A meta-metaphor for science : the true and the fictional within the book of nature

Evelyn Fox-Keller is unsurpassed in the perspicuity with which she has analysed the power of metaphor within science, to the way it defines scientific discourse, and in developing methodologies that address semantic ambiguity. This paper considers a great metaphor for science itself. The ‘Book of Nature’ idea is at least as old as Augustine, and enjoyed strong advocacy in other ages from Hugh of St. Victor, Boyle and Galileo, to name a few. Yet it is not without its dangers. The significance of ‘books’ changes with their availability, the language they are written in, the communities who are educated to read them, and their hermeneutic context. I will suggest ways that science has been construed differently following these changes in the metaphor’s meaning, including a suggestion that part of the early modern shift is from pure ‘reading’ of the Book of Nature, to writing it

Reversals in Wartime: Alcuin and Charlemagne discuss Retrograde Motion

The apparent retrograde motion of the planets was a puzzle for astronomers from the ancient world to the final establishment of heliocentric cosmology in the early modern period, but enjoyed an especially rich discussion in the Carolingian Renaissance. We explore the first stirrings of an eighth-century response to this epistemological challenge in a remarkable series of letters between Alcuin of York and Charlemagne, sent while the latter was on campaign against the Saxons in 798 CE. Their exchange constitutes the longest discussion of the phenomenon of Mars' retrograde motion in the West up to that date. Our consideration of the relevant letters explores Alcuin's ability to marshal diverse and complex explanatory narratives and observational traditions around the problem of the retrograde motion of the planet Mars, even as he was unable to fully reconcile them. Attention to his ultimately unsuccessful (and at times contradictory) attempts at explanation suggest that he relied on knowledge from sources beyond those previously recognized, which we identify. Charlemagne's curiosity about the matter can be located in the much longer context of an ancient tradition of imperial and royal concern with heavenly phenomena; at the same time, the exchange with Alcuin heralds the ninth-century expansion of astronomy away from the computists' preoccupation with the solar and lunar calendrical data required to calculate the date of Easter and towards a more wide-ranging curiosity about observed planetary motion irrelevant to Easter dating and computistical calculations. Alcuin's functional, if not geometrical, assumption of the centrality of the sun in his explanation merits a further examination of the more general sense in which lost ancient heliocentric ideas sustained early medieval echoes

Medieval concepts of colour turned into glass artwork in new exhibition

An unlikely combination of artists, medieval historians, philosophers and scientists have converged to create an exhibition of glass artwork

Taking the discussion onward

This response to the foregoing reviews of The Poetry and Music of Science identifies common themes raised by them, responds to direct questions where this is possible and suggests further avenues of discussion. It focusses in particular on issues of the historical and cultural setting of human creativity, the particular issues raised by poetry, the differences between artistic and scientific imagination, the confusion (and de-confusion) of ‘imagination' and ‘creativity', the social and institutional framings of the sciences and the arts, the question of digital creativity and theological themes. A common emerging idea is that human creativity, whether artistic or scientific, is well-described by neither purely ‘expressive' nor ‘receptive’ actions but by a meeting of both

The human ordering of the arts and sciences

This chapter begins with reference to the thirteenth-century polymath Robert Grosseteste’s reflections on his own curriculum - the seven ‘Liberal Arts’ of the medieval universities. Grosseteste prefaces the body of his published work on natural philosophy and scientific topics with a remarkable treatise on the seven liberal arts. The arts, for Grosseteste, do not primarily support vocation or employment, but constitute vital virtues that underpin them. Science is increasingly divorced from the notion of creativity - ‘there is no room for imagination in science’ asserted a presenter full face to camera in a BBC science documentary. In particular, the medieval centuries, so foundational to modernism, yet without the stark divisions of humanities and sciences to which modernism had become so strongly wed, present themselves as potential sources for more fruitful reconciliation. The most salient differences in accounts of creativity do not, on close inspection, present themselves aligning across the arts and sciences, nor to distinguish between medieval and modern

Entropy and Barrier-Hopping Determine Conformational Viscoelasticity in Single Biomolecules

Biological macromolecules have complex and non-trivial energy landscapes, endowing them a unique conformational adaptability and diversity in function. Hence, understanding the processes of elasticity and dissipation at the nanoscale is important to molecular biology and also emerging fields such as nanotechnology. Here we analyse single molecule fluctuations in an atomic force microscope (AFM) experiment using a generic model of biopolymer viscoelasticity that importantly includes sources of local `internal' conformational dissipation. Comparing two biopolymers, dextran and cellulose, polysaccharides with and without the well-known `chair-to-boat' transition, reveals a signature of this simple conformational change as minima in both the elasticity and internal friction around a characteristic force. A calculation of two-state populations dynamics offers a simple explanation in terms of an elasticity driven by the entropy, and friction by barrier-controlled hopping, of populations on a landscape. The microscopic model, allows quantitative mapping of features of the energy landscape, revealing unexpectedly slow dynamics, suggestive of an underlying roughness to the free energy.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures, naturemag.bst, modified nature.cls (naturemodified.cls

How proteins' negative cooperativity emerges from entropic optimisation of versatile collective fluctuations

The fact that allostery, a nonlocal signaling between distant binding sites, can arise mainly from the entropy balance of collective thermal modes, without conformational changes, is by now well known. However, the propensity to generate negative cooperativity is still unclear. Starting from an elastic-network picture of small protein complexes, in which effector binding is modeled by locally altering interaction strengths in lieu of adding a node-spring pair, we elucidate mechanisms particularly for such negative cooperativity. The approach via a few coupled harmonic oscillators with internal elastic strengths allows us to trace individual eigenmodes, their frequencies, and their statistical weights through successive bindings. We find that the alteration of the oscillators' couplings is paramount to covering both signs of allostery. Binding-modified couplings create a rich set of eigenmodes individually for each binding state, modes inaccessible to an ensemble of noninteracting units. The associated shifts of collective-mode frequencies, nonuniform with respect to modes and binding states, result in an enhanced optimizability, reflected by a subtle phase map of allosteric behaviors