Plants from Pyramids: Entanglements between the Sciences and Humanities
This talk looks at ancient plant and animal remains found in Egyptian pyramids, tombs, and other monuments and the histories that these objects were enlisted to illuminate. Specifically, I look at three clusters of natural scientists and their local informers that were active in Egypt between 1800 and 1925, who managed to historicize the specimens in very different ways.
In the ongoing historization of nature, the plant remains filled the gap in the chronological data between fossilized and living plants. Thus, plant and animal remains could shed light on the question of the evolution of species, as well as the migrations of plants across space through time, and from here, whether climates had changed drastically since the ancient Egyptian.
To historicize ancient human history, the scholars often worked closely with Egyptologists, but also saw themselves to be contributing to a broader Kulturgeschichte of humanity (culture as cultivation). In this view, agriculture was seen as both a crucial step in the general history of civilisation as well as one that distinguished itself from pastoralism, seen by nineteenth century thinkers as a more primitive form of economy and one they associated with the Arab bedouins. As several scholars have shown, Egypt’s landscape was being reshaped and re-arranged to suit the economic goals of the colonizing powers in a broader move to modernize cities, infrastructures, institutions, customs, and the Nile itself. Thus, by emphasizing the agricultural heritage of ancient Egypt, the authors, it seems, also legitimated the colonial agricultural development of the Nile valley in their own time.
Anna Simon-Stickley is a doctoral fellow in the Graduate School Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität zu Berlin. Before joining the Graduate School, Anna first completed a Bachelors in Art History at Freie Universität Berlin, which she finished with a thesis on contemporary artistic research on the Anthropocene. This work introduced her to the history of science, which she henceforth pursued in her master’s degree at Technische Universität Berlin. During her master’s, she explored the role of material media and practical knowledge in the 19-century life sciences especially – from early eye-tracking devices to botanical drawings from India – and has published on the history of instruments as well as on the intellectual history of the Anthropocene concept. Besides academic work, Anna has also worked as a freelance editor and translator, recently translating a 850-page book on the history and theory of Conceptual History and Historical Semantics (forthcoming 2024).
Astronomer at War: On Karl Schwarzschild's military activities during World War I
Karl Schwarzschild (1873–1916) was one of the most prominent astronomers in Germany. When the first world war broke out, he volunteered to the Prussian army. While serving as a lieutenant in an artillery unit, he continued his scientific work in parallel with his military duties. In particular, he managed to find an exact solution to Einstein’s equations of general relativity, just a few weeks after they were published in November 1915. His solution, which today is known as the Schwarzschild formula, forms the mathematical starting point for the study of black holes.
Schwarzschild’s concurrent astronomical and military work raises several important questions about the interplay between science and war. In this talk, I will present unpublished material from Schwarzschild’s archive that elucidates two aspects of this interplay: how Schwarzschild could transform his astronomical skills into military tools, and how he could reconcile the international nature of science with the nationalistic fervour of war. By analysing how Schwarzschild’s attention oscillated between the sky and the battlefield, between the celestial and the military sphere, we can gain valuable insights into the subsequent transfer of knowledge, technology and personnel that occurred between astronomical and military institutions throughout the 20th century.
Jonas Enander is a Swedish science writer and communicator. He has a PhD in physics from Stockholm University (with a focus on cosmology and general relativity), and has done postdoctoral research in astrophysics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. He has participated in the construction of the IceCube Observatory in Antarctica, taught physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and worked at the Communications Department of the European Southern Observatory in Germany. Today, Jonas regularly writes popular science articles for Swedish and American magazines, and also runs a Swedish podcast called Rumtiden.
In 2024, Jonas will publish a popular science book about black holes on Albert Bonnier’s publishing house. The book tells the story of what black holes are, what role they play in the Universe and what insights they give us into space, time and even our own lives on Earth.