Science and the Public: Vignettes in History of Science 1700-1980

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Enlightenment anatomists journeyed to Peter The Great’s collection of monsters to study the human body. In 1800s London, Humphrey Davy discovered potassium, sodium, and chlorine at the newly built Royal Institute, which he funded from hugely popular, public lectures he gave. Private firms bolstered their R&D by hiring research scientists after WWI. An integration of private management methods and production techniques, federal money, and scientists who were previously cloistered in universities built the atomic bomb. The above anecdotes gesture at an intimate relationship between science and the public. To explore the entanglement of science and the public, this class offers a “survey” of science beginning in the Enlightenment and ending in the late twentieth century. Rather than covering every scientific development over 300 years, this course will focus on the topics that best reveal how science and the public relate in a series of case studies chronologically arranged. Using those case studies, the course investigates the principal question: how did scientists and their theories interact with the public? From this, sub-questions emerge, such as “what is the public?” “what is the basis of scientific authority?” and “how has public support changed science?” Students will grapple with these questions by examining the history of science and technology.