August 2, 2023 • 19 mins
This week we welcome Dr Martin Bush to the podcast to discuss the role of imagery and visualisation in the circulation of science and knowledge.
Martin is a member of the HPS department at the University of Melbourne who focuses primarily on the role of imagery in the popularisation and teaching of astronomy. In this episode, he takes us through the different arenas in which science is produced, discussed and circulated, and how these spheres can influence, or gate keep knowledge from each other. Martin then looks at the role that imagery and visualisation plays in the popularisation and understanding of scientific knowledge, and at the use of imagery as documentary evidence.
Follow the links below to learn more about Martin and the topic he discussed with us:
Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The uses of images as historical evidence. Cornell University Press, 2001.
Bush, Martin. (2018). 1891: The Collins–Hosking debate, Christchurch. Public Understanding of Science, 27(7), 897–904. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662518771400
Bush, Martin. "Again with feeling: modes of visual representation of popular astronomy in the mid-nineteenth century." Notes and Records 76, no. 3 (2022): 485-506.
Kärnfelt, Johan. "The Popularization of Astronomy in Early Twentieth-Century Sweden: Aims and Motives." In Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000, pp. 175-194. Routledge, 2016.
Lewis, Dyani. "Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborne." Nature 604, no. 7904 (2022): 26-31.
Secord, Anne. (1994). Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire. History of Science, 32(3), 269–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/007327539403200302.
Secord, James A. “Knowledge in Transit.” Isis 95, no. 4 (2004): 654–72. https://doi.org/10.1086/430657.
A full transcript of the episode can be found here: https://www.hpsunimelb.org/post/episode-10-transcript
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast with current producers, Samara Greenwood and Carmelina Contarino. You can find more about us on our blog, website, bluesky, twitter, instagram and facebook feeds. Music by ComaStudio.
This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.
HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Indigo Keel (00:05):
Hi all.
From the team here at the HPSpodcast, we welcome you to
another episode.
I'm your host, Indigo Keel, andtoday we welcome Martin Bush.
He discusses with us the role ofvisualization as a method of
circulation and distribution ofscientific knowledge.
How does science move from thelab into the public sphere?
(00:25):
What is the role of the publicarena in the creation and
distribution of knowledge?
And how do we use imagery toaugment our creation and
circulation of scientificknowledge?
Hello Martin, welcome to The HPSPodcast.
Martin Bush (00:40):
Hi Indi, it's great to be here.
Indigo Keel (00:41):
I'll start off with the question we always ask,
which is how did you come intoHPS?
Martin Bush (00:46):
So I think the traditional answer on this
podcast so far is for people totell their sideways story about
how they got into HPS and I canalso tell a sideways story, but
maybe for a counter narrative, Ican also tell a story about how
HPS has always been very closeto me.
This comes about from two booksthat I was given as a teenager.
(01:09):
First was What Is This ThingCalled Science?
by the University of Sydneyphilosopher of science, Alan
Chalmers.
That introduced me to the ideaof the philosophy of science.
The second one, possibly, um,even more significant to me was
the hardback version of Cosmos,the TV series by Carl Sagan,
which was given to me by mygrandfather.
(01:31):
This really changed my life.
This introduced me to the ideaof physics and also introduce
the role of the history ofphysics.
What I would now think of as arather bad history of science,
but nonetheless veryilluminating and inspiring to
me.
So I went off to university,determined to be a theoretical
(01:54):
physicist, and I completed myundergraduate degree, determined
not to be a theoreticalphysicist.
And decided that what I reallywanted to do was a socially
engaged form of science, so wentoff and did my master's in
science communication.
I completed my sciencecommunication degrees and moved
to Melbourne and got a job atthe museum, did some museum work
(02:17):
for a while, and then finallyleft the museum to go off and do
a history of science PhD.
Since completing that PhD, I'veworked here at the University of
Melbourne on a meta researchproject evaluating the
reliability of publishedresearch claims.
In the social and behavioralsciences.
(02:39):
So I do feel like I've done abit of a tour of HPS through
philosophy and history and metaresearch with a bit of science
communication and museum studiesalong the way.
Indigo Keel (02:51):
It's great to see just how wide h p s is and how
many fields you can jump intowhile doing HPS.
So what is a topic that youbelieve would be of interest or
value to our audience?
Martin Bush (03:03):
So the idea that I want to talk about in this
podcast is the notion of thecirculation of knowledge.
So this was a concept that wasintroduced into the literature
by the historian of science atthe University of Cambridge,
James Secord in 2004.
And it both crystallizedexisting trends and also shaped
(03:28):
the endeavors of the particularsubdiscipline of the history of
science that I work in, which isthe history of popular knowledge
of science.
Now I do have to say that, asoften happens in the humanities,
we define a subfield, and thenargue endlessly about how the
name that we've given for thatsubfield is not appropriate.
(03:51):
There are a lot of debates abouthow we shouldn't really talk
about the idea of popularscience, because this gives the
misleading impression that thereare two kinds of knowledge.
There is elite scientificknowledge, which is produced in
laboratories, and then this isdisseminated out to the public
in a popular form.
It is precisely this issue thatwas one of the things that James
(04:16):
Secord wanted to address by theidea of circulation.
And that is to recognize that ina very important way, the public
arena has always been a placewhere scientific knowledge is
formed, shaped and debated.
And I can give you a fewexamples of this.
So very recently, of course,we've gone through the COVID 19
(04:40):
pandemic.
And one of the major issues thatcame up during that was what is
the mechanism of transmission ofCOVID 19?
Is it transmitted by largedroplets which gather on
surfaces?
And so we have to wash ourhands.
Or is it transmitted by smalldroplets that are airborne, and
so we have to wear masks.
(05:01):
I think, we will all rememberthat this was a very important
debate that happened, and to alarge extent it happened in the
public arena.
It was being fought out onwebsites, through Twitter, there
were discussions in the mediaabout it.
People's direct experiencesreally fed into the debate.
(05:23):
It wasn't something that wassimply conducted in academic
journals or laboratories.
Although, of course, it was alsoconducted through those
mechanisms.
This kind of publicargumentation around scientific
knowledge is not new.
Closer to my own field of studythere has been the question of
(05:43):
the possibility of life ondistant planets or distant
universes.
Now, this is a topic that hasinterested astronomers for a
very long time, and while therecertainly have been many
scientific publications aboutthis, it has more often been
something that has been talkedabout through popular medium
(06:03):
through novels, books, magazinesand recently TV shows, internet,
documentaries, and podcasts.
This is an example of ascientific question which gets,
to a large extent prosecuted,developed, discussed through the
public realm.
Now this is not to say thatthose more traditional
scientific sites are notimportant.
(06:25):
Analogously to how Rachel Brownwas talking about values in
science in an earlier podcast,that's not to say that anything
goes.
To say that the public realm isan important medium for
scientific discussion is not tosay that the laboratory and the
observatory and the fieldworksites are not important sites of
(06:47):
knowledge generation.
Of course they are.
But the traditional view hasbeen that this is solely where
knowledge is created and that itthen emerges from those sites
into the public realm.
The field that I look atemphasizes that the public realm
has always been an importantsite of negotiation and
(07:10):
development of scientific ideas.
So, that is one of the aspectsof the circulation of knowledge
that is important.
A second really important aspectof the idea of knowledge as
circulation is a focus on thisidea of knowledge as practice.
And by this, I don't just meanthe technical skills that would
(07:32):
allow you to build a smartphoneor to perform a DNA assay, but
really in a much morefundamental level that knowledge
allows us to do things that wewouldn't otherwise be able to
do.
So knowledge of theoreticalphysics allows us to think about
a multidimensional world and toanalyze space in those terms.
(07:55):
Knowledge of psychologicalpersonality types allows us to
understand and study people in away that we wouldn't otherwise
be able to do.
So knowledge very much allows usto do things and that's an
important part of it.
This focus on knowledge aspractice helps us to solve what
(08:15):
is something of a puzzle.
And that puzzle is that over thelast few decades, the history of
science has really focused onthe local and the particular in
forming knowledge.
What-to make a shout out to aprevious HPS podcast-what Donna
Haraway talked about as situatedknowledges.
That we always produce knowledgefrom a particular place, and
(08:39):
that involves particular skillsand particular perspectives.
So, just for one example, therole that art and design and
printing played in thedevelopment of botanical
knowledge through the creationof drawing.
And so, historians of sciencehave been very engaged and
focussed on this particular inthe creation of scientific
(09:01):
knowledge.
And yet we know that science hasan enormous and indeed global
reach.
So, how do we put those thingstogether?
How do we understand howknowledge that is constructed in
a very unique way, nonethelessmanages to have a global reach?
And this idea of knowledge assomething that is practiced and
(09:23):
circulates is really one of themost productive ways of trying
to understand how we can bridgethat gap.
The third aspect of the idea ofknowledge as circulation, and
probably the closest to the workthat I do, is this idea of
science as being a generalcultural value.
So even where scientific ideasare produced in the laboratory
(09:46):
or observatory, when they enterthe public realm, they take on a
cultural life of their own.
And an example of this is somework that I've done recently on
the image of the lunarlandscape.
And by that I mean the picturethat would be seen by an
observer who was standing on thesurface of the moon, looking
out, across the craters andmountains of the moon, often
(10:10):
looking at a earth suspended inthe starry sky behind.
An image that I'm sure isfamiliar to most of your
listeners.
But this was an image that arosevery suddenly in the middle of
the 19th century.
For much of the period beforethat the image was literally
unimaginable.
(10:30):
When the first few lunarlandscapes started appearing in
print, they were described as afreak of imagination.
But once it appeared, withindecades of the first lunar
landscapes being printed, Itbecame a visual cliché.
Now this change from somethingbeing unimaginable to being a
cliché was associated with awhole lot of changes in both
(10:52):
science and in socialunderstandings of science.
So there was a change in howscientists understood the moon
as a geological body.
And there's change in howscience understood geology
itself and the practices ofscience.
But, importantly, there was alsoa real change in how the public
(11:13):
viewed the moon as a placerather than as an object of
imagination.
This, of course, was associatedwith the rise of classic Vernian
and Welsian Science fiction, butit's important to note that
these lunar landscapes werebeing produced before the rise
of this kind of science fiction.
So, it's very much a change thatwas associated with that
(11:35):
literary movement, but notcaused by it.
And this is one of my favoriteexamples of how the cultural
understandings of science andthe practices of science really
mix together in a particularlyfluid way.
Indigo Keel (11:51):
So you were talking a lot about imagery in that last
little bit and its role in thecirculation and distribution of
knowledge.
I was wondering if you couldtalk a bit more to that.
Martin Bush (12:00):
Yeah, sure.
I do a lot of work on images inscience and in popular
representations of science.
And there's a range of ways inwhich images get used in the
history of science.
So I'll talk through a few ofthese.
Firstly, images provide usefulevidence for the history of
(12:21):
science.
Historians have traditionallyand rightly been focused on
documentary evidence as theirprimary source, and up until a
few decades ago, images werelargely treated as a second
class kind of evidence,subjective and not really
particularly useful.
But there's been a turn towardsimages in recent years.
(12:44):
And we now see that there's veryimportant and interesting
details that we can get fromlooking at images.
And one example that I'll givehere is to do with the reports
of lecture tours in Australia.
So I've done a bit of work onthe tour in 1880 of the famous
British astronomer andpopularizer Richard Proctor.
(13:06):
And if you read the newspaperreports of accounts of his
visits.
You would hear about all of theimportant men that were
attending, the mayors who turnedup, the heads of scientific and
other societies that turned up.
But then, when you look at aillustration of his lectures,
you see almost the entire frontrow is filled with women and
(13:29):
children who don't get much of amention in the documentary
sources.
But of course we do know fromother sources that women were
highly engaged in popularscience in the 19th century as
one of the ways that it waspermissible to get a scientific
education and to engage withscientific ideas at a time when
(13:50):
women were largely locked out offormal education or membership
of societies.
One example of how looking atimages really does tell a
different story to just readingthe documentary evidence.
A second and really importantaspect of images in science is
their use as a tool in thegeneration of scientific
(14:13):
knowledge.
So, there's been a lot ofinterest recently in the idea of
paper tools in the way thatforms of notation or diagrams or
production of images allows thecreation of scientific knowledge
in a way that simply writingthings out or even doing
(14:33):
equations does not allow.
Classic examples of this are theidea of the periodic table in
sorting out relationshipsbetween chemical elements or
Feynman diagrams in allowingtheoretical physicists to think
through the kinds ofinteractions that happen at a
quantum level.
And of course, the production ofimages has been fundamental to
(14:58):
sciences like astronomy ormicroscopy.
And so images can be themselvesa really important aspect of the
study of the scientific process.
And a third aspect of images inthe history of science, coming
back to things that are closestto my own heart, is the role of
images as cultural meanings.
(15:20):
I've done a lot of work on thepopular astronomical lecturing
in the 19th century, and theselectures were almost universally
illustrated by magic lanternslides, or wall charts, or
various other wackytechnologies.
And it's interesting to thinkabout what this role of images
played in the dissemination ofastronomical knowledge.
(15:43):
It might be straightforward tosay, well, astronomy is a visual
science.
Certainly in that period, peopledid astronomy by looking up and
gazing at the stars and makingmaps of what they saw.
And so it makes sense that whenyou talk about astronomy, you're
also talking about the thingsthat people see.
But in fact, the images thatdominated this kind of lecturing
(16:07):
on astronomy were not the visualrepresentations of the heavens,
but were much more abstract andmathematical diagrams showing
the orbits of the planets or theway that gravity operated.
And these images of thisdiagrammatic form really
emphasize that idea of astronomyas being the pure mathematical
(16:31):
science, the perfect form ofknowledge, the model for other
sciences.
They presented the kind of God'seye view of the solar system,
where everything is seen fromabove, operating according to
perfect harmony.
So, I'd say that the images thatwe used in this kind of
lecturing were not reflectingthe visual character of the
(16:53):
science, but were reflecting thecultural understanding of what
astronomy meant.
And there's some interestingsidelines to this.
I mentioned the God's eye viewof the solar system, and indeed
astronomy was one of the coresciences that was used in the
debates between religious peopleand atheists in the late 19th
(17:16):
century.
So on one hand of the debate youhave people arguing that these
mathematical laws indicate themind of the Creator and show how
everything is according to God'swill.
And on the other side of thedebate, you have people arguing
that the absolute kind ofknowledge, mathematical
knowledge, shows how theuniverse can operate lawfully
(17:39):
without the input of a God atall.
And at one stage, inChristchurch in New Zealand,
there were two lecturerslecturing almost side by side on
the same Sunday using the sameimages of astronomy to
demonstrate wildly differentinterpretations of the universe.
(17:59):
This shows, you know, sort ofnot only can these images take a
whole lot of cultural value, butin fact that that can be a very
wide ranging and disparate formsof cultural values.
Indigo Keel (18:12):
And this kind of image use in science as a
dissemination method forknowledge is something that
continues to this day.
Martin Bush (18:20):
It certainly does.
We've all seen the release ofthe James Webb Space Telescope
imagery.
A very highly coordinatedactivity, I mean, I think
building on the success of theHubble Space Telescope and their
image archive.
Which is something that I thinkprobably, became clear what an
important tool for publiccommunication of science those
(18:42):
images were during the Hubbleproject.
When the James Webb launched,they had a strategy in place
from day one.
A very deliberate andcoordinated release of those
images in a way to createmaximum effect for what is a
very exciting scientificproject.
Indigo Keel (19:00):
Beautiful.
Thank you so much for being onthe podcast today, Martin.
It was great to have you.
Martin Bush (19:04):
It's an absolute pleasure to be here.
Indigo Keel (19:06):
Thank you all for listening to the first season of
the HPS podcast, where wediscuss all things history,
philosophy, and social studiesof science.
We want to thank the School ofHistorical and Philosophical
studies at the University ofMelbourne for their support.
To learn more, check out ourwebsite at hpsunimelb.org.
(19:27):
There you can also find links toour blog, Twitter, Facebook, and
Insta, as well as show notes fortoday's topic.
I'm Indigo Keel and
Hi all.
From the team here at the HPSpodcast, we welcome you to
another episode.
I'm your host, Indigo Keel, andtoday we welcome Martin Bush.
He discusses with us the role ofvisualization as a method of
circulation and distribution ofscientific knowledge.
How does science move from thelab into the public sphere?
(00:25):
What is the role of the publicarena in the creation and
distribution of knowledge?
And how do we use imagery toaugment our creation and
circulation of scientificknowledge?
Hello Martin, welcome to The HPSPodcast.
Martin Bush (00:40):
Hi Indi, it's great to be here.
Indigo Keel (00:41):
I'll start off with the question we always ask,
which is how did you come intoHPS?
Martin Bush (00:46):
So I think the traditional answer on this
podcast so far is for people totell their sideways story about
how they got into HPS and I canalso tell a sideways story, but
maybe for a counter narrative, Ican also tell a story about how
HPS has always been very closeto me.
This comes about from two booksthat I was given as a teenager.
(01:09):
First was What Is This ThingCalled Science?
by the University of Sydneyphilosopher of science, Alan
Chalmers.
That introduced me to the ideaof the philosophy of science.
The second one, possibly, um,even more significant to me was
the hardback version of Cosmos,the TV series by Carl Sagan,
which was given to me by mygrandfather.
(01:31):
This really changed my life.
This introduced me to the ideaof physics and also introduce
the role of the history ofphysics.
What I would now think of as arather bad history of science,
but nonetheless veryilluminating and inspiring to
me.
So I went off to university,determined to be a theoretical
(01:54):
physicist, and I completed myundergraduate degree, determined
not to be a theoreticalphysicist.
And decided that what I reallywanted to do was a socially
engaged form of science, so wentoff and did my master's in
science communication.
I completed my sciencecommunication degrees and moved
to Melbourne and got a job atthe museum, did some museum work
(02:17):
for a while, and then finallyleft the museum to go off and do
a history of science PhD.
Since completing that PhD, I'veworked here at the University of
Melbourne on a meta researchproject evaluating the
reliability of publishedresearch claims.
In the social and behavioralsciences.
(02:39):
So I do feel like I've done abit of a tour of HPS through
philosophy and history and metaresearch with a bit of science
communication and museum studiesalong the way.
Indigo Keel (02:51):
It's great to see just how wide h p s is and how
many fields you can jump intowhile doing HPS.
So what is a topic that youbelieve would be of interest or
value to our audience?
Martin Bush (03:03):
So the idea that I want to talk about in this
podcast is the notion of thecirculation of knowledge.
So this was a concept that wasintroduced into the literature
by the historian of science atthe University of Cambridge,
James Secord in 2004.
And it both crystallizedexisting trends and also shaped
(03:28):
the endeavors of the particularsubdiscipline of the history of
science that I work in, which isthe history of popular knowledge
of science.
Now I do have to say that, asoften happens in the humanities,
we define a subfield, and thenargue endlessly about how the
name that we've given for thatsubfield is not appropriate.
(03:51):
There are a lot of debates abouthow we shouldn't really talk
about the idea of popularscience, because this gives the
misleading impression that thereare two kinds of knowledge.
There is elite scientificknowledge, which is produced in
laboratories, and then this isdisseminated out to the public
in a popular form.
It is precisely this issue thatwas one of the things that James
(04:16):
Secord wanted to address by theidea of circulation.
And that is to recognize that ina very important way, the public
arena has always been a placewhere scientific knowledge is
formed, shaped and debated.
And I can give you a fewexamples of this.
So very recently, of course,we've gone through the COVID 19
(04:40):
pandemic.
And one of the major issues thatcame up during that was what is
the mechanism of transmission ofCOVID 19?
Is it transmitted by largedroplets which gather on
surfaces?
And so we have to wash ourhands.
Or is it transmitted by smalldroplets that are airborne, and
so we have to wear masks.
(05:01):
I think, we will all rememberthat this was a very important
debate that happened, and to alarge extent it happened in the
public arena.
It was being fought out onwebsites, through Twitter, there
were discussions in the mediaabout it.
People's direct experiencesreally fed into the debate.
(05:23):
It wasn't something that wassimply conducted in academic
journals or laboratories.
Although, of course, it was alsoconducted through those
mechanisms.
This kind of publicargumentation around scientific
knowledge is not new.
Closer to my own field of studythere has been the question of
(05:43):
the possibility of life ondistant planets or distant
universes.
Now, this is a topic that hasinterested astronomers for a
very long time, and while therecertainly have been many
scientific publications aboutthis, it has more often been
something that has been talkedabout through popular medium
(06:03):
through novels, books, magazinesand recently TV shows, internet,
documentaries, and podcasts.
This is an example of ascientific question which gets,
to a large extent prosecuted,developed, discussed through the
public realm.
Now this is not to say thatthose more traditional
scientific sites are notimportant.
(06:25):
Analogously to how Rachel Brownwas talking about values in
science in an earlier podcast,that's not to say that anything
goes.
To say that the public realm isan important medium for
scientific discussion is not tosay that the laboratory and the
observatory and the fieldworksites are not important sites of
(06:47):
knowledge generation.
Of course they are.
But the traditional view hasbeen that this is solely where
knowledge is created and that itthen emerges from those sites
into the public realm.
The field that I look atemphasizes that the public realm
has always been an importantsite of negotiation and
(07:10):
development of scientific ideas.
So, that is one of the aspectsof the circulation of knowledge
that is important.
A second really important aspectof the idea of knowledge as
circulation is a focus on thisidea of knowledge as practice.
And by this, I don't just meanthe technical skills that would
(07:32):
allow you to build a smartphoneor to perform a DNA assay, but
really in a much morefundamental level that knowledge
allows us to do things that wewouldn't otherwise be able to
do.
So knowledge of theoreticalphysics allows us to think about
a multidimensional world and toanalyze space in those terms.
(07:55):
Knowledge of psychologicalpersonality types allows us to
understand and study people in away that we wouldn't otherwise
be able to do.
So knowledge very much allows usto do things and that's an
important part of it.
This focus on knowledge aspractice helps us to solve what
(08:15):
is something of a puzzle.
And that puzzle is that over thelast few decades, the history of
science has really focused onthe local and the particular in
forming knowledge.
What-to make a shout out to aprevious HPS podcast-what Donna
Haraway talked about as situatedknowledges.
That we always produce knowledgefrom a particular place, and
(08:39):
that involves particular skillsand particular perspectives.
So, just for one example, therole that art and design and
printing played in thedevelopment of botanical
knowledge through the creationof drawing.
And so, historians of sciencehave been very engaged and
focussed on this particular inthe creation of scientific
(09:01):
knowledge.
And yet we know that science hasan enormous and indeed global
reach.
So, how do we put those thingstogether?
How do we understand howknowledge that is constructed in
a very unique way, nonethelessmanages to have a global reach?
And this idea of knowledge assomething that is practiced and
(09:23):
circulates is really one of themost productive ways of trying
to understand how we can bridgethat gap.
The third aspect of the idea ofknowledge as circulation, and
probably the closest to the workthat I do, is this idea of
science as being a generalcultural value.
So even where scientific ideasare produced in the laboratory
(09:46):
or observatory, when they enterthe public realm, they take on a
cultural life of their own.
And an example of this is somework that I've done recently on
the image of the lunarlandscape.
And by that I mean the picturethat would be seen by an
observer who was standing on thesurface of the moon, looking
out, across the craters andmountains of the moon, often
(10:10):
looking at a earth suspended inthe starry sky behind.
An image that I'm sure isfamiliar to most of your
listeners.
But this was an image that arosevery suddenly in the middle of
the 19th century.
For much of the period beforethat the image was literally
unimaginable.
(10:30):
When the first few lunarlandscapes started appearing in
print, they were described as afreak of imagination.
But once it appeared, withindecades of the first lunar
landscapes being printed, Itbecame a visual cliché.
Now this change from somethingbeing unimaginable to being a
cliché was associated with awhole lot of changes in both
(10:52):
science and in socialunderstandings of science.
So there was a change in howscientists understood the moon
as a geological body.
And there's change in howscience understood geology
itself and the practices ofscience.
But, importantly, there was alsoa real change in how the public
(11:13):
viewed the moon as a placerather than as an object of
imagination.
This, of course, was associatedwith the rise of classic Vernian
and Welsian Science fiction, butit's important to note that
these lunar landscapes werebeing produced before the rise
of this kind of science fiction.
So, it's very much a change thatwas associated with that
(11:35):
literary movement, but notcaused by it.
And this is one of my favoriteexamples of how the cultural
understandings of science andthe practices of science really
mix together in a particularlyfluid way.
Indigo Keel (11:51):
So you were talking a lot about imagery in that last
little bit and its role in thecirculation and distribution of
knowledge.
I was wondering if you couldtalk a bit more to that.
Martin Bush (12:00):
Yeah, sure.
I do a lot of work on images inscience and in popular
representations of science.
And there's a range of ways inwhich images get used in the
history of science.
So I'll talk through a few ofthese.
Firstly, images provide usefulevidence for the history of
(12:21):
science.
Historians have traditionallyand rightly been focused on
documentary evidence as theirprimary source, and up until a
few decades ago, images werelargely treated as a second
class kind of evidence,subjective and not really
particularly useful.
But there's been a turn towardsimages in recent years.
(12:44):
And we now see that there's veryimportant and interesting
details that we can get fromlooking at images.
And one example that I'll givehere is to do with the reports
of lecture tours in Australia.
So I've done a bit of work onthe tour in 1880 of the famous
British astronomer andpopularizer Richard Proctor.
(13:06):
And if you read the newspaperreports of accounts of his
visits.
You would hear about all of theimportant men that were
attending, the mayors who turnedup, the heads of scientific and
other societies that turned up.
But then, when you look at aillustration of his lectures,
you see almost the entire frontrow is filled with women and
(13:29):
children who don't get much of amention in the documentary
sources.
But of course we do know fromother sources that women were
highly engaged in popularscience in the 19th century as
one of the ways that it waspermissible to get a scientific
education and to engage withscientific ideas at a time when
(13:50):
women were largely locked out offormal education or membership
of societies.
One example of how looking atimages really does tell a
different story to just readingthe documentary evidence.
A second and really importantaspect of images in science is
their use as a tool in thegeneration of scientific
(14:13):
knowledge.
So, there's been a lot ofinterest recently in the idea of
paper tools in the way thatforms of notation or diagrams or
production of images allows thecreation of scientific knowledge
in a way that simply writingthings out or even doing
(14:33):
equations does not allow.
Classic examples of this are theidea of the periodic table in
sorting out relationshipsbetween chemical elements or
Feynman diagrams in allowingtheoretical physicists to think
through the kinds ofinteractions that happen at a
quantum level.
And of course, the production ofimages has been fundamental to
(14:58):
sciences like astronomy ormicroscopy.
And so images can be themselvesa really important aspect of the
study of the scientific process.
And a third aspect of images inthe history of science, coming
back to things that are closestto my own heart, is the role of
images as cultural meanings.
(15:20):
I've done a lot of work on thepopular astronomical lecturing
in the 19th century, and theselectures were almost universally
illustrated by magic lanternslides, or wall charts, or
various other wackytechnologies.
And it's interesting to thinkabout what this role of images
played in the dissemination ofastronomical knowledge.
(15:43):
It might be straightforward tosay, well, astronomy is a visual
science.
Certainly in that period, peopledid astronomy by looking up and
gazing at the stars and makingmaps of what they saw.
And so it makes sense that whenyou talk about astronomy, you're
also talking about the thingsthat people see.
But in fact, the images thatdominated this kind of lecturing
(16:07):
on astronomy were not the visualrepresentations of the heavens,
but were much more abstract andmathematical diagrams showing
the orbits of the planets or theway that gravity operated.
And these images of thisdiagrammatic form really
emphasize that idea of astronomyas being the pure mathematical
(16:31):
science, the perfect form ofknowledge, the model for other
sciences.
They presented the kind of God'seye view of the solar system,
where everything is seen fromabove, operating according to
perfect harmony.
So, I'd say that the images thatwe used in this kind of
lecturing were not reflectingthe visual character of the
(16:53):
science, but were reflecting thecultural understanding of what
astronomy meant.
And there's some interestingsidelines to this.
I mentioned the God's eye viewof the solar system, and indeed
astronomy was one of the coresciences that was used in the
debates between religious peopleand atheists in the late 19th
(17:16):
century.
So on one hand of the debate youhave people arguing that these
mathematical laws indicate themind of the Creator and show how
everything is according to God'swill.
And on the other side of thedebate, you have people arguing
that the absolute kind ofknowledge, mathematical
knowledge, shows how theuniverse can operate lawfully
(17:39):
without the input of a God atall.
And at one stage, inChristchurch in New Zealand,
there were two lecturerslecturing almost side by side on
the same Sunday using the sameimages of astronomy to
demonstrate wildly differentinterpretations of the universe.
(17:59):
This shows, you know, sort ofnot only can these images take a
whole lot of cultural value, butin fact that that can be a very
wide ranging and disparate formsof cultural values.
Indigo Keel (18:12):
And this kind of image use in science as a
dissemination method forknowledge is something that
continues to this day.
Martin Bush (18:20):
It certainly does.
We've all seen the release ofthe James Webb Space Telescope
imagery.
A very highly coordinatedactivity, I mean, I think
building on the success of theHubble Space Telescope and their
image archive.
Which is something that I thinkprobably, became clear what an
important tool for publiccommunication of science those
(18:42):
images were during the Hubbleproject.
When the James Webb launched,they had a strategy in place
from day one.
A very deliberate andcoordinated release of those
images in a way to createmaximum effect for what is a
very exciting scientificproject.
Indigo Keel (19:00):
Beautiful.
Thank you so much for being onthe podcast today, Martin.
It was great to have you.
Martin Bush (19:04):
It's an absolute pleasure to be here.
Indigo Keel (19:06):
Thank you all for listening to the first season of
the HPS podcast, where wediscuss all things history,
philosophy, and social studiesof science.
We want to thank the School ofHistorical and Philosophical
studies at the University ofMelbourne for their support.
To learn more, check out ourwebsite at hpsunimelb.org.
(19:27):
There you can also find links toour blog, Twitter, Facebook, and
Insta, as well as show notes fortoday's topic.
I'm Indigo Keel and
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