Friday, 15 September 2017 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Bruce Hunt, UT

“Reliquiae Scientiae, or Reflections on Galileo’s Finger Bones”

On the second floor of the Galileo Museum in Florence, amid arrays of armillary spheres, telescopes, and other historic scientific instruments, one encounters a display case holding several of Galileo’s finger bones. A glass and marble reliquary holds the bones of the middle finger of his right hand, while one made of glass and wood holds the bones of his thumb and index finger, along with a single tooth. How did these bones come to be there? What are we to make of them? To what extent should we compare them to the relics of Christian saints that are displayed in so many Italian churches, and how are they related to the remains of other scientists that have been preserved for veneration or for study? The story of Galileo’s finger bones is an intriguing one, with many odd twists, and as we shall see, it also raises some deeper questions about attitudes toward scientists and their bodily remains.

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Bruce Hunt has taught courses in the history of science and technology at UT for many years. Most of his research focuses on telegraphy and electrical physics in 19th century Britain, but he also has a strong interest in the life and work of Galileo. This past June he got a chance to visit various Galileo-related sites in Padua, Florence, and Rome, and this fall he is again teaching an undergraduate seminar on “the Galileo affair.”

Friday, 14 April 2017 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Audra J. Wolfe, “The Fight for Science and Freedom: Recovering the Role of Science in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy”  

Audra Wolfe’s current book project, Freedom’s Laboratory, explores how the United States attempted to use visions of science as a tool for cultural diplomacy in the Cold War, whether those measures were covert, overt, or something in between. This talk considers the role of science in the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), probably the best known of the CIA’s attempts at covert cultural diplomacy. From its first appearance at the organization’s opening meeting in Berlin in 1950, this strand of the CCF’s agenda continued throughout the 1950s, with a major conference on Science and Freedom chaired by Michael Polanyi in Hamburg in 1953 and three smaller meetings in Paris, Milan, and Tunis. From 1954 to 1961, the CCF’s Committee on Science and Freedom published a bulletin called Science and Freedom. But despite pushes from the CCF’s Paris office, Science and Freedom never lived up to the CIA’s expectations, and the Agency finally cut off funding in 1961 in favor of a more mainstream journal, Minerva. Science never took on the central role in the CCF’s operations that Michael Polanyi originally envisioned for it, but it did play a role, and there is evidence to suggest that U.S. policymakers wanted it to play a larger one.

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Audra J. Wolfe is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor, and historian. She is the author of Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her articles have appeared in both scholarly and more popular venues, including the Washington Post, The Atlantic.com, and Slate.