Event Description
Why is the scientific community so unified? In the last 350-odd years, the international “scientific community” has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global crises: disastrous climate change, and a deadly pandemic. How did “the scientific community” come into existence, and why does it work?
Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate is an attempt to answer these questions in the form of a brief historical overview, from the late seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries, through the creation of two enormous projects—the Carte du Ciel, or the great star map, and the International Cloud Atlas, pioneered by the World Meteorological Organization after World War II. These new models of intergovernmental collaboration and global observation networks would later make the mounting evidence of planetary phenomena like climate change possible.
Event Speaker
Lorraine Daston, Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and History at the University of Chicago
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. For more information, please visit the event webpage or email [email protected].
Hosted by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and Columbia Global Reports at Columbia University. Co-sponsored by the Center for Science and Society, Columbia Journalism School, and 13/13 Seminars.
