YouSaid · the spoken record

Patricia Fara

lines on the record: 69
first: 2021-02-24
most recent: 2021-02-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Charles Darwin, for example, representing him as an ape because what he dared to do was bring together animal life and human life. Or there's another famous one of Marie Curie. And she's with her husband. And it's so typical that her husband, Pierre, is holding up this tube of radium chloride and it's shining out on his forehead as though he were the genius. And she's dressed very demurely and timidly and she's hiding behind her back. So it's giving him all the credit for this discovery, whereas actually it was her work, it was her project, and she was in charge of radiation.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got several projects. One is I would like to write a book about caricatures. So my ideal project would be to have a set of about 50 caricatures by people like William Hogarth or Gilray, which are satire's on science, and to accompany each caricature with about a thousand words explaining what the joke is because we've lost touch with it. So for example, one of the most famous, which seems relevant today, is that when Jenner introduced smallpox vaccination at the end of the 18th century, everybody was absolutely terrified about what effects that would have on the human body. And Gilray did a very famous caricature of all the patients in the clinic sprouting horns and turning into cows because the vaccine was based on cowpox. So that's just one very obvious example. There were a lot of caricatures about”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most effective and usual. Well, someone. People who stayed with me in my house have told me that I have a habit of which I was completely unaware, that I sit upstairs where I am sitting now, in my study and I sort of work on my computer, then about every half an hour there's an enormous bang, and I stamp around the room swearing, and the people in the house are terribly worried that something has gone awfully wrong, and then I get back to work and everything resumes as usual for the next half an hour and then it all happens again. I was completely unaware that I did that until several people have told me that I do, but it seems to work.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, an important illustrate, oh, well, one of them was a 17th century Dutch woman called Maria Sibylla Marianne. And she was an extraordinary woman who went out to the East Indies, either on her own or with her daughter, I can't remember, and she painted the most wonderful pictures of butterflies and plants and insects. So she think she was a very important illustrator. Her works were collected by Queen Charlotte, who was the wife of King George III, and she did a great deal to promote the science of botany amongst women at the end of the eighteenth century.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And on her side of the picture, she's looking very beautiful and glamorous, but on her side of the picture there's a big portfolio, and she was an art student. And she learnt from David, the man who painted the double portrait, and all her illustrations, her sketches still survive at Cornell University in the archive. And there's pictures of her made by her showing her husband's laboratory, and she shows herself sitting in the middle of the laboratory, and she's writing down all the observations, and she's very, very much involved in the scientific work. So there's two different kinds of illustration that she did. One was technical illustrations for the book, and the other was this illustration showing science not as the sole product of Lavoisier's brain, but as a collective work. There's about ten people in the”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And each of those plates shows an instrument and takes it apart, so that Somebody who reads a book in Berlin or New York or London could replicate Lavoisier's results precisely and build an instrument that was exactly the same as the one that he was using, and she drew all those plates. There's a famous portrait of them. It's in the Metropolitan in New York. A big portrait, a double portrait of the Lavoisier couple, and on his side of the picture there's lots of glass instruments and”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh Madame Levoisier, she was Marie Le Paul LaVois. She was married to Antoine Lavoisier, who was the French chemist who introduced a lot of the symbols that we've got today. He introduced the idea that you have an equation in chemistry and all the weights have to be the same on both sides. And when they got married, she was only thirteen. And the first thing she did was learn English, which he never did, so she was absolutely essential in his work with all the English chemists and the people like Benjamin Franklin from the States and Joseph Priestley from English. And he published a big book, a revolutionary book of chemistry. It was published during the French Revolution. He published a book which is commonly regarded as a revolutionary book, is regarded as a foundation of modern chemistry, and has got twelve plates in it.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Renaissance to the seventeenth century. It was traditional that the frontispiece of a book, the image opposite the title page, the frontis piece carried a visual summary of the arguments of the whole book. That was true, I suppose the latest famous example was in the middle of the 19th century, Charles Lyell's famous book on geology. It had a frontispiece about the temple of Serapis and that summarized his whole theory about the temple sinking and rising so on the pillars of the temple you could see boreholes from the marine organisms where it had been submerged below the waters. I think that's an old tradition to summarise an argument in pictures and I think perhaps it's one we could valuably get back to.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think pictures are very important. Pictures include a huge amount of information. Many types of information can only be communicated visually. It's just, personally, I love going to art galleries. And I found it a very rewarding way of teaching because if you, at the beginning of the academic year, you've got a group of students and they're all very nervous, not just of me, they're nervous of each other. They don't want to embarrass themselves in front of the other students. So if I show them a picture, everybody can say something about a picture. They can say, well, that's a man and a woman sitting at a table. By encouraging them to explore the picture more and more ideas come out. And I think it's a very helpful way to start a conversation about what's happening and what all the subtexts are and what all the symbols are. If you go back to the”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my remedy naturally would be to teach them all history of science and the latest book, I don't know, I assume it's come out in America, Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Lives. He was one of my students and he did history of science when he was at Cambridge. And he is an excellent example of how someone who studied history of science can also be a brilliant scientist and a brilliant writer.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah, okay. So my husband and I very foolishly probably in our early twenties both left our work and we set up a small company making educational material about statistics and about computers. And my role in that was to write the script. So I had to translate some quite complex ideas about computer programming and about statistics, which I already knew about them, but I had to translate them into very simple phrases. And each one had to be matched to an illustration. And I think that's probably why I have so many images in my book, because we were making what they don't exist now, but they were called take slide programs, the 35mm slides that were synchronized with a take cassette. So you had to present an image and an idea together in very simple basic ways. Terms, and I think that was fantastic intellectual training.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think education should be mixed all the way up. I think we've just got to, we're never going to get away from gender discrimination if we keep separating people. And we've got to bring them together. I think achieving gender equality isn't just a matter of improving the position of women. We've also got to change the attitude of men and the attitude of men and women towards their lives and towards work. And that's one of the things I find it wonderful when I walk around Cambridge now and I see young fathers taking their children to school or playing with their children. And I think that's a cooperative parental approach towards their children is fantastic. It's wonderful for the children and it is also very rewarding for the parents as well, for both parents, particularly the father. And I think we've got to get away from this idea that work is what really matters.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm not and there are still a couple of colleges at Cambridge, which are single sex, and I have been quite consistently outspoken about saying that I personally think that that's wrong.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I did enormously. I mean, I'm much older now, I've sort of slightly had time to get over it. But yes, I was hugely confident, not so much when I was at university, but after I left What I discovered was that I should never ever admit that I had a degree in physics from Oxford, because if I was at a nightclub or a party or something there would soon be this big empty space all round me. And I felt at that time there was a double image. I was being encouraged to succeed intellectually as a scientist, but I also there was still that older role model that had to be the perfect wife and the perfect mother and I had to have my nail varnish all sorted out. And so there was this double role model and I was sort of trying to fill both and I felt that I was filling neither. And I don't think it was really until my 40s or 50s that I started feeling confident.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Historical subjects, and I'm more on the sort of arts side, and perhaps that's what I should have done when I was at school, but no one ever knows that at the time.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of our last segment. Okay. Well, I was always top of the form. There's lots of other qualities which I don't have, but intellectually, I was a year younger than everybody else and I was at the top of the form, so I was a very clever person intellectually I was very clever, not in all sorts of other ways. And because it was a high-powered girls school, I think all the teachers and my parents were absolutely delighted that they had a girl, a teenage girl, who was very, very good at science and obviously could succeed. And I sort of steered into studying science without anybody, including me, seriously questioning whether that was what I actually wanted to do. And I was very intellectually competent, so I passed all my exams and I went to Oxford and I got a very good degree. But I'm far happier now that I'm undertaken a”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was at school, a teacher, and I was, I think in retrospect, I was at a very competitive girls' school. And I was very, very good at science and maths, but I was pretty good at English and history as well. And I was always, sorry, it sounds like I'm boasting, but I was always top of the forbear.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think I still try to abide by that. So, for example, I was what's called the senior tutor of a college, which is sort of rather like a dean in America, I believe. And I was responsible for the pastoral well-being and the educational welfare of about 700 students, I think, something like that each year. The aspect of that work that gave me most pleasure and most gratification was when a student was in deep distress for some reason or another and I managed to help that individual student and help them sort of regain their life and get back to work and become a happy student again. And I sort of think that's the sort of thing that George Elliot was talking about that I had hope that I had a big influence on individuals. And that was the most rewarding aspect of my career.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't got a physics PhD. I graduated in physics and that was at a time when because I got a good degree result I was offered a position as a PhD student which would be fully funded by the government. Life was much better back then and I turned it down because I didn't want to spend the next three years in a laboratory fine-tuning instruments and working out some number to the 10th place of decimals. So I made a positive decision that I was bored by physics. I wasn't very good at the practical aspect anyway and I wanted to get out in the world and I wanted to do something different.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think those data are very, very interesting, and I unfortunately don't know enough about the situation in Muslim countries. And as I understand it, it's different, naturally it's different in different countries, but that does very strongly confirm what I was saying, that it's a sort of social prejudice, a set of cultural beliefs rather than an intrinsic inability of women to do physics. And as I understand it, a lot of women in Arab nations who go in to science at university level then end up teaching other women. And I think that's something that we could benefit from in this country, whereas where a lot of the problem starts at school that girls aren't well taught and they're discouraged from carrying out subjects like computer science or physics.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad they're prominent in some science, that's absolutely excellent. I think the problem with theoretical physics, I think there aren't enough good teachers in the girls' schools. I think that's one problem. I also think we still have a cultural bias, which is very unfortunate, which suggests that women are not clever enough to do physics. I personally really resent that because I've got a degree in physics from Oxford. I think a lot of men in physics, unfortunately, are still unwilling to recruit or to promote female scientists. So those are some of the prejudices that we have to smash down.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“William Herschel got the astronomy bug, and he persuaded her to devote her life to helping him, and she was out there all night observing on the telescope, also carrying out this work of translating raw data into figures that could be recorded in the star catalogue, and she also discovered on her own she discovered several new comets, and she became very well known for that in the late 18th century.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To work with their father. And that sort of structure was stronger in Germany than it was in England, but there were also some important female astronomers. So, for example, the first astronomer royal at Greenwich when the observatory was built in the seventeenth century, the first astronomer royal was John Flamsteed, and his wife, Joanna, was also a good astronomer, and she was very good at carrying out all the mathematical calculations that are needed to transform the data, the readings of the stars, to transform those data into measurements that can be recorded in a star catalogue. Another excellent example of that is Caroline Herschel, who came over from Germany with her brother William, and they set up in Bath together, and she was going to be a musician, and she started on her musical career.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because astronomy was it is a subject now that you study at university, but it was also a craft to study astronomy, to study the stars you need to make instruments. And the instruments were being made at home. The guild structure was very strong in Germany. And a lot of women in England as well.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“managed to spread around the world, and women played a very important role in that sort of communication and spread of science. So I agree with Londa Schievinger, but I also think that we need to rewrite how we think about the history of science and what's important about the history of science. Science is about collaboration, it's about cooperation. It's not about unique effort. And women were very important in that process.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as a sort of range of mountain peaks with individual geniuses standing on top of them, then women played a very, very important role because teaching, illustrating, drawing, editing, running museums, collecting different sort of specimens, those are all absolutely crucial. So if you think of Isaac Newton, he wrote his Principia in a very complicated geometrical language and he said he deliberately made it very difficult because what he said was I don't want to be bothered by little smatterers in mathematics. So ordinary people, even quite skilled mathematicians, found his book impossible to approach, so it was only when other people translated it or explained the ideas in it in simpler terms that his vision supposedly under the apple tree.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Science was being carried out at home before the nineteenth century not much was happening in universities or in public laboratories. So a lot of women were at home and they were essentially working with their brothers or their fathers or their husbands. They weren't allowed to go to university. So unless they were very rich and could afford a private tutor, they didn't have the opportunity to learn all the scientific theories that men could because men were allowed to study those sort of subjects. But if you think about the history of science, of course there are individuals like Newton and Einstein who make great discoveries, but science isn't just about that. You have to be able to communicate ideas from one person to another, from one country to another. And if you think about that sort of model of science, if you think of science as being continuous.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Glamorous heroic, tragic tale like a Rosalind Franklin, for example she was just an ordinary woman who got on and she did her science and she had four children and she was very supportive of her peers and everybody liked her and she seems to me that she is the ideal role model for a scientist and Maggie Hamlin has painted a very very sympathetic portrait of her as an elderly lady borrowing amongst her papers and she's painted her with forearms because she's so busy that her arms are dashing around all over the place and she's got a big model of a molecule in the middle of her desk to show off her achievements.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of my favourite pictures she's not particularly underrated is by Muggie Hamlin. And the reason it's my favourite pictures is because she shows Dorothy is a portrait of Dorothy Hodgkin, who is the only British woman to have won a Nobel Prize for Science, and very, very few people have heard of her. I would like to see Maggie Hamlin more represented, but also this particular portrait, Dorothy Hutchin, she won the Nobel Prize, she identified the molecular structures through x ray crystallography. She identified insulin, vitamin B and penicillin. She was also very affable, lovely person who campaigned for maternity leave for women in the universities who was very supportive of other women, and she doesn't have a sort of”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps they don't look happy because they have to sit still for a long while being painted. That's certainly true of the early photographs that people had to pose for a long while because portraits were painted, if they were painted of a man, it's different for a woman, but a portrait was painted of a man was to show his importance and his seriousness and his gravitas, so they didn't necessarily show him as unhappy. In the eighteenth century they were shown mainly as being sort of noble and austere. It was in the seventeenth century a lot of them actually were given very melancholy expressions, someone like the Daurist John Evelyn, for example, or Isaac Newton himself, because being melancholy was associated with scholarship the idea that you would sit inside in a darkened room and you had very white skin and fine bones, so your physical attributes”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“rather than another one, and it's now being replaced. I mean, there's a lot of debate about whether it is the best and the most useful classification system. So it's not absolutely right. It's just one system of doing it.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because people classified plants according to why they needed to use them. Plants mostly used for food and for drugs. In John Ray in the 17th century did introduce a classification system. It was a different classification system. By the time Linnaeus proposed his, there were several others, and his was strongly opposed. It's got several important defects. It was completely arbitrary, the way that it counts the sexual characteristics of the flowers is also roughly half flora don't have flowers that you can count the sexual characteristics in that way. So it's a deeply flawed system that was much criticized at the time. And it was like all new scientific ideas. It had to be promoted. There had to be almost a sort of public relations exercise to make sure that Linnaean botany was accepted rather than”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That will soap. Robert Hooke took refuge at a country house in Surrey and he went for long walks over the Dans, and he found lots of fossils of marine organisms. So already in the middle of the seventeenth century Robert Hook was arguing that there must once have been a sea that lay over that land because he was finding all these marine fossils. So it was a long, slow process. I think it's easy in retrospect it's quite easy to say well why did it take so long for people to discover that? One reason is that they had other things to do. Another reason is that during the 18th and 19th centuries when all the new canals and the railways were being built, then people started slicing down inside the earth and they could see for the first time they could see all those layers, all those geological strata. So again it was a different activity.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one reason why it came late in Europe was because of Christian beliefs. I mean, what it says in the Bible, it says in the Bible that the earth was created in six days and on the seventh day God rested. But more importantly, I think the idea of revolution that God created the world just as it is now. And I think it took a long time to overturn those ideas, but long before Charles Darwin formulated his idea of evolution by natural selection, that view of the permanence and the unchanging nature of the earth had been overturned a long while previously and all the geological information was already in place by then. So if you go back, for example, even to Robert Hooke, who was a contemporary of Isaac Newton during the plague, when Isaac Newton was in his country home,”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Charles Darwin was very impressed by his father for one thing physically they both had a large nose and they both had a stammer that was something that Charles Darwin commented on. He also inherited the family aversion to alcohol. When Charles Darwin was a medical student in Edinburgh, he had to read Erasmus Darwin's medical textbook which was called Zoonomia and it was in Zoonomia that in the pages at the end that Erasmus Darwin first suggested evolutionary ideas and when Charles Darwin went on the Beagle voyage when he started taking notes about all the flora and fauna that he saw he had several notebooks and there's one notebook that's got his first sketch of an evolutionary branching tree and that notebook is called zoonomia. So I think that's just one example of how influential”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if I can extend Northern England of south a bit to the Midlands, I would say Lichfield, because that's where Erasmus Darwin lived, who was Charles Darwin's grandfather. Lichfield is near Birmingham. And in the 18th century, Birmingham was quite small and insignificant, and Lichfield was very important. And that's where Darwin developed one of the earliest theories of evolution to be expressed in Britain.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think Queen Christina was also important for launching a tradition of learned minervas of women who were capable of understanding scientific ideas.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Queen Christina was like, Well, she's important because she was a very, very intelligent woman and she was lucky enough to be rich so she could study science and she collected an intellectual court around her and she attracted Renee Descartes, the French philosopher, to her court to come and be her tutor, so she learnt maths and physics from Descartes, one of Europe's leading philosophers at the time, but it's quite cold in Sweden, unlike France, and he got very chilled and he caught some illness, and he died while he was in Sweden with her. So that's what she's best known for. But she was also revered in her own age as Athena as Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. And that became a very common emblem, those various busts and pictures of Queen Christina dressed like Minerva, wearing a helmet because she was also the goddess of war, wearing a helmet with an owl on the top.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it is rated particularly highly in the history. I mean, it's a good example of something that wasn't invented for scientific purposes, but was developed by merchants when they're trading. You need to add up the bills and work out, I don't know how much six meters of cloth a meter is going to cost. So it's a good example of an instrument that was not developed for scientific reasons, but for other reasons in this instance trading and marketing.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose discussions about the nature of truth and objectivity and whether you can ever attain truth and what does that mean? Yes, the sort of relationships, the theoretical relationships between an observation and a fact and a theory. It's much more complicated than most people are led to believe.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think an enormous number of holes have been picked in Thomas Coon's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and I think Thomas Kuhn himself would agree with many of those. On the other hand it was a key book in the way that it influenced people and persuaded them to think about the interaction between science and society in a different way. So it's been enormously influential although I don't really agree with all that motuate.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Thomas Coon introduced he didn't introduce it himself, he developed earlier ideas and it has come to represent this idea that science doesn't proceed in a straight line sort of up the mountain of truth, that it proceeds through revolutions so that people get hold of a fixed idea like for example they know that They know that the sun goes round the earth, but then more and more evidence comes up that really argues against that belief and then becomes a sort of a crisis when the evidence overwhelms the previous belief and you flip into a new paradigm and go for a different belief that the earth goes around the sun.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a science student should learn history of sciences that the students I teach absolutely love it because they have an opportunity to argue and to express their own ideas and think for themselves and it's something that students really really enjoy as well as learning a lot from.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think I would like to make history of science compulsory for all science students. I think one thing that they learned, they obviously learn about debates of the past. A lot of the ethical considerations involved in previous debates are still very, very relevant now. So I think that's very useful for them. Another reason for them to learn history of science is that if they're scientists, they're taught how to carry out calculations and how to advance from a certain base of knowledge and to produce new knowledge what historians of science do is argue and interpret and find ways of expressing their own point of view. So we teach science students how to write essays, how to present their own position, and that's a skill that everybody is going to need if you're writing a grant application. You need to be able to present your ideas clearly. And the other reason why I think every...”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the Antichithera device, which was as an ancient mechanical clock from the Greek era, which was discovered in the early 20th century, is an absolutely magnificent example of the sort of thing that I'm talking about, because according to the standard historical works, such an elaborate set of gears and such an intricate understanding of what's going on in the heavens, but particularly the mechanical work that was involved couldn't possibly have happened before the Middle Ages. And here there is this clock that's long, long preceding the Middle Ages, and the fact that one has been found, which is so technically proficient, suggests, I mean, it's sort of really confirms that there must have been many, many others as well. And what historians have started doing is rereading ancient texts and reinterpreting different references to pick up indications that this sort of technology”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but you could say the same of the Egyptians. They cultivated a weed and turned it into something that we used to print books on and use for transmitting knowledge. I think a lot of ancient cultures, ancient civilizations had very advanced levels of knowledge, but they weren't directing it to what we would call science. They wanted to live better. They wanted to be more healthy. They wanted to grow more crops. They wanted to get from one place to another. They wanted to become rich. And to do all those things, they developed techniques that later got taken over and were adapted and now seen as being part of science.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I looked back on that book which I wrote about, I think about came out about 15 years ago. And when I wrote it, I was trying extremely hard to get away from a Eurocentric approach and to write an international history of science. And since then, I think history of science has become still more global and international. So I think we do know a lot about the ancient world. I think, unfortunately, we still don't take sufficient account of other cultures outside Greece and Rome are seen as being particularly important. And I think more and more we have to look at what was happening in other parts of the world and recognize that not everything originated with Europe.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“being extremely important for developing the idea of careers outside the church and the law which were the traditional careers developing different sorts of careers and making science into a professional activity and that's what happened in the 19th century”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you've just given precisely all the reasons why I think it was a continuous effect, and you're quite right it couldn't have happened in fifteen hundred because the other social factors weren't in place. But the name of a revolution suggests that something changes precipitately and very quickly. I think it's quite relevant to remember that the word scientist wasn't even invented until the 1830s. And in this country, it didn't become common until the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. So science as we know it didn't exist in the 16th, 17th century, which is where the scientific revolution is usually placed. And the term scientific revolution implies that you go from a non-scientific state to a very scientific sort of position. And that actually didn't happen. And there was a long process of continuity. And you could see the 18th century as”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it became particularly important after the Second World War when science was compared with religion and the sort of rather idealistic view was that there could be a universal language of science, I suppose Isaac Newton's Principia would be sort of like the Bible of the new science. And that could spread internationally. And it went along with a very pacifist aim to reduce international tensions. And this concept, the label, the scientific revolution, became really important during the second half of the 20th century. But since then, a lot of historians have strongly challenged it. So I don't personally think it's a very good label.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source