| Science and Humanities |
| Thursday, 10 May 2007 | |
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Students at Cambridge read for a degree in Natural Sciences, yet many scientists feel that they do not get the opportunity, to or know how to read at all. Conversely, budding literary scholars may have become convinced that they do not understand, or cannot do science. But does this have to be the case? Can reading bring science and literature together?
The Science and Literature Reading Group, jointly organised by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and the Department of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, hopes to challenge some of the preconceived boundaries, barriers, and differences between these academic disciplines. Their aim is to provide a forum in which diverse specialists can come together over a common interest in texts and in sciences. During informal discussions over themed readings, post-meeting drinks in Darwin College bar, and occasional trips to appropriate theatricals, the group explores connected ways of investigating these subjects, stressing and assessing the importance of interdisciplinary interactions.  In recent years, termly themes tackled by the group have ranged over genres and time periods, from analysing the written conventions of up-to-the-minute internet journalism to the nature of poetic Lucretian philosophy. Alongside Lawrence Durrell they have interpreted the ‘space and time marriage’ as ‘the greatest boy meets girl story of the age’, worked out how to fit all the animals inside Noah’s ark via John Wilkins’s literary technologies, travelled to The Blazing World with Margaret Cavendish, shared Edgar Allan Poe’s whirligig Eureka moment, and entered the amazing Mind of a Mnemonist. Along the way the group has encountered writings by canonical literary figures such as Robert Browning, renowned characters from the history of science such as Humphry Davy, and classic works of ‘science and literature’ such as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Despite the relationship implied by the ordering of the group’s title, they are not limited to one-way traffic from scientific practice to its ‘diffusion’ in contemporary literature. Rather, one aim of the group is to help rethink these categories of ‘science’ and ‘literature’, especially in relation to past times and cultures, when such alignments often made little sense. Far from simply choosing to read poetry and fiction that include scientific ideas, they take the languages of sciences as forms of literature, including their theories, terminologies, models and metaphors. Thus analysing the manner in which a scientific journal article has been written. There is an ongoing fascination with the variety of metaphors used when discussing how these disciplines interact. Their interconnectivity has been described in terms of open fields, membranes, tentacles, parasites, sympathies, encounters, mappings, interweaving and perhaps most appropriately given the nature of the group, conversations. This is the broader ideological framework underpinning the group’s fortnightly meetings. Sessions usually begin with a brief introduction before the attack of the set readings from a number of angles. Whilst no-one in the room is usually an authority on a particular text, the group can draw on a stellar array of expertise and insights. At a recent meeting, representatives of quantum theory, literature, psychology, the earth sciences, pathology, and the history of science contributed to an enhanced understanding of Chekhov’s short stories about doctors. Consequently, anyone who attends the meeting leaves with at least one nugget of novel information, or a slightly different perspective, to take back to the library or the lab, be it on topics as diverse as the clinical symptoms of tuberculosis, conceptions of the narrative structure of disease, techniques of analysing formal prose structures, or the mythic story of Cupid and Psyche. The Cambridge Science and Literature Reading Group provides a wonderful way of encouraging creative relationships and dialogue between members from a range of academic departments. It is a great example of how members of different departments can learn a great deal from each other. After only a few meetings with this inter-disciplinary reading group one can appreciate how, in the words of Muriel Rukeyser, “the universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.” Melanie Keene is a PhD student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science The Science and Literature Reading Group |
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