'A trip to Mars by aeroplane': genres of public astronomy and the practice of astrophysics in the fin de siècle

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Josh Nall (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
• Thursday 24 October 2013, 16:30-18:00
• Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Helen Curry.

In 1901, visitors to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition were able to take a journey into space. Trips aboard the airship Luna were made by ‘a combination of electrical mechanism and scenic and lighting effects … to produce the sensation of leaving the Earth and flying through space amidst stars, comets and planets’. Although easily dismissed as mere popular spectacle, I will argue that after 1870 emergent forms of mass media – ranging from the material culture of public expositions to newspapers, globes, magic lantern lectures, encyclopaedias, and mass-circulation periodicals and books – were integral to the development and success of a new type of imaginative astronomical practice. In the wake of fierce contests over the use and validity of new experimental astrophysical techniques in the science, this imaginative, publically-oriented astronomy was posited by some as a viable solution to the discipline’s growing crisis of identity. By exploring the wide variety of media that made this new, contested knowledge travel, I will show how practitioners both for and against imaginative astronomy engaged with genres of public science as part of their work to forge rival identities for themselves and their competing sub-disciplines. The paper suggests that the general strictures of astronomy’s cultural marketplace – the resources and constraints this public sphere provided – were embedded within, and therefore constitutive of, debates over the practice of this ‘new astronomy’.

This talk is part of the Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge talks
• Department of History and Philosophy of Science
• Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science
• Featured lists
• History and Philosophy of Science long list
• Philosophy Events
• Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• hc446
• jer64's list

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.