Climate and Literature ed. by Adeline Johns-Putra (review)

Abstract

might be even “more beneficial than inviting them to observe how the mechanism operates” (p. 277). In some instances, the heuristic value of imaginative processes seems to outweigh even direct observation. James Clerk Maxwell’s “explicitly fictionalist move” (p. 4) to use “an ‘imaginary’ fluid in his study of lines of force” (p. 156) or his famous demon (p. 324) drove contemporary understandings of unobservable properties of physical systems. Similarly, Einstein used penetrating but simple thought experiments to illustrate complex physical facts. Throughout The Scientific Imagination, authors continually demonstrate the newness and vitality of their focus on the subject of the collection’s title. References to earlier research seldom reach back more than 30 years, and authors frequently cite their own earlier work and the earlier work of other authors in the collection. As many of the authors acknowledge, attention to the imagination’s role in fiction is (relatively speaking) new and evolving. One thing that seems crucial to the topic, however, is the interdisciplinarity required to address the issue. Although this collection was written chiefly by philosophers, psychologists, and historians of science, it speaks to readers from a diversity of disciplines. Scientists (be they physicists, biologists, or engineers) and students would do well to interrogate their own thinking and their own imaginative processes as they endeavor to produce quantitative, objective knowledge about the world. With this in mind, this collection might be productively read alongside primary historical texts like John Tyndall’s “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” (1870) and John F. W. Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831). More recent works such as The Scientific Imagination (1998) by Gerald Holton, and Objectivity (2007) by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, also offer interesting contexts for thinking through this collection.