It has been very hot here, and very dry as well. So the pace of things has slowed a little as people try to keep hydrated and out of the sun as much as possible. Still, we can’t just stop and throw in the (sweaty) towel, now can we? So, here are some interesting things from our friends over at Lablit. I want to mention that the founder of the site, Dr. Jennifer L. Rohan, has published her first novel, a romantic thriller called Experimental Heart. It seems to have all the makin’s…romance, rivalry, research, a mystery with dark doings in high places, a quest. Then, a more careful exam of the site shows me that the managers have an ambitious plan to review every work of fiction in which scientists or scientific work appear, without regard to publication date. So, they’re digging up some interesting books. The one that’s featured now is Copernicus by John Banville, and that appeared in 1976. It’s easy to forget the flesh-and-blood side of science when you read the accounts in a history: Doaks observed, conjectured, theorized… But what else was going on with Doaks? Did his feet hurt? Was his child sick? What was the guy really like? What kind of place was Restoration London, or Imperial Vienna? The science did not happen in a vacuum. Visit Lablit, and look at the review. It’s in the lefthand column, labeled Hell and Heliocentricity. Then, scan up to the top of that same column and read about the AllResults Journal or ARJ. This is a planned new publication which will bring to light interesting but unpublished findings, now unavailable, because “nobody publishes negative results”. It’s certainly an interesting take on things, and we wish them well.

It may be hard to believe now, when scientific literacy is at a very, very low state in the Great Republic, but there was a time, in the Nineteenth centrury, when there was a general enthusiasm for and desire to learn more about, science in all its forms. And, in response, a whole new class of writers found occupation and not a little fortune by answering the demand for help in understanding the discoveries that were visibly changing the world. Britain was at the center of this wave of popularization. Respected scientists did not scorn lecturing at meetings of working men and other self-help societies, partly because the hall was packed with eager auditors, there on their own dime after a long day on the job, and really wanting to learn something. Show me an academic who can turn away from a deal like that; a lot of people who really want to listen to him talk. And the “talent” approched the task very seriously, as Huxley’s letters to Darwin on his working men’s lectures prove. Bernard Lightman is an established scholar working in the history of science, with special reference to Nineteenth century Britain. His recent Victorian Popularizers of Science traces the rise and influence of this new kind of writer, and how the writers functioned amid changing social roles, technological innovation and economic developments. Many of the best popularizers were women, encouraged in that work as part of the nurturing and fostering widely thought to be particularly womanly tasks. The introduction of the steam press made books easier to produce and cheaper to buy, so the material side of book publishing was able to meet the demand for “popular” science, provided writers could be found who understood the material and could write in a way that explained it to others. Lightman’s book tells the story of where the writers came from and how they, sort of, made things up as they went along, acting in the play and writing it at the same time. Today, we know what a “science writer” is, but back then there was no such thing. They had to create their own profession, keep up with the dizzying pace of events and make a living all at once.

Victorian Popularizers of Science, by Bernard Lightman. University of Chicago Press. 978-0226481180