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

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...

Search This Blog