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Thursday 12 November 2009, 16:30-18:00
Learning things: the objects of familiar science in nineteenth-century Britain
- đ¤ Speaker: Melanie Keene (Homerton College, Cambridge)
- đ Date & Time: Thursday 12 November 2009, 16:30 - 18:00
- đ Venue: Seminar Room 2, History and Philosophy of Science, Department of
Abstract
‘To many a Royal Society, the Creation of a World is little more mysterious than the cooking of a Dumpling’ â Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1838).
The use of familiar objects as both physical didactic devices and literary pedagogic analogies was particularly prevalent and powerful in nineteenth-century science education. Candles and cups of tea, pebbles and primroses, salt and see-saws were recruited to explain and entertain, as everyday science was placed at the heart of Victorian domestic life. In this talk I shall introduce the aims and artefacts of ‘familiar science’, exploring how the quotidian world of commonplace artefacts was used to communicate facts and phenomena â in short, how learning things was achieved through learning with things.
Series This talk is part of the Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science series.
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