Susannah Gibson - Four Way Interview

Photo: Seb Faulk

Dr Susannah Gibson is an Affiliated Scholar of the Department of History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How eighteenth-century science disrupted the natural order and was formerly Manager of the Cambridge Literary Festival. Her latest title is The Spirit of Inquiry.

Why history of science?

I took a class on history of science in my third year of a degree in experimental physics at University College Dublin. The class was worth 10% of my grade that year. I probably spent 60% of my time working on it. That was the first clue that maybe I wasn’t pursuing the right degree for me. I had always struggled to choose between science and arts subjects, but when I discovered history of science I realised I could do both. I went on to do a masters and PhD in history of science.

Why this book?

A few years ago the Cambridge Philosophical Society had their archives catalogued in preparation for their 200th anniversary in 2019. When I heard that they were looking for historians to go poke around in that archive I jumped at the chance. The CPS is the oldest scientific society in Cambridge; anyone who was anyone in (Cambridge) science since 1819 has been a member and the archive is filled with incredible documents. There have been a huge number of firsts at their meetings: the first public reading of Darwin’s Beagle letters; Bragg’s announcement of the discovery of x-ray diffraction; the first display of Venn diagrams. Writing this book was a chance to tell some very human stories of scientific discovery, and to look at how science developed in Britain over the last 200 years.

What’s next?

I’m working on two projects right now: one about psychical research in Cambridge in the nineteenth century; and the other about clever women in the eighteenth century who were denied access to education.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Workwise, every day the archives I work on throw up some incredible surprises and keep everything fresh. Outside work... everything from Extinction Rebellion to learning the ukulele.

Comments

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

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