Imaginary magnitude

Interesting seminar coming up at the Niels Bohr archive, unfortunately it collides with the end of term ceremony at the kids’ school:

Niels Bohr Archive
History of Science Seminar

Friday 21 December 2007, 11.15am
Auditorium A, Niels Bohr Institute
Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen

Steven Shapin
Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science
Harvard University

“Science and the Modern World”

Abstract:
Do we live in a scientific world? At least since Max Weber in 1918 announced the “disenchantment” of the world, social and cultural commentators have insisted, or assumed, that we do. This lecture will assess some very substantial senses in which science is now the defining and most authoritative form of knowledge, and has been since perhaps the late nineteenth century. And it will point to a series of considerations which argue that we do not now, and never have, inhabited a scientific culture. Connections will be pointed out between this problematic state of affairs and the changing identity of the scientist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.