Science Images and Popular Images of the Sciences

Peter Weingart, Bernd Huppauf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134175802
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is a popular image of science and where does it come from? Little is known about the formation of science images and their transformation into popular images of science. In this anthology, contributions from two areas of expertise: image theory and history and the sociology of the sciences, explore techniques of constructing science images and transforming them into highly ambivalent images that represent the sciences. The essays, most of them with illustrations, present evidence that popular images of the sciences are based upon abstract theories rather than facts, and, equally, images of scientists are stimulated by imagination rather than historical knowledge.

Part I

Popularizing Science Images

Introduction

1 Images in and of Science

Bernd Hüppauf and Peter Weingart

TRANSFORMING SCIENCE IMAGES INTO POPULAR IMAGES OF SCIENCE

Images in science, or science images, as we prefer to call them, have been very influential in the history of the modern sciences. Yet, until recently, very little was known about them. The conditions of their emergence, genesis, and continued production, their fashions, impact on research, philosophy, and the general perception of nature had attracted surprisingly little interest (surveys of recent literature are Daum 1998; Kretschmann 2003; Oels 2005). This indifference was often associated with contempt for the visual in relation to abstract discourse. In recent years, this has changed. There is a new uncertainty about the relation between images and knowledge brought about by new theories of the sciences as well as a new type of images. The computer generated digital images have led to an intensive debate about the relationship between images and the sciences. The end of an epoch of illustrations in the sciences is undoubtedly approaching. Iconoclashes were always not only destructive but also linked to moves toward the construction of new images and techniques of representation (for a detailed and instructive illustration of the ambivalence of iconoclasm see Latour and Weibel 2002). More often than not, the tearing apart of images was implicated in a discarding of systems of belief and knowledge and was followed by enthroning new ideals, theories, and deities. The sciences were no exception and the current changes of science images seem closely related to a change of the image of science.

At the current turning point, the status of images is being radically redefined and the relationship between images and science has become an object of intensive research. Neglect has given way to a new assessment of the importance of the visual for the intrinsic processes of the production of knowledge and, as a result, of the position of the sciences in the public mind. Not only the history and sociology of science and science studies have taken an interest in these issues but art history and cultural studies have also discovered images in the sciences as an object of study. The proposition of a new discipline named image theory concerned with the “science of images” (Mitchell in this volume) was initiated, it can be assumed, by new developments in the production of science images that inspired attempts to make them comprehensible in terms of a general theory of the visible. The question of what we do when we see an image is being reconstituted as a result of an extension of the field of pictures by including the new electronically generated images. The pioneering work by Aby Warburg and art historians associated with his multi-disciplinary approach to images as icons had prepared a field of research that is only loosely connected with art history and all but neglected by the sciences. The extension of a theory of pictures as art makes it possible to attribute to images in the sciences a status of their own, independent of their artistic value, and develop an iconology directed at symbols by resemblance such as pictures, images, sketches, models, diagrams, graphs, and also linguistic images such as metaphors and allegories. Intensive research has made the common assumption untenable that images in the sciences are produced and communicated by and among scientists for ancillary purposes such as mere illustration or demonstrations for teaching. Visualization has been demonstrated to be an integral element of the reasoning in the sciences: while it is deeply involved in the abstract process of theory building, it cannot be understood in complete isolation from conventions of seeing developed over centuries in art history. This has implications for the image of the sciences that go far beyond the confines of the sciences.

Images produced in the sciences have never been limited to the closed communication circles of scientists but also appealed to a much wider group of recipients often for their aesthetic qualities. Little is known, however, about the impact of science images on the publics construction of general images of the sciences, attitudes toward science, and, indeed, the scientists’ own concepts of the sciences. Essays of this collection support the hypothesis that a public image of science and scientists is based, among other aspects, on moving science images produced for a scientific community to a different context of reception. Our case studies try to substantiate the claim that science images, moved from a scientific context to the public sphere and distributed through various media, including popular and scientific periodicals, films, television, the visual arts, and the Internet can be interpreted as an important segment of designing public discourse on the sciences and ultimately a public image of science as such. The circulation of this transformation process has never been well understood and if the new science images are equally opaque and contingent as they are unavoidable and indispensable, we need to ask ourselves what consequences they will have on our concept of science and the science mediated relationship to reality. Turning a sentence by Mondzain upside-down one could say that traditional science illustrations laid claim to being images of the truth but that following the invention of digital images the truth no longer has/is an image (Mondzain 2005, 2006). This cannot be read but as a plea for developing a new image literacy capable of coping with a new situation brought about by the contingency of digital images. Essays of this volume are concerned with the composition and function of images from a variety of spheres of science of both their nineteenth century tradition and their definition en route to the unstable situation of the present.

This perspective requires not only the investigation of images as an instrument in scientific discourse but also recourse to a reconstitution of theories of knowledge production by including the material conditions of their production, such as working conditions in laboratories, the technology of instruments, processes of dissemination and reception by and for specialists and non-specialists alike. Recent theoretical approaches are based on the assumption that scientific research cannot be understood as a rational process of generating abstract theories only but is inevitably shaped by a variety of material factors. Empirical evidence is gathering that they also have deep effects on the negotiation of truth claims.¹ This collection of essays is an extension of these approaches by addressing the role of their contribution to the construction of public images of science. It is concerned with the changing relationships that link images produced in and for the sciences with the images of the sciences communicated in the broader public. This shift of perspective is suggested by the fact that images of science as an institution and scientific knowledge as its product reveal a surprising continuity over long periods of time and at the same time they are subjected to often abrupt and radical epistemic changes in the sciences. There is evidence for the assumption that the general image of science is based on archetypical stereotypes consistent with traditions that often reach back to pre-modern beliefs and, equally, on the rules and requirements of the modern popular media; this image must be understood as a surprisingly stable combination of persistent stereotypes and changing patterns. It is worth asking what impact changing science images have on the construction of popular images of the sciences. This is a particularly pertinent question in a period of the emergence of entirely new techniques of producing images. Conficting descriptions are resulting and are a reflection of different conceptions of both science and images. Are the electronically generated images that only faintly resemble traditional pictures symptomatic of a change in the sciences?

Pictures are by their very nature a more accessible medium of communication than (specialists’) language, more open to interpretation than the written word. Science images, therefore, can have a considerable impact on broader audiences and can be turned into powerful tools of persuasion. Hence, the intrinsic function of images in the science as a means of knowledge production needs to be complemented by looking at their function as media in public discourse. Their impact on a broader public has led Nikolow and Bluma to call for a combination of the history of visualization with the history of popularization of science; that is, an extension of the history of visualizations to include the history of public perceptions of the sciences. (Nikolow and Bluma 2002: 204). Thus, we suggest including another category, namely, images of science and scientists created outside science and communicated in public discourse. This shift of perspective is suggested by the fact that science as an institution and scientific knowledge as its product are embedded in society by way of a range of media. The genre of science images is one of these media that needs to be kept separate from the images that “society makes of science.” The latter are often based on the former, as case studies of this volume demonstrate, yet they are created outside the framework of science. They explore and exploit the mirror images of science or scientists in the collective imagination. We therefore distinguish between two different kinds of images, based upon their respective functions and their target audiences:

• Science images produced in the sciences as visual elements in scientific research and processes and directed at the scientific community (e.g., technical illustrations that remain accessible to an expert community only);
• Science images produced in the sciences but directed at a broader public (e.g., colored images of the ozone hole prepared for wide distribution); and
• Images of science produced by scientists (e.g., pictures of laboratories or representative research instruments);
• Images of science produced and communicated by the public media (e.g., representations of famous scientists in movies, literature, art and comics).²

It is possible to a limited degree to identify and delineate these different types of images by their origins. But it is impossible to gauge their reception because it is not limited to the group of intended recipients.

The communication of these images is reciprocal. Images produced in the sciences for the expert community in their large majority reach this limited audience only. Yet some find their way into newspapers, art magazines or TV shows. This may be due to their news value or their aesthetic appeal. Images produced by scientists but designed to reach a non-expert public will be based upon the scientist’s assessment of the public’s knowledge of and interest in the sciences.³ Whether they will have the intended effect is far from certain. Likewise, the impact of images of science developed by novelists, cartoonists, or script writers for books or films is even more uncertain. Can it be surmized that they reflect ingrained, common stereotypes about science? In what way do they also need to be surprising or shocking to gain attention from an audience of growing surfeit? These images find their way back to scientific discourse proper because it is not isolated from popular images; for example, as a perceived image of scienfitists as public heroes or, alternatively, a bad image of science that needs to be improved. In short, science images disseminated widely in various media open a view on the communicative interchanges between scientific communities and the public. They are also indicative of power relations that dominate these interchanges. Thus, the unknown effects that these different types of images have within and outside the group of intended recipients make them a signicant object of investigation concerned with the construction of images of science believed in and supported by scientists and non-scientists. At a time when images are gaining increasing importance as a medium of communication and shifting power relations between the community of experts and the public, this perspective promises to be more revealing than analyses of verbal communication.

SCIENCE IMAGES: TRUE TO ARTISTIC CONVENTIONS OR TRUE TO NATURE, AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY DEFINITION OF OBJECTIVITY

While images in the sciences are distinct in many respects, their theory needs to be extended and included in a general category of images. This view contradicts theories of the past. Science images were not considered part of the history of art and therefore interpreted through their correspondence to the ideal of objectivity in the sciences that, in spite of changing definitions of objectivity, has dominated modern society and its sciences. It has, from Leonardo, Newton, and Descartes on, undergone fundamental changes that were implicated in redenitions of truth and its image.

From early on, the properties of the science images were in correspondence with both the self-definition of science and the images projected to non-scientists reflected in the arts and literature of the time. Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Major of 1665, to take one example, was a work of science true to the nature represented in its pictures and at the same time it could be perceived as a distinct work of art and aesthetic imagination. The combination of these two distinct but complementary definitions of scientific pictures was symptomatic of the image that the sciences projected of themselves to the small group of those educated to have an image of the sciences at all. Albertus Seba’s Thesaurus combined naturalistic images and pictures of fantastic animals often based on stories from the new world. They illustrate the liberties of scientific illustrators to make use of the imagination as long as it could be justified by popular narrative. ⁴

In the course of changing epistemic practices, definitions of scientific objectivity and expectations directed at science, a new ideal of images produced in the sciences and for scientific purposes emerged. It was based on a separation of aesthetic values from the information value. The science image itself, as well as its function in the production of scientific knowledge and in public presentations of the sciences, were increasingly based on a clear definition of the sciences on the one side and pictures as a supporting tool on the other. scientific knowledge was understood “to be encapsulated in theories which … are interpreted by logical empiricists as axiomatic systems … Thinking—and not visualizing—is held to be conducive to this activity (the sciences)” (Baigrie 1996: xvii). It was taken for granted that the sciences followed their specific rules of abstract reasoning, whereas images were attributed to the ancillary function of applying artistic means in order to translate the sciences in a code comprehensible to many (Topper 1996). How was this translation done? The eye of the science illustrator, an experienced illustrator writes, “captures” his object, observes it with great care, and then attempts to reproduce it on a two-dimensional sheet as accurately as possible (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• PART I Popularizing Science Images: Introduction
• PART II Towards a Science of Images
• PART III Science Images
• PART IV Science Images and Contemporary Art
• PART V Images of Science
• Contributors
• Index