Why we write - the history of science
4,399 views · Published 3 March 2017 · 1:01:50 · Indexed 28 October 2026
Channel: The Royal Society · 2017 · Science & Technology
While it might seem that science is firmly in the telling camp and literature in the showing camp, scientific diaries and autobiographies seem to be spaces in which scientists have decided to show rather than tell. To explore how scientists write and why they write, we’ve invited a novelist and scientist, Professor Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford), to share her experiences of writing in different ways and for different reasons. We then turn to a panel of historians of science, to ask them why some notable scientists of the last three centuries (Boyle, Hooke, Petiver, Banks, Solander, Blagden and Tyndall) kept a diary and how they went about it. The event was recorded on January 27 2017 at the Royal Society, and was organised by the Royal Society in association with the Constructing Scientific Communities project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council For more events like this, see our schedule - http://ow.ly/KhTi306gTN1
More from this channel
-
1:02
Professor Tim Palmer on climate change
-
0:19
Marine life viewed from a remotely operated vehicle
-
4:49
Biofuels
-
4:57
Royal Society Enterprise Fund
-
5:56
Royal Society Support for Innovation 2008-9
-
4:39
Aventis Prize for Science Books 2006 - the Junior Prize shortlist
-
4:34
Aventis Prize 2006 General Prize shortlist 2006
-
1:29
Aventis Prizes for Science Books 2006 - introduction to the Junior Prize