Wo ist der Geiger?

How complex should we make the picture of the past? To understand what we call “the past” we need to make pictures – and not everything can be fitted into a picture. And yet, it has to be true in the sense that it can be checked. Things really happened. Or they did not. Nazi Germany invaded Norway on the 9th of April 1940. All historians agree on the necessity of empirical correctness. Without that, you are exposed to fraud. But very few historians would today claim that truth simply emerges from a pile of empirical facts. As many theorists have pointed out, to be understandable at all historical facts need a narrative. We tend to look at the past through different narratives – and then we see different things. Scientific method is partly about short-circuiting these narratives, or at least making them visible: to enable us to see things beyond our own prejudice. On the other hand, without this road from A to B, “the story”, things fall apart into singularities: heaps of words and numbers and place names on maps. This is what bad science – dead science like the race biology of the Swede Herman Lundborg – leaves behind: meaningless rows of numbers, “head measurements” and cephalic indexes that today are nothing but pointless statistics, with perhaps their only use being to remind us about the discriminating narrative they were once part of..

The Temptations of the Dinosaur Theory

Does the book have a future? Ola Larsmo firmly discards the common theory that a new medium makes its predecessor obsolete, terming it ‘the temptations of the dinosaur theory’. This has never happened, he argues. The radio did not replace the newspaper, the television did not replace the radio and the cinema, and so on. There always remains a form of coexistence when the new medium can do something in addition to the previous medium; he terms this ‘x plus 1’. Ola Larsmo concludes that the book in its present form will be with us for many years to come, despite of, and as well as, the tremendous growth of digital information