Science and the Human Endeavor - Speaker Series - Ron Numbers

Ron Numbers

Sept. 29, 2015 | 7 p.m. | 2452 Knauss Hall, WMU

“Some Things We've Learned about Science Through its History”

Ron Numbers is Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for nearly four decades.  He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including, most recently, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard, 2009); Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago, 2010), edited with Denis Alexander; Science and Religion around the World (Oxford, 2011), edited with John Hedley Brooke; Wrestling with Nature:  From Omens to Science (Chicago, 2011), edited with Peter Harrison and Michael H. Shank; and Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science (Harvard, 2015), edited with Kostas Kampourakis. He is a past president the History of Science Society, the American Society of Church History, and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science.

For far too long the dominant narrative in the history of science has been of science progressively stamping out superstition and ignorance in its never-ending quest for truths about nature.  The achievements of science and scientists have indeed been impressive, but much of what is thought about how they took place is mythical. This talk draws on a number of historical examples—from antiquity to the present—to help set the record straight.