Dear Colleagues,
The next London PUS Seminar
will be taking place at 4.15pm on
Wednesday 16th March 2016, in room QUE3 28/29 at LSE. We are delighted to
announce that our speaker will be Rupert
Cole from UCL, talking about ‘Really, my dear Eric, you are not the Messiah!’:
The Laithwaite Affair of 1974-5. His abstract is below and on our website http://londonpus.wordpress.com
Hope to
see you on 16th.
Best
wishes
Jane
Gregory, Martin Bauer, Simon Lock, Melanie Smallman
4.15pm, Wednesday 16th March 2016,
Room QUE3 28/29, LSE
Rupert Cole, UCL; ‘Really, my dear Eric,
you are not the Messiah!’: The Laithwaite Affair of 1974-5
In
November 1974 Eric Laithwaite (1921-1997), Professor of Heavy Electrical
Engineering at Imperial College, gave a controversial Friday Evening Discourse
at the Royal Institution (RI) that challenged Newton’s Laws of Motion through a
series of gyroscopic demonstrations. It was accompanied by a wave of local,
national and international press reports – some of the most sensationalist of
which were briefed by Laithwaite himself – that announced the discovery of an
anti-gravity device and, remarkably, claims of parapsychology.
Laithwaite
belonged to an elite group of science communicators connected to the RI. In the
1960s and early-1970s he had built a considerable professional and public
reputation based on his work on linear motors, which he championed through
frequent television appearances as a new method of high-speed train transport.
Following his 1974 Discourse on gyroscopes, which marked the beginning of a
dramatic shift in his reputation, a complex and difficult situation emerged at
the RI. Laithwaite had already been booked to deliver the 1974/5 Christmas
Lectures and it was too late to alter this arrangement. When it became clear he
intended to repeat his controversial views using this platform of the RI’s
famous lecture tradition aimed at children that would be televised by the
BBC, his friends and fellow communicators of science George Porter (1920-2002),
Director of the RI, and Richard Gregory (1923-2010), RI Manager, attempted to
censure him.
This talk will examine the background, consequences and significance of
the Laithwaite Affair. It will attempt to understand how and why a prominent
public communicator of science and highly-respected academic challenged the
scientific establishment, set in the context of the institutional and cultural
climates of the mid-1970s. It will also analyse the role of the media in the
construction of the controversy; the policing tactics of the scientific
establishment; and the public reaction to Laithwaite’s Discourse and Christmas
Lectures.
