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Science And Imagination
""Science and Imagination"" by Marjorie Hope Nicolson is a collection of essays that explores the relationship between science and literature. The book delves into the ways in which scientific discoveries have influenced literary works, and how literature has in turn shaped our understanding of science. Nicolson examines the works of authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, as well as scientists such as Galileo and Newton, to illustrate the interplay between science and imagination. The book also explores the role of imagination in scientific discovery, and how scientific research can inspire artistic creativity. Overall, ""Science and Imagination"" offers a fascinating exploration of the intersection between science and literature, and the ways in which these two seemingly disparate fields have influenced and enriched each other throughout history.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published December 31, 1976
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July 23, 2015
The vastness of the cosmos is something we in the early twenty-first century take for granted, though it isn't something we always comprehend. In her slim volume of essays, Science and Imagination, Marjorie Hope Nicolson studies the impact the discovery of its vastness had on the first several generations of people to live through it, those whose world suddenly became both much larger and smaller than it was thanks to the invention of the microscope and telescope, respectively.
Nicolson examines the ways in which the discoveries achieved through the telescope and microscope lodged themselves in the European literary imagination in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The longest essay is on the "scientific background" to Gulliver’s Travels. Swift, as Nicolson amply demonstrates, knew exactly what he was satirizing: travel literature, reports of scientific experiments, and learned bodies such as the Royal Society. Another essay explores the impact that an early example of science fiction, if it can be called that, had on John Donne. Johannes Kepler, of three planetary laws of motion fame, wrote a book called the Somnium in which he imagines himself traveling to the moon. This work, in manuscript form, somehow reached Donne, who then incorporated some of its ideas in his own work, especially the "space travel" elements in "Ignatius His Conclave." As it turns out, the moon voyage was a popular literary genre, one that got new life from the renewed attention the Moon received thanks to Galileo.
Another essay makes a convincing case that Milton was profoundly influenced by the new astronomy when he wrote Paradise Lost. His descriptions of the planets and Satan’s perspective on the cosmos as he travels to Earth would have been impossible before the new astronomy of Kepler, Galileo, et al. transformed the universe into something nearly infinite in scope. In other, more general essays, Nicolson details how telescope and microscope altered the English (she mostly looks at England) literary imagination by altering what it became possible for English writers to imagine, and therefore write. Donne's "First Anniversary," where he laments the disordering of the old, static understanding of the universe, is probably the best known example, but Nicolson offers many, many more. Nor were all reactions as negative as Donne’s. The people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were just as captivated by the wonders of the universe as we are, and their wonder and awe comes across vividly. Except in Shakespeare. For whatever reason, and Nicolson can offer no more than conjecture, the Bard was immune to the new science. Whenever he speaks of the heavens, planets, and stars, he does so in the terms of the old Ptolemaic conception of the universe. Time fascinated him, but space to him remained empty, even after Galileo had filled it beyond comprehension.
The essays collected here were written in the 1930s. Their style and methodology, from the perspective of 2015, cannot but seem outmoded, if not obsolete. They are very old-fashioned, relying almost exclusively on description and narration. They are "positivist," to coin a phrase. There’s no theoretical apparatus, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In a book like this, I'm most interested in learning what the people involved thought and had to say, and less so what it means from a theoretical or historiographical perspective. (And given how such a book might read if a contemporary English professor wrote it, that's no small mercy.) One might wish for more authorial intervention, but ultimately it's unnecessary to have Nicolson pronounce that the scientific discoveries of the microscope and telescope utterly transformed man's understanding of the cosmos and his place in it. That is abundantly clear on every page of this fine little book.
Posted 23 July 2015
Nicolson examines the ways in which the discoveries achieved through the telescope and microscope lodged themselves in the European literary imagination in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The longest essay is on the "scientific background" to Gulliver’s Travels. Swift, as Nicolson amply demonstrates, knew exactly what he was satirizing: travel literature, reports of scientific experiments, and learned bodies such as the Royal Society. Another essay explores the impact that an early example of science fiction, if it can be called that, had on John Donne. Johannes Kepler, of three planetary laws of motion fame, wrote a book called the Somnium in which he imagines himself traveling to the moon. This work, in manuscript form, somehow reached Donne, who then incorporated some of its ideas in his own work, especially the "space travel" elements in "Ignatius His Conclave." As it turns out, the moon voyage was a popular literary genre, one that got new life from the renewed attention the Moon received thanks to Galileo.
Another essay makes a convincing case that Milton was profoundly influenced by the new astronomy when he wrote Paradise Lost. His descriptions of the planets and Satan’s perspective on the cosmos as he travels to Earth would have been impossible before the new astronomy of Kepler, Galileo, et al. transformed the universe into something nearly infinite in scope. In other, more general essays, Nicolson details how telescope and microscope altered the English (she mostly looks at England) literary imagination by altering what it became possible for English writers to imagine, and therefore write. Donne's "First Anniversary," where he laments the disordering of the old, static understanding of the universe, is probably the best known example, but Nicolson offers many, many more. Nor were all reactions as negative as Donne’s. The people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were just as captivated by the wonders of the universe as we are, and their wonder and awe comes across vividly. Except in Shakespeare. For whatever reason, and Nicolson can offer no more than conjecture, the Bard was immune to the new science. Whenever he speaks of the heavens, planets, and stars, he does so in the terms of the old Ptolemaic conception of the universe. Time fascinated him, but space to him remained empty, even after Galileo had filled it beyond comprehension.
The essays collected here were written in the 1930s. Their style and methodology, from the perspective of 2015, cannot but seem outmoded, if not obsolete. They are very old-fashioned, relying almost exclusively on description and narration. They are "positivist," to coin a phrase. There’s no theoretical apparatus, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In a book like this, I'm most interested in learning what the people involved thought and had to say, and less so what it means from a theoretical or historiographical perspective. (And given how such a book might read if a contemporary English professor wrote it, that's no small mercy.) One might wish for more authorial intervention, but ultimately it's unnecessary to have Nicolson pronounce that the scientific discoveries of the microscope and telescope utterly transformed man's understanding of the cosmos and his place in it. That is abundantly clear on every page of this fine little book.
Posted 23 July 2015
Displaying 1 of 1 review