Hello to all digital subscribers,
my name is Joe and this is my first issue as editor of Viewpoint. I am overjoyed to have been appointed to this position, and I am excited to continue the excellent standards set by Jen and everyone else at the BSHS. You can find out a bit more about me and my background in the interview on page 15, and I am keen to play my part in the history of science knowledge dissemination by spotlighting excellent original research from ECRs and independent scholars.
This issue ‘orbits’ astrophysics and photography, as the various authors explore different historical challenges faced by those who broke new ground in attempting to visually evidence both the very very large and the very very small. We begin with some updates about the latest BSHS small grants recipients, prizes, and news about the upcoming BSHS postgraduate conference and from elsewhere in the field before launching off into Madelyn Hernández’s excellent original article exploring the lives and works of three British women that were pivotal in the field of early photography, and largely responsible for both the technical innovations and popularisation of astrophotography. Madelyn’s article arose in part out of a grant from the BSHS, and we are extremely pleased that this is being used to shine a light on these figures.
The second research article in this issue is by Robert Fleck, where the lens of the camera is instead turned upon the astrophysicists in a very different way. Focusing on the marketisation of Albert Einstein, Robert analyses various uses of this iconic figure, exploring how different multinational corporations have licensed this likeness and used this to associate their brand and their consumers with a variety of ideas, such as disruptive genius, intellectualism, and curiosity. In this important research it becomes clear how individuals within science come to represent far more than their intellectual contributions, and how these associations can become cannibalised by corporations.
Our third and final research article continues this narrowing of focus, from the celestial bodies through those observing them and down to the fundamental particles of the universe. Kevin Wang provides a history of the theoretical origins and the resulting struggle to photographically document the neutrino during the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Despite the technological innovation in between the periods studied by Madelyn and Kevin, this article makes it clear that both sets of historical figures underwent just as much difficulty in capturing images of the very small and the very large. Pleasingly, Kevin optimistically concludes with an overview of some of the potential future applications of neutrino technology as it seems that we are on the cusp of a neutrino-based radical solution to our current energy crisis.
Whilst the merit of Kevin’s article enable it to stand up by itself, Kevin is the first high-school student to publish an article with Viewpoint, and this signals a future collaboration between us and secondary education providers, as we will soon be publishing a separate pilot issue explicitly tailored to the curricula of schools that teach the history of science, edited for a younger readership. Watch this space for more information!
We are thrilled to provide an extract from Uncivilised: Ten Lies that Made the West from our very own Subhadra Das following this. Subhadra’s text – out now by Hodder & Stoughton – re-examines the pillars of Enlightenment thought that still deeply inform many aspects of our lives, revealing the harmful assumptions that are unquestioningly bound up in them. In the extract kindly provided to Viewpoint, Subhadra reveals part of her personal journey towards this topic, drawing on Eugene Fischer’s eugenics-driven Haarfarbentafel (hair colour gauge) and including meditations on the works of Sir Francis Bacon & Galton.
As I indicated above, I then round out the issue by providing an interview detailing my own work, experience in academic publishing, and engagement with the history of science, before a summary of the main research articles from the most recent issue of the British Journal for the History of Science. We are currently pulling together the content for remaining issues for this year, so do please get in touch if you have some news that deserves celebrating, research that deserves circulating, or a book that deserves promotion, as always via viewpoint@bshs.org.uk.
Being the editor of Viewpoint has already been such a rewarding position for me, and I am thrilled to be able to provide you all with important innovations in our field that might otherwise be missed. I hope you enjoy reading this, and I look forward to bringing you another issue in the summer.
With many thanks,
Joe Holloway.
