of was how it had come to pass at all that the social and the natural seemed sundered from each other, seemed entirely separate zones of activity.
50:26
How did that great distinction come to be made? Clearly, one of the places - not by any means the only, or even the first place where that distinction was in question and debated, was in the material around which the book orients itself which is a series of exchanges and debates between the experimental natural philosopher Robert Boyle and the philosopher and political writer Thomas Hobbs and I think that trying to understand a distinction
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that is perhaps too easy to take for granted was clearly an important aim of that book and it seems pretty obvious that that book has then provoked various responses
51:19
which have, again, sought to make sense of the way in which the social order and the natural order might be said to interact with each other.
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LUBAABA: Thank you. I just want to bring a question with regards your work with art galleries and collections and museums. We had some questions with regards to schooling and education and, really, I'm interested to know about how this knowledge can be disseminated in a productive and engaging way to wider audiences. So you've often worked closely with museums, art galleries and collections such as the Science Museum and the National Maritime Museums. How important
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do you see the role of museums and collections in communicating the importance of science and the history of science to public audiences? SIMON: Well, I think that those collections and institutions are entirely indispensable for the kind of work that we need to be doing as historians of science but also as public contributors to debates and controversies, indeed, about the place of science in the world. This, for many different
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reasons. The overwhelming significance of materiality, of the objects and the collections,
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which do far, far more, let me emphasise, than simply act as a kind of conduit down which historical or scientific understanding is communicated or diffused or disseminated. Museums, galleries and collections are sites at which absolutely new knowledge and absolutely new forms of understanding and experience are being made all the time,
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and as was said about primary schools, the same applies in force to galleries, collections and museums - with adequate resources those kinds of indispensable public functions can be discharged. The museum and the gallery as a place of work and exchange and encounter in potentially the most exciting and productive ways, and that especially applies, in my view, to the sciences.
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The complementary point, therefore, is the way in which very different models of what looks like the sciences, or what looks like medicine, can emerge from experiences of working and visiting, making sense of all the resources that museums and galleries provide. I'm lucky enough to be on the advisory board of the Science Museum in South Kensington, and the role of that institution is, of course, highly various. It ought to go far, far beyond
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simply the communication of better understanding of the sciences to issues like active, focused, informed debates in which as large a number of people as possible can take part around the direction of the sciences and also its path. One of the things I think that these collections and institutions offer - we're used to this very often in the case of what we are pleased to call 'the arts', and clearly this applies to techno-science and medicine too,
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these are institutions that nourish better imaginary futures. There is an enormous role for museums and galleries in offering visions of how things might go in the future, and working out ways in which, as it were, there is a history of the future. How, in the past, was the world that we now find ourselves in imagined? That's an area, I think, of absolutely profound significance. LUBAABA: I really love this idea of better
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imaginary futures that you've just mentioned and it's just really so valuable. I mean particularly the Science Museum is an institution that I've visited since I was a child - I've probably visited that from all our museums more than any other of the institutions that we have out there. So I mean I think that would be a great way to segue into one of our concluding questions. We are in the last few minutes of this programme. So the pandemic has in some ways broadened our
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perspectives and our possibilities of connecting and exchanging ideas. We're hosting this event virtually, for example. So in an increasingly digitised world what do you think the methods of understanding and communicating science and history will be in the future - so in our imagined futures, so to speak. SIMON: Right, let me get out of the way instantly the obvious point that the digital cannot function as any kind of substitute for material encounter.
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I'm desperately hoping that the experience of the last 10 or 11 months for very large numbers of people under enormous economic, financial, political and psychological pressure, convinces them that online living, if that's what it is, is a superb complement and a hopeless replacement for material engagement. In the case of studying the past of the sciences - so what is the future of the past of the sciences - digital resources are going to be indispensable and
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they're going to be intense, but crucially, the delocalisation and the availability of expertise, participation and collaboration with other places elsewhere on the planet is, I think, the most important possible development that we could either imagine or struggle for.
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What we need to be thinking about the most is what is the relationship between bad and good forms of global communication. That is surely one of the lessons that the pandemic has begun to teach us. LUBAABA: Absolutely. Certainly one of the lessons that I'm taking from it. A virtual programme is wonderful but I would have loved to have met you in person! So we're in our last minute. Thank you so much, Simon, for joining us, and congratulations for being awarded the
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Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal. It's absolutely well earned. And thank you to everyone who has been watching this evening, and of course for getting involved in the conversations with your questions. Simon, it has been a pleasure, thank you. And I've learnt a lot today.
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SIMON: Well, thank you. LUBAABA: So for further information about the Royal Society events they can be found on the website for future events. Please do take a few minutes to complete the evaluation survey in the YouTube description. And we'll look forward to seeing you again soon for future events. Have a very lovely evening and thank you very much to Simon for being our honoured guest today and to our audience for joining us.
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