JAPC - The Enigmatic Innards of Neutron Stars

Speaker: Dr. Mark A.E. Williams, Communication Studies Dept., California State University, Sacramento

Topic: "Looking Through the Æther: Science, Rhetoric, Magic and Clear Thinking in the Mediæval and Modern Mind"

Time: 2:00 PM, Friday, October 12th, 2007

Place: P-148 (refreshments will be served at 1:45 PM in P145A)

Abstract: Most of us tend to believe that there is something of a bright line between the emergence and triumph of Enlightened Science and the dark superstitions of the Middle Ages. The reality is much, much more complicated, of course. Galileo did not trust his telescope any more than the Church did. Why not? It is common knowledge that Bacon was also an alchemist -- but why? And how is it that William Gilbert, author of De Magnete and the first Englishman to back the Copernican theory, was able to establish through "a multitude of experiments" that the planet Earth is an animate being capable of making choices?

In this presentation, we will discuss how physics has changed over the last few centuries, not in the advances of its calculus but in the underpinnings of its fundamental convictions. We will explore what, exactly, it meant to think clearly in the centuries past, and how those assumptions about thought haunt the present methods of contemporary science.

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