Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL
STS seminar Series 2010-11
Term 2
All seminars take place at 5.00pm in room G.03
22, Gordon Square - UCL

Monday 31 January
Katy Price, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Dreaming the Future: J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time

In An Experiment with Time (1927) and its sequel The Serial Universe
(1934), aeronautical engineer J.W. Dunne (1975-1949) propounded a theory of
‘serial time’. This theory was devised to explain experiences of dreams that
contained a mix of past and future events, and it built towards proving the
existence of a group mind, uniting all individuals in a ‘greater now’ and
granting immortality of the soul. Both books were reviewed, critically but
with serious interest, in Discovery and Nature, and the credibility of
Dunne’s scheme was affirmed by the inclusion in the second edition of a note
from Arthur Eddington, declaring ‘I agree with you about “serialism”’. An
Experiment with Time, revised in 1929 and 1934, invited readers to
participate in a large-scale experiment to help prove serialism, by 
recording
evidence that they had strayed into the future while dreaming. The book was
reprinted regularly through the 30s, 40s and 50s, with several further
reissues since (the latest in 2009). In this talk I offer an explanation for
Dunne's broad appeal across a broad range of reader constituencies, and
present examples of how serial time was appropriated in popular fiction.


Forthcoming seminars:

Monday 7 February
Georgina Voss, Honorary Research Associate, STS - UCL
Hacking the Home

Monday 21 February
Paul Merchant and Thomas Lean, British Library - National Life Stories, 
An Oral History of British Science
"You don't want to be talking to the likes of me": An Oral History of 
British Science

Monday 14 March
Nancy Anderson, SUNY Buffalo/Research Associate STS-UCL
"We Said Magnified 254,000,000X, Not 150,000,000": Linus Pauling, 
Molecular Models, and the Problem of Scale

Monday 28 March
Frederick Attenborough, Loughborough University
‘Sci-candy’ and the ‘femme fatale of physics’: The media, gender and the 
‘sexy scientist’

Monday 11 April
Steve Miller, Science and Technology Studies UCL
Maunakea and the work of the Imiloa Astronomy Center, Hawaii: boundary 
work or boundary object?


-- 
Dr. Chiara Ambrosio
Teaching Fellow in Philosophy of Science
Department of Science and Technology Studies
University College London

Tel. (office) +44 02076791324
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/fellows/ambrosio/index.htm