Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome

Chapter 1: Genres of Scientific Communication

| 1 c ha p ter 1 Genres of Communicating Science On March 23, 1989, at a press conference held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, two electrochemists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, announced that they had achieved controlled nuclear fusion at room temperature with a “simple, table-top apparatus.” Their announcement immediately captured attention worldwide: it simultaneously challenged the conventionally held view of fusion, a process which was thought to require extremely high temperatures or pressures, and held the promise of solving the world’s energy problems. But a long scientific controversy ensued; Pons and Fleischmann werelargelydiscredited,andtheepisodeisstudiednowbyscientists, historians, journalists, and others as an example of “bad science.” One immediate criticism directed against Pons and Fleischmann pointed to their style of communicating science: they had chosen a press conference, rather than a peer-reviewed scientific journal, to make their announcement. Over time, however, criticisms focused on the failure of reproducibility of the results they had claimed. In the end, the rejection of so-called cold fusion was a denunciation of both their scientific practice and content.1 Their choice of medium to communicate the claims regarding cold fusion, and the questioning by the scientific community and others of a press conference as a suitable vehicle for announcing scientific results (without also offering a detailed, technical account in a professional scientific journal), point to an interesting aspect of science in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: a whole new range of media for communicating scientific ideas, 2 | Chapter 1 practices, and results is now in use, including press accounts, telephone calls, faxes, emails, Web sites, blogs, and podcasts. Alongside these newer forms of scientific communication are the more traditional modern formats, especially journal articles, professional conferences, and government reports. Historians have suggested that in the cold fusion controversy distinct frames of meaning shaped different stories. Technical issues were discussed in the specialist professional scientific literature, while other issues, including some rather soap-opera-like aspects, complete with sensationalism, dominated media coverage.2 Scientists in the twentieth century were not the first to be able to make choices about how to communicate their work and ideas. The choices of ancient Greek and Roman authors writing about nature and scientific practice will be the subject of discussion in this volume. In this first chapter, we will look at some of the diversity of formats used by those authors to communicate their ideas about nature, and the study of nature. My position is that, while we can recognize a range of forms of discourse, we cannot make generalizations about the choice of formats, or genres, without looking at individual texts. This is what I will do in some detail in the following two chapters. In the second, I will focus on poems that not only treated the world, and what we see, as liable to natural explanations but also, nevertheless, incorporated some elements of myth. The Aetna poem will serve as my central text, but Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe will also feature prominently. In the third chapter, I will consider Plutarch’s dialogue On the Face on the Moon as an example of a deliberate authorial choice to juxtapose scientific explanation and myth; Plato’s Timaeus looms large in the background as another example of such a juxtaposition, and will also be discussed. First, let me say a little about the study of ancient Greco-Roman science more generally, before proceeding in this chapter broadly to discuss genres of oral and written scientific communication in these cultures, including poetry and dialogue. Genres of Communicating Science | 3 George Sarton (1884-1956), one of the most influential historians of science in the twentieth century, noted that “one often speaks of the Greek miracle,” and he explained that this phrase is “the simplest way of expressing one’s wonder at the Greek achievements and one’s inability to account for them.” For Sarton, “the first and greatest gift of that age was a long epic in the Greek language, the Iliad”; the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are now usually dated to the second half of the eighth century BCE.3 The phrase “the Greek miracle” has been variously applied to such things as the development of Athens as a political center (fifth century BCE), to ancient artistic achievement (fifth century BCE), and to ancient Greek philosophy (sixth to fourth centuries BCE).4 In the...