Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

This paper describes how I anthologised the ‘and’ of nineteenth century literature and science for a volume in Oxford University Press's World's Classics series. The challenge was to choose and align a hundred excerpts from novels, scientific essays, poems, and textbooks to reveal the ‘feedback loop’ of influence between literary and scientific writers. Some of the best evidence for cross-pollination I discovered in journal volumes. In repeated cycles of comments from my editor and reader, and with frequent input from friends, I found myself rethinking what it means to exchange ideas, and did my best to illustrate these interactions for general readers.

Public interest in science is often thought to have been much greater in the nineteenth century than at the present time. However, little attention has been paid to the media used to disseminate science to different audiences in nineteenth century Britain. In particular, the vast bulk of general periodicals which fill our library shelves continues to be largely impenetrable. Yet readers encountered a great quantity and an extensive variety of scientific, technical, and medical information in the pages of such general periodicals as Punch, the Boy's Own Paper, and Dickens's Household Words. This article describes the work of the ‘Science in the nineteenth-century periodical’ (SciPer) project at the universities of Leeds and Sheffield, which seeks to identify and analyse the representation of science in the non-specialist periodical press. The project has prepared an electronic index of the science content of a range of periodicals, chosen to reflect the increasing range of reading audiences addressed in the nineteenth century. In addition to detailing the methodology employed, this article includes examples of the project's findings, showing how both science and scientists were presented in such journals as the Comic Annual and the Review of Reviews.

This article places the work of David Ferrier in the context of the vivisection movement and the agitation of its opponents. Between 1873 and 1874, Ferrier used the facilities of the laboratory attached to the Wakefield Lunatic Asylum to experiment first on animals and then, post-mortem, on patients who had died while in the asylum. These experiments and others on monkeys aroused considerable controversy at the time, and led to Ferrier's being prosecuted by antivivisectionists. His work made an important contribution to the understanding of the brain and of neurological disturbance, but raises important questions as to whether the cruelty of experimentation can be justified in the interests of ultimate good. Heart and Science (1883), where there is a specific reference to Ferrier in the preface, is Wilkie Collins's fictional protest against vivisection, and the second part of this article analyses the ways in which the concerns of the antivivisectionists are explored in the novel, particularly through the character of Dr Benjulia. Collins shows the dehumanising effect of the habitual practice of cruelty to animal subjects. He also dramatises the concern of antivivisectionists that animal experimentation was motivated primarily by thoughts of professional advance. The final part of the article focuses on Dracula (1897). Dr Seward, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum, has a Faustian desire for knowledge of the brain. Fascinated by his patient Renfield's zoophagy, he experiments in a tentative way, measuring himself against two prominent vivisectionists, Sir John Scott Burdon-Sanderson and David Ferrier. Instead of polemic, this novel, a gothic fantasy, offers an imaginative exploration of the themes of professional advancement, vivisection, and the limitations of science.

Science fiction is one of the most successful and perhaps most influential contemporary literary genres, and surely also one of the most significant cultural factors shaping ourimages of science, technology, and - last but not least - the future. As an integral part of postmodernculture, science fiction has penetrated all fields of the media landscape: fiction, comic books, movies, even plays and musicals. Science fiction themes and images surface sometimes quite unexpectedly in everyday life, in TV commercials and video clips, not to speak of computer games. Internet enthusiasts use science fiction jargon and imagery to depict their visions of cyberspace. A generation ago, the race to the moon was at least partly inspired by the dreams of early science fiction writers and readers. For the public, technology is science fiction come true. For many scientists and engineers too, science fiction provides the imagery of their visions.

When, in the twenty-first century, psychologists or popularisers ask ‘what is consciousness?’, or refer to the ‘mind body problem’, what are they up to?Does their discourse, sometimes called cognitive science, fall within the modern idea of the natural sciences? Like many before them, some try to reduce human beings to machines: both mind and the brain become computers. Kinds of knowledge outside the sciences are ignored or derogated. Cognitive scientists consequently make it difficult or impossible for them to understand themselves, let alone other people, or to adopt a moral stance. This essay, in contrast, was not generated by a computer, nor is it addressed to one.

The immense powers to intervene in the very constitution of ‘life itself’ that have been developed by the modern life sciences pose serious questions for the basis of politics, and for common reason. In this context the life sciences may formally be seen as the principle source of instruction for rationality. The work of Michel Serres – philosopher and historian of science – provides a very different account of wisdom. Serres redistributes reason by exploring complex connections between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. His early analysis of the links or ‘translations’ between the art of Turner and the thermodynamic principles of Carnot reveals the existence of highly mediated relationships between different forms of knowledge. Although in recent years Serres has offered a revised reading of the case of Turner, exploring such links makes visible the fundamental interdependence of human affairs with a ‘socialised’ natural world in which ‘it no longer depends on us that everything depends on us’. Serres describes the foundations of a ‘new wisdom’ that is adequate to such a world, leading to a notion of the ‘third instructed’ as whoever is receptive to communication along the borderlines of disciplines.

Works like Copenhagen and After Darwin have shownthat ‘science plays’ can be an especially successful and powerful meeting point of literature and science. Here, we continue the exploration of science and theatre offered in last year's special issue of ISR on science and theatre, by looking at science plays from both a literary and a theatrical perspective. What is it that makes them work as theatre?In many science plays, form and content merge to convey the ideas in a highly theatrical way that reflects the scientific substance and themes. As analysis of specific textual examples shows, this interdependence of formal and thematic properties has become one of the hallmarks of the contemporary genre of science plays, along with their often provocative and innovative challenges to stage realism.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73), was a prolific writer with a strong interest in science. Her work, long ignored, has recently been garnering serious critical attention. This article considers her Observations on Experimental Philosophy as more than just a critique of the Royal Society's mechanistic science. Whilst she was certainly responding to other scientific texts she read, Cavendish also practised her own version of natural philosophy, one that relied on observation to support her objections to Robert Hooke and other Royal Society scientists. Hers was a scientific practice that relied on passive observation rather than invasive experiment. As an early modern woman interested innatural philosophy, she demonstrates concernfor herreaders’ abilities to comprehend difficult texts, and she models herself as a reader of scientific texts and a practitioner of science herself.

The purpose of this paper is to address the interstitial spaces that exist not only between disciplinary methods, but often even within distinct modes of inquiry guided by their own strict disciplinary rules. Case studies are used, drawn from cetacean behaviour as well as from the history of science, in an effort to explore the role of absences - ‘lacunae’ - in patterns of human inquiry. This is an approach that owes a great deal to the field of cultural studies, which has undertaken in recent decades to understand what is ‘missing’ from the canonical frameworks of literature and culture. Rather than being an expression of the need for more or better knowledge, or even for more diverse knowledge, what is at the heart of this venture is the desire to understand and appreciate the cultural ‘topography’ of knowledge. In the constantly shifting landscape of knowledge, where determinative lacunae are inescapable, knowledge will, as a consequence of cultural values, reconstitute itself in terms of meaning, of visibility, of significance, and of consequence.

This paper explores how metaphors drawing on the written forms of science have guided epistemological reflection. After a brief description of how cognitive metaphors work and why the written forms of science serve as natural sources of metaphor, it traces the influence of the most important of these metaphors, the metaphor of the book. I argue that this metaphor is at least partially responsible forthe following assumptions andemphases in epistemology: (1) that justification has a linear structure, (2) that mistakes should rather be prevented than corrected, (3) that pluralism does not have an important role, and (4) that theories as abstract structures are readily available. The final part of the paper contains some suggestions as to how the metaphor of the hypertext may help us to a useful perspective on the issues of coherence, discovery, and the search for information.