[Dr Simon Werrett] So, good evening everybody, it's fantastic that you've all come. We have a terrific crowd
here, so thank you very much, and we're
gonna have what will be a fantastic
talk from Professor John Tresch of the Warburg institute this evening. What I'm going to do,
first of all is introduce you to the
head of the Science and Technology Studies
department, Joe Cain. He's going to say a few
words about the Haldane lecture
series, and then Sam Cutler, who is
one of our fantastic undergraduates, is going to
introduce Prof. Tresch. So first of all over to Joe Cain
[JC] Okay, great. Thanks Simon, thanks very much. Welcome everybody, welcome to the JBS Haldane
memorial lecture. It's a joy to have you, it's just
a massive joy to have this lecture, and
have you here as part of the STS
enterprise. So many new students - yay. So
many colleagues from all over the place -
thanks for coming. We started the
Haldane lecture series a few years ago
because we wanted to do one thing, and
that was (this is gonna embarrass John
a lot so just hang in there), we wanted to
invite the very best of our community,
the cutting-edge intellectuals, the
people who, when we stand up and say
we're STS we have them in mind as... idols?
That's pressure.
As people who we want to engage, people we
want to talk with it, and in a way the 
Haldane lecture has not failed us. This is
the eighth Haldane lecture and we're
going strong so thanks for coming
tonight, and you know what our plan is.
The best and the brightest in front of
you, so that we celebrate this stuff we
do. We named the lecture after JBS
Haldane, UCL hero, a local fella in the
collection. JBS Haldane for us represents
all the things we do in STS -  History and
philosophy of science, science
and politics, science
communication, and just generally
thinking hard about what science is in
the modern world. JBS Haldane is an
important figure for us. If you don't know anything
about him, look him up and find out more.
That's all I really wanted to say. I want
to pass things over to Sam Cutler who is
anxious to introduce our speaker, and who
will move us along. Sam, it's your time.
[SC] Thank you very much. Joe told me that a good introduction needs to be quick
and funny, but I didn't come up with a joke, so...John? [laughter]. So John Tresch is
email professor and history of
our history science and folk practice at
the war Bernie's treatise ben brode she
wired his first degree in anthropology
from the University of Chicago before
acquiring a da from the Eco today's
ebooks e-journals from social and
economic strata in Paris following this
he completed his PhD in the history and
philosophy of science from the river
came bridge before moving on very
prestigious fellowships which included a
fellowship at the in the Department of
humanities at Columbia so the colonial
society fellows and Friends following
this he joined the University of
Pennsylvania in the history
Department and he's had an influence of
many aspiring academics over the years
and he's also worked under some of the
leading academics in the field such as
Simon Shepherd University of Cambridge
and granola fool in Paris for whom he
translated Bank doors hope essays on the
reality of science studies which was
published by Hope University Press in
1999 professor treasures work is focused
on the social and cultural history of
science particularly the not exclusively
in France and particularly 19th century
he forged changing methods instruments
and institutions in the sciences arts
and media connections among disciplines
cosmology social order and ritual
professor Thresh published a monograph
with the University of Chicago Press
entitled the romantic machine utopian
science and technology after Napoleon
the book was awarded applies Award for
outstanding book in history science by
the history of science Society in 2013
and was also named one of the best books
in 2012 by the new museum New York with
an honorable mention by the Council of
European studies 2014 Book Award again
professor pressures currently working on
two books the reason for darkness of the
night Edgar Allen Poe and the forging of
American science and cultivars heavy
things with how to do things with world
we look forward to seeing you near
future
this evening we care about
thank you all thank you Sam that was
brilliant and I would have wanted to add
any jokes to what you've done living up
to the jaws introduction is also going
to be extremely embarrassing because in
fact I am following a number of my idols
in giving this talk it's really an honor
to be invited here by STS and to have
all of you turn out on a rainy Wednesday
Wednesday night Simon thanks so much for
the introduction and for for making this
invitation possible so I'm thrilled to
be here following in those footsteps of
many precursors in STS history of
science sociology of science but also
JBS Haldane himself who I've been
learning a lot about in the last few
weeks to realize just exactly what I'm
walking into here halt dein above all
was a communicator he found many
innovative ways to communicate the
things that he discovered in genetics as
well as his own speculations and
explorations into the future into the
present and the history of science
imagining the ways in which science is
affecting and could affect humanity in
the future and he found ways of reaching
people radio film fiction speculative
fiction science fiction poems as well
and so as I was thinking about this talk
for today I was thinking well what would
halt dein do to talk about science today
in the world we live in and obviously
he'd be on Twitter in fact he is on
Twitter I looked him up and here is the
hit his profile he's a geneticist a
bloody damned war hero an actual Marxist
fellow the Royal Society and fond of
beetles but not inordinately so he said
that God whatever he might be is
inordinately found of beetles because of
some how many there are and how many
varieties there are he has been dead but
nevertheless maintains his social media
profile
and I think that he wouldn't only be
speaking about beetles today I think
although he survived the crises of the
20th century he would have been as
shocked as many of us are about the very
strange winds that are blowing today
highlighted just by looking at the
Guardians bookshelf of what's for sale
some of them discounted but all what you
need to know to live in in this world
weapons of mass mass destruction the
death of truth fascism a warning so a
lot of the things that fall that halt
dein dealt with are back in new and even
scarier forms and of course the role of
science in all of this is as prominent
and as fraught as it was during Paul
Danes lifetime I think though that
rather than simply promote science as
the solution to all of our ELLs as
someone like Steven Pinker Pinker has
done in a kind of ham-fisted
assertion that everything the
Enlightenment was in a very narrow
definition of the Enlightenment is good
and we need to just keep going I don't
think that's what holidaying would have
done I had a much more nuanced
understanding of science in its
multiplicity the different styles the
different modes and methods of science
and also the dark side of science the
harms its part about the ways in which
it's been complicit in some of the very
horrors of the 20th century he fought
against and some of which we're dealing
with now certainly in the case of
climate change right that those who
think that science is going to be the
only possible solution to ecological
destruction are somehow neglecting the
fact and making themselves blind to the
fact that so much of what has caused
climate change is there unchecked
development of Science and Industry as
well as the the role of the science the
so-called science of economics and
saying the only good society is a
society that's constantly producing more
science has proved it therefore go
forward produce consume so halt dein I
think had a much more nuanced nuanced
understanding of science he wouldn't be
there simply waving the flag
of science is the best solution and I
think you'd have some interesting
responses to what I think is the violent
idiocy we we see in current policy and
in the the state of the world having
mentioned violent idiocy it would be
wrong not to turn to the current US
president and and think about exactly
his role in the sense of a kind of
comic-book apocalypse that were we're
moving into we could talk of brexit
filter bubbles for dirty tensions
declining attention spans authoritarian
nationalism worldwide but Trump best
captures this unreality TV feeling of
the present on one hand lying about
scientific consensus right denying
climate change on the other denouncing
the lying press as the enemy of the
people
Trump may well be as Tanna EC Coates has
said the first white American president
in the sense that everything he was
doing was a negation of Obama but I
think there's another determining
negation that defines what Trump is
doing and bruno latour has pointed this
out he is also perversely the first
climate change president but in the form
of denial there's a mad dash for profit
a retreat to national and ethnic
categories but for the first time
climate change denial is not is
determining all political decisions of
course it's a denial in bad faith
plugging the ears and closing the eyes
to justify deregulation lawlessness a
grabbing of resources for himself and
his cronies in a way that harkens back
to the worst crimes of the founding of
the nation slavery and the appropriation
of native lands yet for someone so
indifferent to history there is
something remarkable about Trump's
mythology and those that he claims he
made a point of hanging a portrait of
Andrew Jackson in the White House the
populist for whom nationalism meant war
on Indians and Mexicans and for whom
democracy meant white male supremacy
here he is Trump cynically
graduating and honoring Navajo veterans
in front of the hero of the Creek and
Seminole Wars but the way in which he
uses the meat the media to batter common
sense bashing expertise and competence
making individual ignorant the measure
of truth harkens back to another equally
dubious American American of the same
period PT Barnum
whose book the art of money-getting is
clearly a precursor direct and as much
of a fraud as art Trump's art of the
deal and this is not an accident Trump
has openly identified with Barnum in
interviews saying we need we need more
PT Barnum I identify with him we need to
build up the image of the country even
if that building up of the image of the
country is through lies fabrications
exaggerations and deceptions so there's
a very strange constellation
I think that's formed between our
moments and the antebellum us in the
1830s in formal 40s the era of this
nativist demagogue Jackson and of this
the exemplary con artist
PT Barnum so strange anticipations of
where we are now in that moment and
bizarrely Trump has zeroed in on that
but if that was the era of Barnum and
Jackson there's another figure who's
less well known but just as important if
for understanding the politics of
knowledge and science at the time and
one who identify who's identified
entirely by historians of American
science with the projects to found a new
American science and that's Alexander
Dallas Page you know his middle name
because his uncle was given the honor of
having the Dallas named after him he was
very connected on that side of his
family in politics but on the other side
of his family he was the great-grandson
of Benjamin Franklin okay so this is
someone who is very connected to
American science and policy
way back and use that political and
family capital to build up a federal
framework for doing science in America
to elevate the u.s. to a comparable
level with the academies the Royal
societies in Europe and that was an
urgent mission of the 1830s and 40s for
beige and his friends they succeeded
here's an apocryphal picture of I mean
this never happened the scene never
happened but it's a fanciful rendering
of the signing of the Charter for the
Academy of Sciences the American Academy
of Sciences and that space in the
billowing beard in the back in front of
Lincoln symbolizing the way in which the
victory of the Union the northern forces
in the Civil War was made possible and
justified the national framework of
science that he and his friends Joseph
Henry
Benjamin purse made possible so he's
written into the mythology of the
history of science in the actual history
of American science in all kinds of ways
and there's a real temptation to make
base the hero of my story okay to say
here's a precursor from the past against
Barnum against Jackson here's someone
who held to the importance of science
and realized that it was necessary to
make a strong and just country and to
build a democracy there's a temptation
to say with Steven Pinker and those who
went on the march for science that
science is the answer that the reality
it reveals will clear away superstition
and error
and return us to our comfortable
narratives of endless progress but that
review forgets that science has spoken
about climate change for instance and
has been ignored so those who turned up
in April 2017 to save science is the
answer that it improves decisions that
it reveals reality that it is progress I
mean it's important that there was a
political visibility to science but some
of these slogans I think are far too
simplistic right
you can't just vote for science and be
entirely for it we
recognizing first of all that it has
spoken with a unified voice and been
ignored but secondly that neutral
science has played a really prominent
role in warfare that all the innovations
and ways of killing people that we've
seen over the last centuries in
environmental damage and that it also
gives cover in the name of eugenics and
economic rationality and sometimes
evolutionary psychology to systems of
exploitation and inequality
so making beige our hero would also mean
ignoring his own context okay not only
ignoring the dark side of science listen
let's say but also ignoring what he was
facing in this period and what he wanted
science to do he and his friends for him
the role of federal science was
crucially to guarantee Western expansion
of the u.s. that is the conquest of the
lands of the West beyond the Mississippi
all the way to sea to sea to shining sea
to California he and his friends turned
a blind eye and gave tacit approval to
slavery for up until the Civil War and
they had a vision of an elite dominated
American empire that would stretch
across the continent and also well into
the Pacific and much further south
so making beige our hero ignores that
context ignores exactly what's going on
in jacksonian america and what these
projects of manifest destiny were the
ways in which they excluded and actually
created profound and perpetuated
profound injustice --is it also making
him our hero in a simplistic way
neglects the real specificities of the
media environment of his time this was
an era era where truth much like today
was extremely slippery scientific
Authority and cosmological order were
very much up for grabs it was the time
of a media revolution thanks to steam
presses canals railroads and eventually
Telegraph's there was an explosion of
new journals new magazines with
unprecedented speed and volume many new
readers and many
self-appointed doctors and authorities
declaring the truth about theological
and scientific claims much like the
Internet today this chaos of voices made
it hard to know who was speaking and
whom to trust it encouraged frauds and
hoaxes
it led reformers like Batian as friends
to try to represent science but without
entering into the contamination of this
noisy public sphere it's set a specific
agenda for them for how to establish
American science so to make sense of
this unsettled landscape its delusions
its doubts its tensions and horrors we
need a view from within the beating
heart of this media revolution one that
balances between the pranks of Barnum
and the austere of certainties of beige
we get exactly such a perspective from
maybe the real hero of this talk but
obviously an ambiguous hero Edgar Allan
Poe he's well known as an author of
horror fiction of poetry and of
detective stories he is the exact
contemporary of those two figures
basically the same age and lived through
the same maelstrom of political and
media and intellectual unrest he was
also a polymath much like JBS Haldane
constantly writing about literature but
also about all of the sciences about
technology and industry analyzing them
evaluating claims making predictions and
speculations based on what had been
shown what was being shown and claimed
so this talk draws on a book that Sam
was kind enough to mention that I'm
working on now the reason for the
darkness of the night Edgar Allan Poe
and the forging of American science
Poe's work can only be understood in the
light of the science the print culture
and tumultuous politics of the early us
but reciprocally the the very peculiar
path of his life in his thought is
uniquely revealing about the science in
this very formative time so we learn
about po by studying science in the
press at that time but we learn about
science by following Poe's trajectory
through the press po aligned himself
with both Bhatia's project to form
professional scientific institutions and
with the popular science whose very
extreme form was represented by PT
Barnum the tension between these two
modes of science also explains my
subtitle po helped to forge a unified
and centralized information information
infrastructure for the intellectual life
of the u.s. he was building him
alongside beige but he also forged very
believable things adding uncertainty
about the basis for Authority about
knowledge so borrowing from both beige
and Barnum po shows how these projects
could overlap and intersect and while I
don't think po gives us a direct answer
for how to respond to today's many
challenges I think he helps make sense
of a period with disturbing resonances
to ours and puts forward a very
compelling narrative view of knowledge
that recognized both truth and the
importance of multiple perspectives it's
a view I think that holding would have
it in some moods endorsed our only hope
of understanding the universe said
holidaying is to look at it from as many
different points of view as possible
this is one of the reasons why the data
the mystical consciousness can
supplement those of the mind in its
normal state I suspect that there are
more things in heaven and earth than are
dreamt of or can be drugged up in any
philosophy and this is certainly the
point of view that po would agree with -
he not only explored the tortuous
contradictions of the media as a
political and scientific modernity for
taking shape but poem also pointed out
the multiple possible worlds and
alternative futures that were emerging
in that in that time many roads that
weren't traveled but were made possible
at that moment for this reason I think
he needs to be heard within his time
and as a voice within ours so there are
four parts and what follows just to give
you a roadmap pose early life his time
in Bhatia's Philadelphia with a
digression to Norway it will be a
refreshing visit to the Maelstrom
Barnum's New York and a few thoughts
about the cosmological context which was
erupting by the time of his death
so first pose early life and the
sciences of this period as is well known
to many in this room historians of
science this was a period in Europe as
well as in the u.s. of a real
transformation in the conduct of science
a real effort towards specialization
towards professionalization so a lot of
new fields were showing up but at the
same time an attempt to figure out what
they all had in common so an attempt to
unify science to define it as a method
as a set of institutions as a profession
so the term scientist emerges at this
time for the first time and you get
systems like abused calls the in Paris
or on pears in Paris or like Willy mules
in England to classify the sciences to
provide a taxonomy of the way in which
they all fit together even though
they're all becoming more and more
specialized having more and more
difficulty in speaking to each other
you need a framework and a method to
explain why they're all doing the same
thing and that's a big part of what's
going on in what's called the second
Scientific Revolution of the 1830s and
40s all of these developments had echoes
in the US and one of the persons
bringing them to the US was Alexander
von Humboldt the Explorer who stopped
off after his voyage in South South
America Latin America in Washington to
visit with Jefferson and really fired up
a whole generation of scientists to
pursue the form of distributed earth
science meteorological physical
astronomical natural historic historical
really ecological before the term had
been used that Humboldt was promoted so
he passed through the US talking with
Jefferson there were scientists in the
US
of course was a hero for politics more
than for his science and Jefferson made
contributions to natural history was
very interested in inventions of all
kinds used the Enlightenment models of
Mechanics for writing the Declaration of
Independence in the Constitution still
these were gentlemen amateurs and though
there were institutions like the APS and
and the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in Boston these were very
small-scale and they were local but they
were funded by their members at the
state level not at the federal level so
there was nothing like the académie des
Sciences in Paris or the Royal Society
or the British Association for the
Advancement of science
there were projects to start new
universities on a national scale
Jefferson's last project was the
University of Virginia in
Charlottesville the Military Academy at
West Point was reformed in the 1820s to
try to keep up with the occult
Polytechnic in Paris which was the model
for military engineering but also
science training and mathematical
training of all kinds so there were some
attempts to reform universities and
training at the time and when John
Quincy Adams was elected it seemed that
there would be a spread of what was
called the American system launched by
Senator Henry Clay to coordinate
commerce to coordinate transportation to
have universal standards a single
monetary basis instead of having
Tennessee dollars versus Pennsylvania
dollars to have a single currency across
the nation and for for Adams that meant
a scientific framework as well he wanted
there to be a network of national
observatories lighthouses of the skies
he called but he was replaced by Andrew
Jackson who thought that a national
framework necessarily catered to an old
elite and repressed the the power of
states and local groups in particular
his friends so he spent his time in
office attacking national institutions
the bank but also not offering not
offering support to national
institutions of science which Adams had
promoted
one thing remarkable about po is that he
lived through the high and low of his
period in the u.s. he moved up and down
the East Coast and was born to two
actors who died when he was two so he
was an orphan but then he was adopted
into the slaveholding aristocracy of
Richmond Virginia and for the first 18
years of his life was raised as a member
of the southern elite with every
expectation of taking up a place within
government or in political life like his
father his foster father John Ellen he
went to the University of Virginia
Jefferson's university but racked up
gambling debts and was kicked out then
was kicked out of Alan's house at that
point he was completely destitute he had
no way of earning a living he joined the
army like many others who had no other
options and then entered into West Point
Military Academy so through these
strange circumstances he was exposed to
the best possible education that someone
could have in the u.s. at the time
particularly in military engineering and
mechanical sciences of West Point but
also the humanist education that he
received at the University of Virginia
with Jefferson so after some twists and
turns in Baltimore in New York he
surfaced again in Richmond in 1835 that
was his hometown after his foster father
had died with a job as an editor at the
southern literary messenger there he got
to publish some of his first stories
BMS found in a bottle there nice but he
also made a name as a literary critic he
was famous for chopping to bits
the the text of other people just
ridiculing them until there was nothing
left of famous authors especially those
who were promoted by a click of one city
or mother so the Bostonians and the New
York group he attacked ruthlessly for
puffing their favorite authors without
regard to their actual quality just
celebrating them because he was they
were one of theirs instead from this
very particular local position
Richmond Pope was trying to put forward
a national framework for literature
standards for evaluating the good and
the bad but from the point of view that
would transcend all those local cliques
southern versus northern Boston vs.
Philadelphia in New York that was the
aim of the of the SLM and it's what it
was his aim in his criticism he did the
same sort of argument in talking about
the sciences so he was one of the most
ardent supporters of the plan for an
exploring expedition that would go to
the South Seas the person who led this
was someone named Jeremiah Reynolds who
may who toward saying we need federal
funding to have this expedition to
follow in the footsteps or sorry to sail
behind Captain Cook and the French
explorers if the US wants to be a world
power it has to have an expedition like
like them they were inspired by John
Simms who was called the Newton of Ohio
quite a distinction for having
pronounced the what he believed to the
to be the indisputable fact that the
earth was Hollow that if you sailed to
all the way to the north or all the way
to the south you discover that to be
true and then be able to enter the
habitable interior of our planet
Reynolds at first was totally convinced
by this and realized it wasn't such a
good selling point for the expedition he
was trying to put forward you could test
it by sailing to the south instead he
urged national pride the elevation of
the sciences that it the contributions
to political economy that could be found
by discovering and claiming lands to the
South Pole lent his voice to this
campaign very loudly in the southern
literary messenger and was a friend of
Reynolds promoting this expedition and
many other scientific developments in
the period so he's publishing poetry and
literature he's publishing criticism
from a national point of view
criticizing and building up a framework
to say what is good American literature
and he's also promoting American science
in very similar terms at the same time
he's evaluating popular science like the
famous chess playing automaton
introduced by male soul that toured
around
machine that dressed as a Turk wearing a
turban though smoked a cigar or a long
pipe and would beat anyone who
challenged it to chess so it's a
remarkable device if it's actually a
machine
Wow like this this is a chess-playing
computer in in 1830 before anyone's used
the word computer in that way Poe wrote
an analysis of Milton's chess player
where he admired what Milton was trying
to do and the claims if he had done such
a thing it would be the most
extraordinary machine ever but he
convincingly showed that there had to be
a trick there had to be a human inside
of it which turns out to them the case
or you'd have heard a lot more about
Milton's chess-playing computer so here
he's defending humans against the
machine but he's using a very mechanical
analytic language to do so it's in this
kind of face off against mechanism when
the exploring expedition finally took
off in 1838 when it was clear that
Reynolds had managed to convince people
to launch it Poe said about writing a
new kind of text people told him that
selling stories is not what the public
wants you need to write a novel so he
wrote a novel based on the expedition
imagining what would happen when they
got to the South Seas and that was the
narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Nantucket
so it was published before the
expedition started but it imagined all
of the things and many many things what
all the things that it would see and
many things that it would it's a
fantastically strange book presented as
actual geographical science but as you
read you realize this can't be the the
planet that I know because there are all
kinds of strange mixings of the
naturalness supernatural
words carved into the landscape in these
signs there and at the end him and his
companions sail into a bizarre waterfall
that brings the end of the story they
disappear and somehow turn up again in
the North alive for a moment perhaps
proving
sends his claim of the Hollow Earth or
perhaps just some speculation that that
pole alone knows the secret of pole fell
out with his publisher in Richmond the
richer the the Richmond publisher of the
SLM didn't think it was good policy to
drink the mint juleps in the morning and
then added a newspaper so Tim left
Richmond and went to New York to try to
publish the narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym he found a publisher but no jobs
there was a massive crash in 1837
economically thanks to Jackson Andrew
Jackson destroying the the National Bank
so there was a sudden run on the banks
and there was no employment to be found
instead he went to Philadelphia which
was this beautiful city on the Delaware
River so now I'm not gonna talk about
the sciences and intellectual life of
Philadelphia and the way in which he'll
fit within it and the way in which the
tone of science was really set in
Philadelphia and eventually for the
nation by Alexander Dallas Page so the
city was very proud of its commerce of
its neoclassical architecture like the
u.s. Bank building also its civic
reforms like the much more gothic
penitentiary that was on Fairmount Hill
they took Dickens there when he visited
in 1830 in 1841 he met Paul visited the
prison and was horrified by the by the
very idea of it but the isolation
chambers that the the Quakers thought
was a good a good way to reform
criminals they were also proud of their
manufacturers there were many coal seams
near to Philadelphia and the inventions
and machines and Industry of the city
including the daguerreotype which has a
long history but some of its decisive
innovations showed up in in Philadelphia
and here it is being reported upon by
Alexander Dallas beige so
po was right in the middle of a lot of
these developments peels museum his
Museum of Natural History
the APS the Academy of Natural Sciences
the Franklin Institute a Mechanics
Institute where mechanics could learn
the scientific principles underlying
their their trade and the Academy of
Sciences he certainly spent time there
where he would have known
Samuel Morton who was the the leader of
the polygenic School of craniometry he
collected skulls from around the world
and then challenged Scripture but
reinforced prejudice by using the the
measures of skull capacity to create a
hierarchy of the races which also he
explained
according to distinct inventions or
distinct creations of each of the races
at different times around the world so
this was radical science that challenged
Scripture but also lent support to the
inequalities of slavery now
Morden as I said was part of the Academy
of Sciences and was at the center of a
lot of innovations including of
daguerreotype this is one of the first
indoor photographs taken in the u.s. we
know that the guy in the top hat is
Morton the guy with the cap is probably
Joseph lighty who became a very
important paleontologist and there's an
excellent article by someone who works
at the Academy of Sciences desperate to
prove that the fellow in the sideburns
and the striped trousers is Edgar Allan
Poe now there's not really much reason
to believe that except that Edgar Allan
Poe did have sideburns at about the
period that this was happening I I want
to believe it I really want to believe
it but whether or not it's true
it's a fact that Poe was immersed in the
networks of literature publishing
invention and science in Philadelphia he
was writing short stories some of his
most famous including the Fall of the
House of Usher but he made his his
greatest hit by writing a textbook of
collecting shells published in
Philadelphia the con
geologists first sport so this is
building on the craze for botanizing but
going out and analyzing plants and
antennae and finding their taxonomy here
it's analyzing shells he did this for a
friend of his who was an itinerant
natural history lecturer who would sell
these at his lectures at the same time
he borrowed from Cuvier and Lamarque but
added quite a bit in the layout of these
published shells in the taxonomy so he
would certainly have crossed paths with
alexandre dallas-based who was building
up philadelphia's sciences at the time
with a view toward the national
framework so like po base was a graduate
of West Point or he went to West Point
instead of dropping out like PO did he
carried on and became an instructor of
mathematics and engineering they're
returning to Philadelphia he taught
natural philosophy at the University of
Pennsylvania and then was put in charge
of a new school at the Girard school for
orphans after a tour of Europe
collecting equipment and contacts he
started an observatory at the Girard
school for terrestrial magnetism where
he was measuring along with other
members of him Bolton networks the the
daily changes of the magnetic needle in
attempting to map the distribution of
magnetic force across the planet
this was the magnetic crusade of the
early 19th century he was also very
involved in the Franklin Institute and
used its journal to publish advanced
science on steam engines assisted by
Joseph Saxton who went on to lead the
u.s. mint and Bureau of weights one of
the first to garrett typists in the US
and james SP who became the first
government-funded meteorologist in the
u.s. so these were his protege x' who
worked with him on steam engines bass
also befriended other upcoming
up-and-coming elite scientists in the
u.s. benjamin hearse at the Harvard
Observatory Joseph Henry at Princeton
whose experiments with electromagnets
and induction were in some cases
simultaneous with those a faraday vation
his friends came to call themselves the
Lazaro knee that's the name of the
beggars in Naples who they thought they
were like because they
they had their hands begging for funding
from the government state at the state
level but also at the national level so
purse beige Henry and eventually Louie
Agassiz when he comes to the US makeup
the Lazaro knee it became their goal to
create national institutions not only
were such institutions as the Royal
Society and the BAS missing in the u.s.
for them the public culture of the
Jacksonian era era made them all the
more essential so Henry wrote to beige
after a scientific grand tour the
charlatan ism of our country struck me
even more disagreeably when I first
returned then than before or even now I
often thought of the remark you we were
in the habit of making that we must put
down quackery or quackery we'll put down
science these real men of science had to
compete with self-styled experts
performing and proclaiming discoveries
cures and cosmologies they were the real
men of science the others were quacks
the boisterous and skeptical press often
mocked their claims to philosophical
Authority it became Bhatia's life's work
to develop a unified national
infrastructure that would make it
possible to adjudicate between true and
false claims about the natural world
world between serious research and
humbug he was building a system whose
object quote was rather to produce
uniformity in all parts of the country
than to introduce novelty it was a
system a unified standardized system
that aimed and in words that would have
pleased Benjamin Franklin to conduct
science as a business so one possibility
for this was the bequest by Joseph Smith
about a half a million dollars to set up
some kind of institution for national
science that would later become the
Smithsonian Institute but debates about
what to do with that money
bogged it down in Congress and the
moment did not seem right for Beijing
Henry to build a national university or
museum as Smithson envisioned so instead
bass latched on to an unexpected
opportunity which was this sleepy branch
of the federal government which was the
coastal survey survey there to map the
coasts and the internal and external
borders of the you
he threw influence in Congress got named
its director and then turned the coastal
survey into an informal Academy of
Science an informal University where he
selected students trained them in the
cutting-edge techniques of Natural
History of geodesy of astronomy of
mathematics and Natural History natural
philosophy and physics and watched them
and sent them off on careers to become
the first generation of professional
scientists in the u.s. so it was a
vehicle for federal funding that created
a new generation that were all more or
less under his control the aim to run
science as a business became possible
through that massive input of funding
from the state from the national
government which again was quite an
unstable organization at the time the
United States of America at the time
meant a number of states roughly united
by a loose federal organization base was
central was a very important person in
building up the unity of that federal
government through the funding of
science and through projects like the
coastal survey which had multiple ends
and impacts even those who had bases
blessing still ran into the conflicts
and the uncertainties of the public
press the problem of the public sphere
and the press at the time of Jackson so
SP who's his protege and the
meteorologist was dubbed the storm king
for his famous lectures on the
philosophy of storms he would go around
giving demonstrations with his novella
scoop which was a storm and is basically
a tea kettle that would heat water up
and show that that demonstrated how
storms worked he believed that storms
were made by hot air rising condensing
and then falling so it was a vertical
motion and to prove this he was going to
set fire to the forests of the
Appalachian mountain range which would
create clouds that would then rain and
irrigate the Ohio Valley fortunately he
was not allowed to do that
but he did he did set up a national
framework for meteorology he was
directly attacked by another scientist
at the time the steam engine
entrepreneur William Redfield who said
who was able to demonstrate that storms
followed a cyclical pattern and he
Redfield couldn't believe the kinds of
claims SP was making and it made him a
lifelong enemy not only of SP but of
patient Henry for attacking him in
public
worse yet he made an M an end run around
base Henry and SP by presenting his
claims at the Newcastle
be a British Association for the
Advancement of science meeting and got
the support of Herschel to denounce SP
very embarrassing for all of the laws
Ronin so these controversies about
storms and who was to be believed and
how to conduct science as individuals
but also as a national organization
we're on people's minds were very
visible in Philadelphia especially to
assiduous readers of the scientific
press like a girl in Poe so in his tale
descent into the Maelstrom 1841 he ends
playing on the kind of controversy about
meteorology and oceanography I told my
story they did not believe it I now tell
it to you and you will put no more faith
in it than did the merry fishermen of
London muffled ed so now we are in our
digression into Norway and a descent
into the Maelstrom this tale so it's a
remarkable story very exciting and I
highly recommend it about a sailor who
sails into this famous whirlpool and
lives by observing what's going on very
carefully and by having actually the
right state of mind to observe the thing
that will save him so it's a kind of
allegory of induction and observation
but it's also a phenomenology of
discovery which is rooted in a
physiological esthetics it's one case
and there are many of Poe's novel
fusions of mechanical observation and
romantic susceptibility to nature that
really define his writing and take shape
out of the
tensions of this period the Maelstrom is
formed by the interaction between
opposing currents within narrow straits
mathematically it's a vortex as Poe
would have learned at West Point where
the speed of each whirling particle is
inversely proportional to the its
distance to the center and where
impossibly at the center that speed
approaches infinity he combines this
formal definition of a vortex with
Burke's aesthetic analysis of the
sublime in the beautiful for Burke
Beauty causes pleasure and relaxation
the sublime causes pain and distress by
tightening the body's fibers
astonishment horror and fear resemble
actual pain all of which are increased
by our ignorance of things along with
ideas of eternity and infinity like the
infinity the infinite speed that
mathematically is present at the center
of the Maelstrom so Poe knew his Burke
but he also knew his Laplace he knew his
fluid mechanics in mechanical science
and the Maelstrom joins these two
together in describing what it's like to
go around increasingly fast terms of of
the Maelstrom so I was helped by two
artists aurélien Gamboni and Sandrine
Tec Sato who themselves are obsessed
with the descent of the Maelstrom to
draw that Maelstrom and begin to map out
the emotional responses that poe
describes his narrator has experiences
but I added to their description and
attempt to map it according to these two
poles of pleasure and pain following
Burke so as the story unfolds the
narrator first feels uneasy then enters
a kind of stupor then a kind of joy and
realizing and thinking it's not so bad
then he feels a kind of horror while
realizing it actually is pretty bad
there's a little bit of hope again and
then he curses himself for being stuck
on this boat and it has the hideous
thought of his instant his approaching
death he feels sick and dizzy his horror
spasm he shrieks says he looks into the
abyss suddenly he's self composed and
enters the middle where it's it's
neutral kind of neutrality he has given
up hope that allows him to think more
clearly he thinks it with
pleasure it would be magnificent to die
such a manner again his self-possession
takes over him the spray ends his
brother who hasn't got that composure
reaches for the ring that he's holding
on to tries to take it for him and with
the self composure the narrator lets it
go fine cling cling to this if you think
it will save you there's a sudden tilt
to starboard he thinks it's all over
even greater horror now but then his
courage returns he realizes that he's
not falling down the precipice of the
the whirlpool then there's a sudden
reward of a doubled admiration or as
he's hangs on the ebony walls of the
Maelstrom vertically above the abyss but
not yet falling and admires what he
suddenly sees the moon in the sky above
the Maelstrom and then reflected in the
mist a rainbow which he compares to the
bridge to paradise that the Muslims
describe as the bridge into eternity so
horror and madmen are there at their
maximum at the same moment which somehow
allows him to pop out of that maelstrom
of emotion into a state of unnatural
curiosity of amusement and he begins to
make a series of observations like the
observations he made about male cells
chess-player the key one that he
observes is that small round objects are
falling a lot less fast than big ones
namely the Burrow of the barrels from
the ship that have been thrown off and
are floating much less quickly
descending much less quickly than the
ship he then based on that observation
is able to make up his mind to do what
would seem to be the least reasonable
thing imaginable which is to jump off
the ship he jumps off the ship and lands
on a barrel which exactly as his
observations had suggested to him goes
down much less quickly than the ship
which plunges into the abyss with his
brother on board the barrel revolves
much more slowly and eventually the
Maelstrom subsides and he survives and
he can look back shot out of the
Maelstrom with recollected hor far less
troubling than the actual horror and
terror that he'd experienced before it
so again this allegory of inductions is
like the revived bacon ism that was
really much talked about in the
philosophy of science at the time but it
also provides a kind of geometry of
emotion the narrow the
force an increasing speed of the
whirlpool bring more extreme
oscillations between pleasure and pain
which in turn bring a greater
concentration and power of mind to
increasing forces pull in opposite
directions the point of greatest contact
is the point of greatest opposition we
can read the tale as as a narrative
enactment of the new term recently
introduced by Coleridge of objectivity
but here it's not a neutral negative
state but it's a positive charged an
energetic virtue the greater the mystery
and Wonder the greater the aesthetic
energy of the experience the more
remarkable the solution so PO works out
such geometries in many tales of the
houses people of this period including
famously the japan stories the first
detective stories arguably in the world
in philadelphia he became editor of two
national literary magazines but also
began making claims to unique scientific
expertise as is suggested by the
maelstrom he reviewed discoveries and
inventions in a series of chapters on
art and science launched a series on
cryptography where like melt all he
challenged his public to submit codes
that he would then crack he exposed a
charlatan a weather reader and prophet
in philadelphia who's who composed a
pamphlet of trash which we are sorry to
see noticed by any person of the
slightest pretension to intelligence or
discernment but he introduced a logic of
scientific discernment into his literary
criticism at this time so his great
dream which he began cultivating in
Philadelphia was to have his own
literary magazine first called the pen
then called the stylus which would be
upholding an honest and fearless opinion
and absolutely independent criticism
self-sustained
guided only by the purest rules of art
one of his correspondence loved this
idea of the stylus and wrote to him
saying you've got to carry on the
Enlightenment here in the US right it's
become a mighty nation but it it's
institutions require the people to be
enlightened
I'm glad that you attempt the overthrow
of Hama okay so his friend sees Poe as
fighting charlatans in a very concrete
way Poe is setting himself up as the
literary wing of the Lazar oneis project
to create a federal framework a national
framework for the evaluation of
intellectual products and the stylus the
the magazine will be his institutional
equivalent of an Academy of Sciences for
example so unfortunately that didn't
happen in in Philadelphia his wife grew
deathly ill he went bankrupt
he owed Nicholas Biddle 100 dollars
actually the head of the US bank and had
to sort of creep out of town with
nothing but a handful of letters as he
said in his bankruptcy declaration a
handful of papers worth nothing to
anyone which is sort of heartbreaking
when we know that there his stories and
poems that he's talking about again he
would try his luck in New York
so if base defined the science of
Philadelphia Barnum is the presiding
eminence in New York the culture of
science in New York resembled its
culture in general defined by Commerce
defined by rapid activity by many people
passing through by a constant hubbub and
debate and controversy among many
different people and high low phrenology
popular science very experiential
practical science it could go and touch
people's heads to know their character
and Mesmer's and likewise very practical
very engaged are both very popular in
New York they're performed as well as
published and written about at the
Fowler's at the house of the fault
Fowler brothers who are the leading
phrenologist
and mesmerist of the time but also in
popular science places in theaters where
magic shows happen like nibblers garden
and Barnum's new American Museum so
Barnum was born in 1810 in Bridgeport
Connecticut the son of shopkeepers he
started in the family line and then
started a lottery which made more money
than just selling actual concrete things
promises sold sold more than actual
commodity
Connecticut outlawed lotteries he
entered politics to try to change the
law to make lotteries legal that didn't
work he went to New York is so many had
before and after him his first traveling
show was Joice Heth who was a former
slave woman very old probably not as old
as he claimed 160 years old he said she
was George Washington's nanny so she
would sit on stage in a bonnet smoking
cigars and talking about the infancy of
the father of the country and people
loved the show whether they believed it
or not he also toured with poor Tom
Thumb who at age five was actually a
dwarf but started much younger than
start started very young at age five was
smoking cigars and drinking brandy and
the Queen of England Queen Victoria saw
him and said she made he made her very
sad I think he's a rather sad person and
story
Barnaby seems very proud to have him as
his companion his scientific and musical
theater included Giants albinos native
dancers jugglers magicians automata
right mechanical humans taxidermy and
other curiosities these were not just
successful shows or tricks they were
some of the most important routes
through which people learned about
natural history and Popular Mechanics in
the u.s. amidst the fakes and hoaxes
were genuine wonders and facts
geological specimens rare plants fossils
and mechanical inventions like like
Poe's novel Pym Barnum also caught the
excitement around the exploring
expedition to the South Seas it landed
in New York in 1842 after its voyage
pretty much around the world the
exploring expedition had captured one of
the Fijian Chiefs and Dovie and
unfortunately he died on board their
ship in New York this was a cause for
great popular complaint but also
excitement especially as Barnum claimed
to have his head and invited people to
come witness the Fijian Chiefs head in
fact his skull was sent to Samuel worden
the more respectable scientist but
is interested in the sensational science
of collecting dead people's skulls he
kept the excitement going Barnum by
trading on the the term Fiji and the
Fijian chief and launching his most
famous show the Fiji mermaid he that
this involved repurposing a Japanese
artifact which he had acquired through
various means he drummed up publicity
for it by inventing a natural historian
who testified to its authenticity
who then invented another expert who
would say that historians a fraud it's
not true the whole thing's a scam he
actually commissioned people to denounce
the fraud as a fraud there was no bad
publicity for Barnum
so both stating the truth and denying
the truth created a controversy which
brought people in undoubtedly some
people would be disappointed when they
finally saw this wretched half of a
monkey that had been sewn to the back
half of a fish that was the Fijian
mermaid but they still paid their 25
cents and they still talked about the
controversy afterward so according to
one of Barnum's biographers truth is not
the point here an exhibitor an exhibitor
did not have to guarantee truthfulness
all he had to do was possess probability
and invite that the public would be more
excited by controversy than by
conclusiveness
so in other words the wonders were not
introduced as dogmatic truths as
authoritative certainties as they had
been in other museums Barnum's and
Barnum invited viewers to decide for
themselves whether or not what they were
seeing was real whether or not they or
the doctors the learner doctors who
either denounced her supported these
these these claims had the truth so his
lies may have been insulting but at the
same time they flattered the public's
intelligence by inviting them to use
their own judgment when the thrill wore
off there'd always be another gimmick
another controversy another scandal to
celebrate in New York Poe learned very
much from this epistemic mode within
days of his arrival in 1844 he published
in the first Penney daily broadsheet
newspaper
appearing once a day for a penny an
article a report of breathless account
of a crossing of the Atlantic in a
balloon a new hot air balloon astounding
news by Express V in Northland the
Atlantic has been crossed in three days
sold a lot of papers it's amazing news
of course it's not true likewise he got
caught up in the enthusiasm about
mesmerism and wrote a number of articles
where he presented himself as an expert
on mesmerism and described experiment
using exactly the language that other
psychologists were using at the time to
describe mesmeric trials his own
experiments would be involved
hypnotizing someone on the point of
death someone who was very very ill and
then keeping them alive through the
mesmeric state long beyond the point at
which the body would have died and in
the facts in the case of mr. Valdemar
one of the most famous of his stories
when the spell ends the mesmerizer pope
decides to end it after seven weeks of
keeping the person in this state of
death in life the body collapses into a
state of on at unutterable putrescence
so who has the last laugh the corpse the
reader Poe or the reader or mr. Valdemar
himself with his tongue quivering and
saying I am this impossible utter is
again like Barnum Poe wanted to persuade
people about the truth but was also
happy to publish and reprint and quote
people saying these were fakes that they
weren't real whatever it took to give
the story a long run to keep it moving
to keep it something that people were
talking about the exact same logic
followed in his wonderful mysterious
poem The Raven
the work that is probably most famous he
first published it under a pseudonym so
people are asking who wrote it
who is this author he then would perform
it in public and the question people on
people's minds was how does it produce
these effects how do these rhymes keep
adding one after another the pole Kurush
quality is what one critic described in
it adding a new rhyme adding the
intensity of the rhythms to the
overwrought cathartic conclusion at the
end
to satisfy readers curiosity about how
it had been done how this this wonder
had been performed he wrote another tale
or sorry another literary criticism
called the philosophy of composition
where he purported to explain how he had
written the Raven he says every step of
the way he followed the rigor and
necessity of a mathematical formula so
he's claiming that he had the accident
of poetry at the start and then just
followed them out like building a bridge
followed out the instruction manual to
produce the sublime poem he is acting
very much like Milt in saying look it's
just a machine right that produced this
wonderful poem this wonderful effect but
on the same on by the same token we also
are led to believe as with mates all
that know there must be something else
going on there there must be inspiration
something not reducible to mechanics and
then with one mode more turn of the
corkscrew we can realize that the
philosophy of composition is itself a
machine right a very carefully crafted
story very crafted carefully crafted
narrative to produce an effect of either
belief or denial in the minds of the
readers so it's a machine it's not a
machine it's a machine this is the
maelstrom of Poe described in the terms
of emotion in the descent into the
Maelstrom now playing out at the level
of belief and disbelief right a constant
movement between belief credulity and
incredulity so recalling that the
geometry of emotion we can see a
geometry of belief in Poe's general
writings about mechanism organism
science and doubt in this critical zone
where the text does its work he brings
opposites closer and closer together
even as they swing to greater
extremities these juxtapositions chucks
positions between fact and fiction he
calls mystification weird symmetries the
potent magic of verisimilitude
verisimilitude right the the seeming
realness or truth or something we could
we could also map the
in which he combines other polarities of
the period high and low in spirit
inspired and conventional spiritual and
material in his various stories and
across his various writings these were
the unstable opposition's the swings of
the pendulum of the Jacksonian period
where new possibilities of democratic
participation vied with new forms of
absolutist control
there were also new authorities of
scientific fact and new forms of
entertainment and deception also
shifting be torn between foreground and
background was the horror of slavery and
the horrific war that would be needed to
end it so this tableau and all these
polarities I admit is a bit crowded and
a bit messy and probably a bit insane
but that is exactly what the period was
like and Poe's stories and writings
found a way to move through that
churning males from that churning
cyclone between these opposites and
polarities and produce moving effects of
all kinds on his readers so if you'll
indulge me for another six minutes I am
going to give a bit of a detour no back
to my main my main track but from a
slightly broader frame which is the
cosmological context of 1848 which is
again there's the political the media
the scientific context but how are all
of these issues playing out in terms of
the order of the universe and the cosmos
is very much up for grabs at this period
and that is where Poe is where he puts
himself at the center of these debates
he envisions he's probably one of the
first people to envision technological
technological apocalypse brought by
human-made climate change in one of his
spirit colonies which are dialogue
between disembodied spirits after they
die the spirits recall their own death
and the destruction of the earth by by
art that is industry which rose supreme
and in change the intellect we're
smoking cities arose leaves shrank
before the hot breath of furnaces
bringing about a purification to
these these rectangular cemeteries are
so he's imagining climate change and as
the worst kind of apocalypse likewise he
builds on the Millennial tensions in the
air 18:43 there's a comment people think
there's it's the end of the world the
Prophet Millar leads a group of people
to the top of a mountain to wait for
that end it doesn't come before that Poe
wrote another spirit colloquy describing
the revelation and apocalyptic
destruction of the earth along the lines
of Scripture but with a purely
naturalistic and scientific explanation
of how the earth could be destroyed by a
comet so playing with that sense that
the world is being remade and that the
world is being destroyed
he also wrote stories that went in the
exact opposite direction thinking about
how science could be used to produce as
in the domain of Arnheim a kind of
aesthetic technological paradise so the
vision of science not mapping the ways
through which the world will be
destroyed but science being used to
perfect it improve Nietzsche to bring
about a second nature that's a kind of
revelation kind of having a kind of
heaven on earth now the firmament of his
period was defined in part by the Second
Great Awakening a religious movement
people were hearing hearing voices
speaking in voices were having Baptist
revivals Methodist revivals and in a
real sense that the Millennium was just
a few days away a lot of cases new
religions showed up Mormonism also
spiritualism synthesis of mesmerism and
swedenborgianism took form so home in
thinking about new what endings to the
world is not alone the scientists also
enter into this fray it's the moment of
natural theology trying to argue that
scripture and scientific discoveries can
be easily reconciled as in the
Bridgewater treatises but that synthesis
as many of you know was disrupted by
vestiges this anonymous publication in a
way it like Barnum and Poe's worked in
playing with the press and
people questioning about who authors
were this anonymous publication that
presented a purely naturalistic
explanation of the evolution of the
world no need for miracles no need for
God so a great threat to theology and a
threat to the official Protestant
scientific orthodoxy of the tongue a
year before he died
Poe entered explicitly into this
cosmological frame this cosmological
he's cosmological debates he wrote his
last book which was called Eureka an
essay on the spiritual and material
universe and gave it a society library
of New York where he did earlier given
critical lectures literary critical
lectures he cited Laplace Herschel and
Humboldt to explain his vision of the
universe as exploding outward from a
single particle and then as both
electricity and gravity increased in
opposition to each other pulling back
pulling back inward with increasing
velocity to a final collapse and fiery
explosion of the world and its
destruction
okay so sort of like the Maelstrom but
not in water but now now in fire and
electricity however like the Maelstrom
as soon as it dies out it'll start again
so he describes the another Big Bang
expanding outward and then collapsing
the beating of the heart divine that's
his sense of what the overall narrative
of the universe is from a single
particle radiating outward collapsing
inward and doing it doing it again for
expansion progressive collapse and
destruction so we're not sure whether
we're meant to read this despite the
fact that he's quoting Herschel and
Newton and Kepler as a scientific text
because and the prophecy says as it is
as a poll that I would like this to be
read that said if the work is a poem he
aligns that work with the work of the
creative because the universe that he's
just described he says is also in our
artwork for the human artists perfection
of a plot is really or practically
unattainable because it's a finite
intelligence that constructs the plots
of God are perfect
the universe is a plot of God so it's a
natural theology which is also a kind of
literary criticism how did this creator
bring about these effects he denounced
Poe in Eureka he denounced a narrowly
logical or empirical method offering
instead a poetic leap as the best means
of knowing the mind of God okay so this
is the apocalyptic and cosmological
firmament of the in late 1840s religious
scientific and political that Poe is
contributing to with Eureka it's also at
the moment for that very reason vestiges
Barnum various hoaxes the challenges to
Authority brought by mesmerism and
phrenology for that very reason the
scientists who were friends with base
elite scientists you want to build a
national framework work are circling
settlements they're circling their
wagons setting up the institutions to
make sure works like pose Eureka won't
be considered as science so first the
National Endowment of the smithsonian is
realized it's opened in 1846 with henry
as the first president 1848 the American
Association for the Advancement of
science is launched I think there's a
direct dialogue here reaction to
vestiges and the cosmological
controversies that Poe was entering into
as well after 1848 for the next 10 years
it is Henry bass Gould Agassi and their
friends who are the presidents of the
the triple ants so this cabal of
scientific conspirators who wanted to
get control and start nationwide
institutions of science had begun to win
they had begun to set up take control of
these institutions set them up in
various ways in various places to make
sure that there was agreement among all
properly vetted participants to science
about what counted as good science who
the good scientists were and to be able
to disqualify and expel allowed to do
what they're doing but not call it
science people like Barnum and people
like Poe
when in in writing Eureka so this
organization would be used to ban
charlatans like Barnum but in the same
gesture it would exclude the singular
speculations of a lone voice like pose
now that seems like a totally reasonable
thing it's not science it's a poem that
said Poe is Eureka it has been rather
plausibly argued was a direct influence
on the people who came up with the
current modern cosmology of the big of
the big bang Alexander Friedmann and
George Lamech who were readers of French
poetry readers of Baudelaires
translations of Poe readers of Paul
valéry who wrote the praise of Poe's
Eureka just before the emergence of the
Big Bang cosmology so in excluding
things that look to literary things that
look to popular things that look to
singular and imaginative the Triple A s
the organization's of base are also
ruling out those leaps of imagination
those leaps of poetry that in many cases
lead to solid science so where are we
now at the end of our talk first of all
and wrapping up the idiosyncrasies of Po
and the absurdities of Barnum may
provoke a raised eyebrow or a laugh
today Barnum's obituary called him a
noteworthy figure almost classical
typical of the age of transparent
puffing his name will be a proverb until
mankind has ceased to find pleasure in
the comedy of a harmless deceiver and
the willingly deceived mankind has not
ceased to find pleasure in the comedy of
a harmless deceiver in the willingly
deceived and the willful deceptions of
today's maelstroms are far grimmer as
Hannah Arendt put it mass propaganda
discovered that its audience was ready
at all times to believe the worst no
matter how absurd and did not
particularly object to being deceived
because it held every element every
statement to be a lie anyhow so the
unsettling of truth has dangerous
possible
as we know all too well that said the
attempt to just say all you need is
science are also far far too simplistic
just pounding the table and say I
believe what they tell me
or booming up from a pulpit of
rationalist authority clearly hasn't
worked yet proclaiming the self evidence
and universal truth of science alienates
as much as it persuades science his own
role in establishing the current
accelerations and destabilization of the
climate has also to be acknowledged
science is not a flawless hero nor does
it usually speak with a single voice and
when it does as in the case of
demonstrated climate change it cannot
float above the complex dynamics of
communication through various channels
of the media of persuasion motivation
ethics and politics poe saw the universe
as a story when he claimed was perfect
but whose perfection would always escape
the grasp of a limited humans
nevertheless we try to tell the story to
follow the twists and acknowledge the
blind spots and the shadows Holden
agreed the wise he said regulate their
conduct by the theories of both of
religion and science but they regard
those theories not as statements of
ultimate fact but as art forms
so to Scott to discover like Daedalus a
way out of the labyrinth right to
discover the Eureka that leads us out of
the labyrinth scientists and those of us
who study them those of us who work with
them have to learn to speak with urgency
but without dogmatism with constant
awareness of the limits of science but
with unabashed opposition to the ethical
and epistemic abomination of the law of
the strong and rule by gut feeling we
need imagination intuition the senses as
well as reason to join up the world
stories into a plot that can hold up
against the forces of selfishness
ignorance and cruelty now I'm not saying
I've got that story but it would
certainly be a story worth telling so
for my last trick
I invite you to witness
the amazing egress and to thank you for
your attention
hearse is a great example especially
because he's right there in the middle
of the base constellation he's the son
of Benjamin purse who is Bhatia's path
organizing the the national framework
and people have shown that purses
notions of abduction are connected on
the one hand to his work in the
observatory and in the coastal survey
with page but also to relate it to pose
ideas about how one makes discoveries so
it's not so much Eureka
the book Eureka the cosmology Eureka
it's not so much the contra lodgest
first book either that has had an
influence on science above all it's the
detective stories which map out the way
and the gold-bug which features a lot of
cryptography which have a kind of quite
compelling emotional narrative of
discovery that has led a lot of people
to say well how do I try this in my own
field and so the citations of do pen are
more abundant in the citations that Poe
himself about how knowledge and
discovery work and that includes purse
I've stuck by us all self referentiality
really what you've done is given us what
came first in Ipoh and bring quite a
find a little or the latter actually and
and holiday puts a chicken is the
chicken and egg problem and I think
posed I've been in the nest proposal
alone I'm finally correct yeah one of
them has Poe inspired the way I think
about history absolutely and through his
speculations through his ideas someone
else has the idea of uchronia alternate
timelines he definitely sets up
alternate timelines as a way of thinking
about history other pasts that allow for
other futures so philip k dick is a
later person developing this but this
comes out of out of pote more
specifically i've discovered that a lot
of the structuralist post-structuralist
historians who think about the
variability of history have been
themselves directly inspired by Poe by
Japan by his analysis of words by his
analysis of how to make a translation
how to make an interpretation what it is
to reach the solution in the massive
documents that every historian faces so
thank you because I think it's a very
high compliment to just to think that
I'm following a somewhat Polian method
here and that's not an accident
contemporary American technoscience
agriculture and I want to just invite
you to play with a sort of notorious
Jamis so you have your your science
looking back and sort of March for
science me attempt to impose rationality
on what is seen as a as an increasingly
ludicrous American politics but then you
have the sort of the side of it this
equally may be scientific but a bit more
PT which is I guess my my question is
where is evil Musk that's a great
question and I think a lot of people are
wondering that where is Elon Musk I
think the figure the speculator is is
everywhere in this story it's the
speculator who is willing to acknowledge
that it's pure speculation like poo and
then there's the speculator who says why
don't you sign up to my plan and you
know convince convince city governments
to give me a hundred billion dollars to
build something that could never work
right they're everywhere in this period
and in a way musk is trying to ride that
same way that a lot of these people are
trying to ride which is at what point do
you crash and get realized that people
realize you're just a con artist like
Barnum or are you able to convince
enough people to make the investments to
make the thing work and there's an
element of truth in both but I mean
you're not musk I don't think he was a
US citizen but he is absolutely the US
figure of this of this moment and it
makes perfect sense that he and his
cronies want to colonize Mars to just as
the people this moment wanted to
colonize California who's just as
fantastic California happen its own
demise
they will crush it well it's a tradition
in the department of science and
technology can enjoy the contents of
that later
you
