🍎your Scholarly Digest 17th April, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox every week.
Know someone who will enjoy The Scholarly Letter? Forward it to them.

Hi Scholar,

Tomorrow, April 18th, is the 70th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s death. The only reason we’re telling you this is because there’s a weird story about what happened to his brain after he died (it’s this week’s Keeping It Real) and we needed a good reason to include it in the Letter.

BRAIN FOOD

The Scientist in The Mirror

Whether there is solid public trust in science has been an important topic of discussion in recent years. We rely on the authority of scientific knowledge to inform decisions that influence our lives on everything from climate policy to public health. But what happens when that trust begins to erode?

A common solution is transparency: if the public better understood how science works - how knowledge is produced - they’d trust it more. 

Yet in 2004, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, argued that increased transparency as a result of reduced trust in science would not necessarily lead to more trustworthy science. Horton argued that in a society where there is no trust in scientists themselves, there is no knowledge at all. In other words, if we no longer believe in the character of the scientist, then the knowledge they produce loses its public legitimacy.

This raised the question of whether the integrity of scientific knowledge depends on scientists being exceptionally moral individuals - which is what the essay on trust in science by Steven Shapin, “The way we trust now: the authority of science and the character of the scientists”, seeks to answer.  

Beginning with a discussion of research as an initially “pure activity” reserved for people of high moral standing, Shapin traces how, over the last century, science evolved into a professional occupation. Scientists could apply their expertise to making profits for business and exercise real power through roles as government advisors and administrators. In light of this shift, a concerted, and perhaps necessary, effort was made to emphasise that scientists do not possess “special wisdom about what is good for society”: they could offer technical expertise, but not moral authority.  

The attempt to separate technical expertise (knowing more) from moral authority (knowing the right thing to do) is, according to Shapin, nice in theory but has lead to the situation we are faced with today:

Experts often avoid talking about what’s right or wrong, and in turn, people who deal with ethics or policy don’t fully trust those experts. 

It’s a thoughtful essay that tries to lay out a middle ground where there are checks and balances in place (to prevent, for example, increasing commercial influence from corroding the values of scientists) but still room to trust what moral authority is possible for scientists to have, given our need for their expertise in tackling the problems we face. 

NEWS ANALYSIS

No Hypothesis, Just Hype

On Monday, April 14th, Blue Origin’s New Shepard NS-31 mission was successfully completed. The mission has captured headlines around the world because for the first time since 1963, an all-female spaceflight was achieved. And unlike Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, this six-woman ‘crew’ wasn’t made up of seasoned astronauts. It was mostly celebrities.

Katy Perry (she needs no introduction), CBS host Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and entertainment reporter Lauren Sanchez (also, Blue Origin’s CEO - Jeff Bezos’s partner) made up the star-studded line-up. The only two with any real links to space on board were Aisha Bowe, aerospace engineer and entrepreneur, and Amanda Nguyen, a bioastronautics research scientist and social entrepreneur.

The purpose of this ‘mission’ was, however, a little less clear. There were vague mentions of "science" being done on this 11-minute flight. Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi (abc news contributor) vaguely summarized the findings of this science as follows:

• It’s evidence that trips to space can be done routinely.
  

• It shows that women can go to space.
  

• It shows the resilience of the human spirit.
  

You might also add: it shows that you can now be called an astronaut without actually training like one. Also, Katy Perry reportedly sang ‘What a Wonderful World’ in space. Future research may include studying the vocal patterns of singing in zero gravity.

Of course, there’s something noble about putting women in space: feminism quite literally reaching new frontiers. But is this really the kind of progress we need? Is an 11-minute ride to the edge of space, for an amount of money so obscene it’s not publicly disclosed, really the kind of inspiration young women need? Are we meant to cheer for “astronaut” as a title anyone can buy, one that’s now being used to describe people who haven’t undergone a day of NASA training?

At best, this is elitism dressed up as feminism. And at worst, it cheapens the real work of women who have spent decades proving that they belong in space, not just aboard a spacecraft for a photo op.

For Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin, the point of the mission was crystal clear: marketing. A highly publicised stunt, bolstered by celebrity power and designer space suits, that reminds the world: space travel is for sale. Want to fly on New Shepard? The ticket price is hidden behind a six-figure deposit - $150,000 to be exact. But you can buy a NS-31 Mission Patch for $7.50 from the Blue Origin merchandise shop. 

RESOURCE

Big Ideas, Small Essays

This might sound like advice from your high school teacher, but it’s excellent advice nonetheless: writing mini-essays is one of the best tools for learning. Some topics are complex, full of moving parts, and difficult to pin down. Tasking yourself with writing short, 300-400 word essays on a single idea helps you test whether you really understand what you’ve been reading and pushes you to make connections across texts, concepts, and questions. As Einstein once said,

This short video is a wonderful explainer of how and why writing mini-essays to learn actually works and might just give you the nudge you need to start doing it more often.

P.S. It turns out writing mini-essays about books and ideas is also a gateway drug. That’s how The Tatler and The Critic ended up launching a newsletter.

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• PhD, Postdoc, and Faculty Positions @ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands: click here

• Postdoctoral Positions @ University of Florida, USA: click

• PhD, Postdoc, and Research Positions @ ETH Zurich, Switzerland: click here

• PhD, Postdoc, and Academic Positions @ University of Oulu, Finland: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

I Like Big Brains an’ I Can Not Lie

Albert Einstein reportedly wished to donate his body to science after he died. The man who performed the autopsy, Thomas Harvey, took this quite literally. Harvey removed his brain, preserved it in the hopes that studying it would reveal the secrets of genius and, more weirdly, personally kept a portion of it for 40 years. It's a strange but morbidly fascinating story: after Einstein's death, his brain was preserved, photographed, and cut into 240 pieces, which were then sent to neurologists to look for differences from “normal” brains. The initial results were… underwhelming. Most of the neurologists who received a sample thought it looked pretty normal, and actually, the brain itself weighing in at 1230g was smaller than a typical brain for a man in his 70’s. Some studies have been published in recent years that claim to have identified abnormalities, but (mercifully) the interest in studying the brain seems to be fading. If you’re ever in Philadelphia, some slices of the brain are part of the permanent collection of the Mütter Museum.

We care about what you think and would love to hear from you. Hit reply or drop a comment and tell us what you like (or don't) about The Scholarly Letter.