Patricia Fara: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, on the role of women in the history of science, Londa Schiebinger has written that early women’s scientific contributions were most prominent in, and I quote, “illustrating, calculating or observing.” Do you agree? If so, why was that the case? Science was being carried out at home. Before the 19th century, not much was happening in universities or in public laboratories. A lot of women were at home, and they were essentially working with their brothers or their fathers or their husbands. They weren’t allowed to go to university. Unless they were very rich and could afford a private tutor, they didn’t have the opportunity to learn all the scientific theories that men could because men were allowed to study those sorts of subjects. If you think about the history of science, of course there are individuals, like Newton and Einstein, who made great discoveries, but science isn’t just about that. You have to be able to communicate ideas from one person to another, from one country to another. If you think about that model of science, if you think of science as being continuous, not as a range of mountain peaks with individual geniuses standing on top of them, then women played a very, very important role because teaching, illustrating, drawing, editing, running museums, collecting different specimens — those are all absolutely crucial. If you think of Isaac Newton — he wrote his Principia in a very complicated geometrical language. He said he deliberately made it very difficult because what he said was, “I don’t want to be bothered by little smatterers in mathematics.” So ordinary people, even quite skilled mathematicians, found his book impossible to approach. It was only when other people translated it or explained the ideas in it in simpler terms that his vision, supposedly under the apple tree, managed to spread around the world. Women played a very important role in that sort of communication and spread of science. I agree with Londa Schiebinger, but I also think that we need to rewrite how we think about the history of science and what’s important about the history of science. Science is about collaboration. It’s about cooperation. It’s not about unique effort, and women were very important in that process. Between 1650 and 1710, 14 percent of German astronomers were women, arguably higher than is the case today. How did that happen?…

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