As devoted readers of the blog will recall, Brian and Giles gave a public lecture in September 2015 at the Royal Society, as part of Open House London. The talk introduced Grosseteste and the world of the medieval university, medieval experiments and what modern science might make of his concepts and understanding. From the thirteenth century to the twenty-first, you can enjoy the full lecture below.
Apart from the time devoted to collaborative reading sessions during Ordered Universe Symposia, there is also room for broader conversation and exchange of ideas. These conversations are very interesting and maybe also quite unusual, as they represent a rare instance of academics from very different disciplines being brought together. Interdisciplinary discussions are challenging in many ways and they require trust and respect on both sides. It is wonderful to see how during Ordered Universe Symposia, an atmosphere of open-mindedness and friendliness is all around so that this kind of true interdisciplinary exchange becomes possible.Continue reading “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Materialism and the Value of Conscious Life”
From relatively early on in school, young people start to think of themselves as ‘more sciency’ or ‘more of a humanities or languages person’. With these two poles, to one of which many students sooner or later find themselves gravitating, we tend to associate different personality attributes and skills. For humanities subjects, creative and outside-the-box thinking is deemed to be important, and we tend to expect people in the humanities to have a vivid imagination and maybe also an elaborate, ornate writing style. For the natural sciences, by contrast, we assume that what’s needed is sharpness and coherence of thought, quickness of the mind, and maybe most importantly, good quantitative reasoning skills.
Continue reading “About What It Takes: Assumptions About Skill Sets in the Humanities and Sciences”
25th – 28th November 2015, Durham, UK. A group of around 25 people gather for another symposium on the scientific writings of the 13th century English bishop Robert Grosseteste. It’s the first symposium under the umbrella of the generous AHRC grant that started in October. Whilst most academic conferences bring together experts from more or less the same subject area, this symposium is different. Its attendants span the academic disciplines from medieval history to modern vision science, from Middle English to computational cosmology, from church history to physics and applied mathematics, and from linguistics and acoustics to music composition. Continue reading “Unity in Diversity”
The Arts and Humanities Research Council has produced a fascinating brochure on some of the projects it has funded over the course of the last decade, now available in an online version. The Ordered Universe features as one of the projects, under the Science in Culture theme, on pages 83-84 (if you want to take a look!). Continue reading “AHRC 10th Anniversary: Ordered Universe and Science in Culture”
At the last Ordered Universe symposium the group made its third, and final, collaborative reading of Grosseteste’s treatise De generatione sonorum ‘On the Generation of Sounds’. An intriguing, characteristically dense piece of writing, with the usual editorial conundrums, and a strange beauty to its construction, the DGS also sparked a series of reflections from a modern scientific perspective. The treatise deals with the notion of what sound is, showing Grosseteste’s familiarity with Aristotle’s De anima (probably in the translation by Gerard of Cremona), and human vocal production, showing his knowledge of Augustine (354-430) and Boethius (c.480-524) on music, Priscian (flourished around 500) and Isidore of Seville (c.560-636)on grammar and phonetics. However, as always with these works, the question of Grosseteste’s own interests and observations need to be considered, and not merely from the perspective of how he constructs his treatise and orders his thoughts. Continue reading “Generating sounds: help us write our next paper!”
Ordered Universe Co-investigator Tom McLeish was invited down to the Cambridge Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) to talk about the project in that famous institution’s regular ‘fluids’ seminar series.Continue reading “Medieval Rainbows at Cambridge Mathematics”
The Ordered Universe project is very pleased to relay the news that one of its core members, Professor Nader El-Bizri, American University of Beirut, is the recipient of a significant honour for his academic work. The Prince of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, awarded the prestigious internationally peer-refereed Kuwait Prize for the year 2014 on behalf of the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) to Nader for his work in the field of Arabic Sciences and Philosophy. The official awards ceremony took place in Kuwait City on Thursday 2 December 2015. Continue reading “Kuwait honours Professor Nader El-Bizri: Arabic Science and Philosophy”
Robert Grosseteste suggested in his treatise on the liberal arts that in all areas of human endeavour it is necessary to choose carefully the hour most propitious for the undertaking one wants to carry through. Plants carry more fruit if planted when the celestial spheres are correctly aligned, and base metals are transformed into gold more easily if processed under favourable planets and stars. We no longer believe this to be true, of course, and we may even speculate about the extent to which Robert himself gave credence to such theories; nevertheless, had Robert been around at the Ordered Universe workshop organised in Durham last week, he may have inferred that the organisers had chosen a favourable hour indeed. Discussions and deliberations carried much fruit, and base drafts were transformed into golden light of understanding. A liberating experience indeed, and one which generated the right kinds of sound!Continue reading “On the liberal arts and the generation of sounds”