Galileo's Pendulum: Science, Sexuality, and the Body-Instrument Link

Foreword

To appreciate Dus=an Bjelic;’s treatment of Galileo’s pendulum it is necessary to understand what it is not. It is not a straightforward contribution to the history of science. Nor is it a “social” or “philosophical” study of science in the usual sense. The book is sociologically inspired, it investigates the fundamental philosophical question of the relationship between experience and the world, and it includes some instructive forays into the history of Western science , but the book’s historical, philosophical, and sociological treatments do not easily fit within the usual taxonomies of academic disciplines, subdisciplines , and interdisciplines. Instead, this book is a highly imaginative—and yet exquisitely material—investigation of the embodied practice of demonstrating “Galilean” science. I can imagine that many readers will be appalled by very idea that Galileo’s pendulum is an expression of “sexuality.” Those of us familiar with the recent “science wars”—which fortunately seem to be on the wane—will recall that self-appointed defenders of science and reason seized, almost gleefully, upon statements in the science studies literature suggesting that Western science is an exercise in rape or that the experimental method is “gendered” at its core and in every detail. Those who are inclined to seek evidence of degenerative thinking about science in the social sciences and humanities will find plenty of grist for their mill in this book. The overall thesis is perverse, the writing is peculiar, and the history is quirky. Superficially, the book is a blasphemous exercise in the history and philosophy of science. However, readers who dismiss the book out of hand, who settle for harsh denunciations of the author’s twisted mind, or who read it in search of outlandish sentences in order to illustrate charges of irrationality and incompetence, will have missed the serious and original lessons offered by this book. ix F o r e w o r d Michael Lynch Bjelic; writes with tongue in cheek: Galileo’s “sexuality” is not what you might think; indeed, “Galileo” is “himself” an elusive figure in this text whose mythical demonstration of universal laws is mimed in Bjelic;’s performance. Bjelic; also has something serious to say, and the challenge offered by his book is to find the serious lesson while appreciating the laughing tone of voice with which it is enunciated. Bjelic; relishes strangeness, and yet speaks perversely about the most ordinary of matters: the mundane practice of doing a classical scientific demonstration. In the context of classic history and philosophy of science—with its hagiographic tendencies and grand metaphysical narratives —nothing is stranger than the ordinary way in which science is performed. Galileo’s Pendulum not only describes an historic experiment (or, in the Koyrean view, a theorized projection of an experiment), it is itself a textual experiment. The chapters on Galileo’s pendulum demonstration invite readers to perform what the text says: to gather string and weights, assemble an apparatus , and play with the assemblage in search of the Galilean law. Later chapters invite readers to pick up a toy prism in order to generate the geometrical phenomena the text describes. The text should be read in concert with the relevant embodied performance. If Bjelic; could have managed to do so economically , he would have supplied a kit of materials with this book, so that readers would have ready-to-hand the required equipment for “reading” his descriptions. The idea of building an exercise around a Galilean demonstration derives from Harold Garfinkel, the “founding father” of ethnomethodology . Garfinkel (2002, ch. 9) recently published an account of an exercise that he and a few colleagues performed in the 1980s. The exercise involved an attempt to reenact Galileo’s inclined plane demonstration of speed in the law of falling bodies. (Whether or not it was “Galileo’s” or “Garfinkel’s” inclined plane demonstration is an open question that, for reasons I shall elaborate, is beside the point.) Garfinkel describes an exercise performed in an office at UCLA with a twenty-two foot board purchased from a lumberyard. The motive for the exercise was not to gain insight into a foundational historical moment in the annals of physical science. Garfinkel and his colleagues did not try to reproduce exactly what Galileo actually may have done four centuries ago (assuming that he ever did perform the inclined plane demonstration). Instead, the exercise was a way of gaining first-hand insight into a foundational phenomenon in the annals of social science. Garfinkel built and performed an improvised...