Outposts of Empire: Scientific Discovery and Colonial Displacement in Gaskell's Wives and Daughters

This article offers a fresh consideration of Elizabeth Gaskell's unfinished Wives and Daughters (1864–6), in terms of what this metropolitan novelist knew about contemporary scientific debates and imperial exploration of Africa, and how her familiarity with these discourses was incorporated into her imaginative work. Her focus for these two related themes is the naturalist Roger Hamley, whose character and exploits are meant to parallel those of the young Charles Darwin. Roger's direct involvement in the historical Geoffroy–Cuvier debate allows Gaskell to offer a sophisticated examination of how discussions about evolutionary biology (about which she learned from personal acquaintances and printed sources) contributed to political and social change in the era of the first Reform Bill. Roger's subsequent journey to Abyssinia to gather specimens allows Gaskell to form a link between science and imperial exploration, which demonstrates how, when carried to its conclusion, the development of classificatory knowledge systems was never innocent; rather, it facilitated colonial exploitation and intervention, which allowed for the ‘opening up of Africa’. Gaskell's pronouncements about science in the novel are far more explicit than her brief references to empire; the article ponders why this should be so, and offers some suggestions about how her reliance on imaginative and discursive constructs concerning the ‘Dark Continent’ may be interpreted as tacit complicity with the imperial project, or at least an interest in its more imaginative aspects.

The Annual of scientific discovery: or, Year-book of facts in science and art.

1866-1867

The Annual of scientific discovery: or, Year-book of facts in science and art.

1870

The Annual of scientific discovery: or, Year-book of facts in science and art.

1859

The Annual of scientific discovery: or, Year-book of facts in science and art.

1863

The Annual of scientific discovery: or, Year-book of facts in science and art.

1869

Wells's natural philosophy : for the use of schools, academies, and private students. Introducing the latest results of scientific discovery and research; arranged with special reference to the practical application of physical science to the arts and the experiences of every-day life. With three hundred and seventy-five engravings /

Mode of access: Internet.

Annual of scientific discovery: or, Year-book of facts in science and art for 1860 ... /

Mode of access: Internet.

Annual of scientific discovery; or, Year-book of facts in science and art, for [1850]-1871, exhibiting the most important discoveries and improvements in mechanics, useful arts, natural philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, botany, mineralogy, meteorology, geography, antiquities, etc., together with notes on the progress of science, a list of recent scientific publications; obituaries of eminent scientific men, etc

Title varies slightly

Scientific Discovery in a Space of Structural Models: An Example from the History of Solution Chemistry

Postprint

Structure Discovery in Nonparametric Regression through Compositional Kernel Search

Despite its importance, choosing the structural form of the kernel in nonparametric regression remains a black art. We define a space of kernel structures which are built compositionally by adding and multiplying a small number of base kernels. We present a method for searching over this space of structures which mirrors the scientific discovery process. The learned structures can often decompose functions into interpretable components and enable long-range extrapolation on time-series datasets. Our structure search method outperforms many widely used kernels and kernel combination methods on a variety of prediction tasks.

Teaching the scientific method in the curriculum

 In chemistry education, students not only learn chemical knowledge and skills, but about the culture of chemistry – how scientists think about, and practise, chemistry. Students often learn that science is practised according to the “scientific method”, which is a model of scientific discovery, expounded by science historians and philosophers. The idealised “scientific method” has a number of steps: the collection of information about a phenomenon; the development of a hypothesis to explain those observations; an experiment to test a prediction that arises from the hypothesis, perhaps including more observations and collection of more information; improvement of the hypothesis; and so on.

The problem is that students (and even some science professionals) often do not understand the philosophy behind the scientific method and paradoxically, the scientific method does not seem to apply to most careers in science. The true nature of science is that concepts have been developed though variants of the “scientific method”, and that a process of testing the predictive value of these concepts has lead to advances in that conceptual knowledge. Hence the “scientific method” applies to the development of scientific ideas, not necessarily to the work of all scientists. It is not whether we personally use the scientific method in our day-today work, but how we use, apply, think about and communicate scientific knowledge and skills that makes us chemists.