All throughout high school and even at university you hardly learn about the scientists themselves. Even in history classes there is little to no attention to ‘famous’ scientists and their life/works.
At uni you learn a lot about a specific field but for example regarding myself, I never had a course on ‘famous’ scientists in my field nor did I ever had some type of ‘introduction’ on the scientists in my field during a general course of that field.
I find this rather peculiar how we learn the science itself (eg mathematics) but never really get an idea about who the greatest mathematicians were. It doesn’t even have to be a full on course in detail, but an introduction for example would have already been nice.
What makes learning about the people behind the science so ‘absent’ from our general curriculum? Perhaps a more philosophical question but I really wonder about this.
Any professors here that actually do teach a little bit about the scientists themselves during their coursework or you barely touch it yourself?
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How would this information benefit students or wider society, in your opinion?
I was a math major undergrad and had a professor who had the biggest crush on a mathematician named Galois who died a long time ago
Like blushing and going on and on about how handsome and how he died in a duel
That’s the only one I remember
You didn’t have mentions of at least some of the greats in grade school? Marie Curie, Louie Pasteur, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Archimedes?
I feel personal glorification is unhelpful. Usually for every scientist whose name is remembered, there are a few who have made valuable contributions who will have been forgotten.
Science is mostly a team effort and discoveries are rarely made in isolation. I think that’s a more valuable message.
I’d propose two big reasons:
Space. Especially in the sciences, pressure has mounted over the past, oh, century or so to squeeze more and more material into education programs. As a result, anything deemed ancillary gets squeezed out.
The ideal of objectivity. Science is supposed to be true independent of who does it—isn’t that what we’re taught? As a consequence, we deemphasize discussions of the people. If you do too much of that, you might start questioning whether the course of science was contingent upon the characteristics of the people. Can’t have that! So you talk about them little, carefully, and only in specific terms. (If you want a good analysis of what that looks like, check out the prologue to Sharon Traweek’s Beamtimes and Lifetimes).
That said, you are seeing more of it lately. Discussions of people have crept into science pedagogy in some places as part of the effort to diversify fields that have historically been fairly masculine and monochromatic.
You might enjoy the book by E.T. Bell, Men of Mathematics. It’s a fun read (what with the scandals and all), but kind of dated — also take a look at Math Makers, by Posamentier and Spreitzer.
The personal lives of the individuals aren’t relevant to learning the course material.
This is also in line with the general philosophy that science is about the, well, science and not the person.
It’s not just scientists, but you may enjoy this series: https://littlepeoplebigdreams.com/.
There is a sub-discipline called the History of Science, which of course include examining the life and work of key scientists. And there are similar sub-disciplines in math, sociology, economics, and so on. The issue for universities is: Who is going to teach it? Ideally, you want an interdisciplinary scholar, with a background in science (or whatever discipline) and history. But higher ed really does not support interdisciplinary research, despite the occasional claims that it does, and interdisciplinary scholars typically have a hard time finding tenure track positions.
TLDR: your university didn’t hire someone to teach that course.
I am a historian of religion, so both in humanities and a historical field, which definitely plays a role in my answer. One segment of my work is intellectual history both of the ancient religions in which my expertise lies and of their study in later periods.
While somewhat marginal in my field, there are a fair number of us who do intellectual history and research history, both of which usually involve deep dives of pivotal figures in our field. This is meant both to give a deeper context to the type of knowledge they produced, and show how that knowledge relates to that produced by others.
You will see far more of this type of intellectual history and history of science in humanities fields because they do not rely on storytelling about objective truth that is/can be arrived at without context. The logical follow-up to that point of view is to dig into the contexts in which it was produced to understand why, how, and in relation to what the findings of yesterday became the facts of today.
Fields which more thoroughly rely on the myth or at least the ideal of objective knowledge will engage in less of this type of research because it lifts the veil on the process of producing facts, and renders the knowledge produced more vulnerable to critique.
You can do courses on History of Science if that is your thing. But, let’s take a classic example of Relativity, if you want to do science the actual life of Einstein won’t help you when you are doing the actual science, so why spend time on that instead of an extra hour making sure you understand how to use tensor calculus?
This could relate to the myth of the genius. For example, learning about the personal life of Elon Musk due to his supposed advances in technology when in actuality those advances are due to the work of however many faceless others.
Not a scientist but I have designed and directed modules. Basically we do not have unlimited teaching time and students do not have unlimited attention span/memorisation capacity.
There is nothing stopping students from doing additional research on whatever they want once they master the basics.
As a Historian, there are only so many minutes available in a semester and if we spend time talking about scientists we have to cut something else.
Some of my Profs have shared background on the scientist/statistician/mathematician behind the theories we were learning about. I think we’re not taught about them a lot because it isn’t helpful to understanding the theory, but also, they were often brilliant at what they did and pretty vile otherwise. Lots of pettiness, assholery, and eugenics.
This is not science, but history. The intellectual history of science is a totally separate thing. I have a friend who wrote his dissertation on the construction and naming of elements in the periodic table. He is an historian, not a scientist. He knows some science, enough to inform his study of history, but is not doing serious modern work. I no more expect him to teach science than I expect a scientist to teach history.
A professor gets 30 hours to teach their course, (15 week semester, 2 hours a week). They need to pick and choose what goes in. If you wanted to do serious intellectual history, your science class would cover half as much science. Instead of 30 topics, you’d do 15 and then each would have an accompanying hour of context and that is just not going to work for most folks. If you wanted history of science, take a class on history of science. There is, of course, a lot that is interesting in the question of “why did scientist X study topic Y?” And you can examine life experience and funding sources and other contexts but like I said that is a whole other thing from the science
You should read Bill Bryson’s a Brief History of Everything. Great, humorous, survey of natural history and the scientists who made major breakthroughs.
Two likely reasons.
The higher you go in your education, the narrower your field of study becomes and it can become deeper as a result. At the master’s and the PhD level, you’ll likely be offered at least one or two “theory” or “history of X field” courses, where you can study the biggest thinkers/philosophers/contributors to your niche field.
You might enjoy books such as A Brief History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. Lots of context, sometimes humorous, even snarky, regarding the researchers, scientists, and thinkers, to go along with the facts and discoveries.
On the one hand, that has no relevance to the topic, and on the two hand, now that we have Wikipedia you can just look it up yourself.
Science and Technology Studies is the Anthropology / Sociology of Science. There’s also the history and philosophy of science. There’s lots of really interesting stuff in it and it may be worth a look.
This is taught pretty extensively in history classes, especially classes on history of science. There’s also lots of movies, books, interviews/profiles, etc ig you’re interested. It’s just not part of an intro physics, calculus, biology because it’s not the goal of those classes.
A lot of them are dicks.
When I’m teaching classes (statistics/ML), I usually introduce the people who created the method, where they worked and what problems they faced. It also engages the students to something as boring as maths. Learnt it from a professor when I was a UG.
Um we do all of that in philosophy. They were all philosophers until pretty recently and we study people by their corpus instead of their individual texts/ideas. Thats where you should look.
Schrödinger was a pedo, Newton was a dick and invested in slavery, Heisenberg was a nazi, Von Neuman was a creep, Einstein abandoned his kids and was a dick to his ex wife, and many Nobel laureates were active racists. We should know more about the history of physics it helps understand the origin of ideas but also helps to avoid cults of personality.
History of Science is an established field, but it is mostly populated with…historians. So at the university level you can certainly take such courses if you wish. Some STEM faculty teach a bit of history alongside their core material, but that tends to be an individual choice and often depends on the discipline. For example, many ecologists I know do teach some history of science in their introductory courses while organic chemists I know do not.
There’s an expression I have heard before:
Never. Meet. Your. Heroes.
There is a great website called Google. check it out maybe?
The topic sounds horrendously boring, and I say that as a scientist. Their work is what makes them interesting, and that work is most interesting when applied. Yeah, I’m sure there are a few cool stories pepper in there (like how penicillin was an accidental discovery). Holistically, though, lot of important scientists were either dicks or boring nerds with mental problems… or both (like me… maybe I’ll get to be part of the statistic one day). I don’t want to read biographies of boring nerds. I mean, in my field, your choices for notable figures are basically either dickish academics or a boring monk who liked to garden.
Throughout my school be in high school or in veterinary school or right now studying epidemiology, I have had teachers focussed heavily on scientists and the history of the subject. In veterinary school, one department – microbiology – was too focused on scientists, the year and exact date of discovery needed to be known, and they would ask all these dates during final exams.
Right now, when I am studying epidemiology, the professors in the lectures go through the life and history of famous people who contributed to field, when stats professor are in good mood they might go through different statiscians and how a particular theorem came into existence.
These stories would often be about self-sacrifice, abnegation, obsession, depression, being exploited, living in poverty, and mental health problems. This is why it is better to provide kids with mystical stories, so as to keep them in a kind of cult of STEM and a faith about a glorious life that would result from mastering some symbol toys (mathematics) or other sciences. Too many fails, too few succeed, the pay is too low.
I always think their should be “Statistics for Engineers For Statisticians” courses, too (for example) – where grad students, at a minimum, learn about likely “constituent” fields and their practices and needs.
I can easily envision a crappy version of this course being bad, but I think a good version might help (in the example) statisticians to understand the genres of problems that come up for engineers, their schedules and attitudes, and how to help given what the engineers would and wouldn’t know about statistics. (That is, actually address: “most of these peers won’t know about stochastic/Gaussian processes, but they will know a bit about Kalman filters.”)
I can’t give you an answer as to why this is an avoided topic in history classes, but get a science PhD and you’ll see how surface level the undergraduate science curriculum really is without talking about the history at all.
The idea of scientist as lone genius is a pernicious myth.
The scientists themselves are irrelevant. When we do research, most of us aren’t looking for personal glory and some actively try to minimize or redirect it. Those that are seeking glory usually end up less successful.
What matters is what we learn.
All of that said, most people begin to become more familiar with the actual people involved in grad school.