Genius Grant Goes to Science Historian
New MacArthur Fellow Pamela Long studies the scientific revolution as a result of the interactions of academics and hands-on infrastructure engineers in the 15th and 16th centuries. Steve Mirsky reports
By Steve Mirsky
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New MacArthur Fellows announced today, commonly called the genius grants. Seven of the 21 fellows are mathematicians or scientists. And another is a science historian.
“My name is Pamela Long, and I’m a historian of 15th- and 16th-century Europe, of the history of science and technology and cultural history. So I’m interested in the processes that occur when infrastructure projects are undertaken…what I’m very interested in is the relationship between practitioners who understand engineering and have trained on-site to, say, repair bridges or repair aqueducts and learned people, people with university training….
“So you have this communication between practitioners and learned people and I argue that that’s important for the development of the new sciences. People call it the scientific revolution. It was a time when investigating the natural world, the methods shifted to empirical methods, to measurement and mathematical analysis, so engineering became part of learned culture in a sense, and that broad context is important for the development of new methodologies.”
For the complete rundown on the new MacArthur Fellows, both in and outside the sciences, go to www.macfound.org
—Steve Mirsky
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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