Notes on Research, Beauty, and Progress

Open Notebook Issue, 25th September, 2025

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Hi Scholar,

Our Letter today was meant to be an essay. However, the formats we’ve been using — alternating between essay and digest — have started to feel a little constraining. Structure and form are important, of course, but shouldn’t they serve us, rather than the other way around?

So, this week we decided to play with the format of our Letter. We were inspired in part by Gary Hall’s pirate philosophy and his idea of academic work taking the shape of Open Notebooks. You will therefore find that this Letter takes the form of notes. Notes, in the verb sense, mean “to notice or pay particular attention to something” — and it is precisely the things we have recently taken note of that we share here today. One of these, we’re especially excited about: a Letter written to us by one of our readers. This is the first time we’re sharing a Letter not written by us, but to us.

On another note, we’re absolutely delighted to announce that we have launched an online community for scholars united by passion, desire, and a sincere dedication to knowledge. We’ll refrain from going into too much detail here, but only say that it is called Scholar Square — inspired by the Greek tradition of the Agora — and you can read more about it by following the link. An informal session has been scheduled to welcome our 9th member at 2pm (British Standard Time) - we hope to see some of you there!

A Reader’s Letter On The Mark Gable Foundation
— Blanka

The physicist Leo Szilard was also a writer of sci-fi short stories. One particular story The Mark Gable Foundation was brought to our attention through a letter sent to us by Blanka, a reader of The Scholarly Letter, who was reminded of it after reading the essay Doughnut Shaped Scholarship. It did not feel right to include The Mark Gable Foundation in today's newsletter without Blanka's letter alongside it; what follows below are the contents of her letter (very lightly edited by us), which Blanka has kindly agreed to let us publish:

“Reading this week’s essay reminded me of a short story, The Mark Gable Foundation, written by Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian-born physicist. His short stories are often sci-fi satires and mostly about nuclear war and politics, but this one is a bit different. His fictional protagonist – also his alter ego – developed a method that enables people to ’withdraw from life’ (through hibernation, I assume). He himself wanted to be ’in statu dormiendi’ (i. e. asleep) for three hundred years, but ’for reasons of' a legal nature’ he was returned to life ninety years later. I want to focus on a conversation between the scientist protagonist and Mark Gable, an influential and wealthy man 'of great personal charm'. He asks Szilárd for help in figuring out what good he could do with all his money. At first Szilárd wanted to know whether he would like to do something for the advancement of science, but when Mark Gable answers that scientific progress is already too fast, Szilárd comes up with a different idea – to slow the rate of scientific progress. I cite his plan:

Later, Szilárd explains why he believes this model would slow the rate of scientific progress.

I think this is the kind of ’slow science’ many scholars wouldn’t want to do. What strikes me even more, however, is that some aspects of this model are already becoming reality, yet science is still far from being slow. (Or maybe is there an expanding gap between ’science’ and ’progress’? The hyperbolic growth in the number of articles makes us think that scientific progress, or science is fast, but how can we measure ’progress’ fairly? I use the word ’measure’, but I also think it shows the ubiquity of the neoliberal paradigm and/or utilitarian values. Maybe the underdefined notions of ’progress’ and ’innovation’ shouldn’t even have such central roles when it comes to sustaining and taking care of the knowledge system.) I also find it both sad and rather ironic that the only part of the model that hasn’t come true is scholars (whose living still depends on 'producing outcomes' though) being financially compensated for their scientific work – whether it is research or peer review. And of course, those evaluating their work, strictly speaking, are not members of the academic or scientific field.

I think this short story is worth reading, and it deserves a more thorough critical analysis than I can give at the moment. The end of the story at first may seem banal or weird, but in a deeper sense, I think, it can also be interpreted as a critique of the discourse of ’progress’: what would ’knowledge production’ look like, if scientists recognised that sometimes when progress is achieved there is no way back?

Best wishes,
Blanka”

Notes on Ann Veronica and The Aesthetics of Research
— The Critic

A little red book The Tatler picked up from a dusty corner of a second-hand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye — H. G. Wells’ Ann Veronica — made me acutely aware of something. Something that appears to have gone missing in today’s cultural world of scholarship, research, and science.

Set in early 1900s England, the most prominent theme of the novel is sociopolitical issues, specifically through a feminist perspective. It deals with the way women struggled to find their place in patriarchal society, the women’s suffrage movement, and their fight to attain higher education. Ann Veronica is, of course, the protagonist of the story: a rebellious but determined, energetic but highly idealistic twenty-one-year-old New Woman. Following her attempts to find emancipation from male authority — first from her father, and then later through male friends and beaus alike — and her eventual maturation as a woman through her struggles, Wells brings to light feminist issues of the time. This emancipation not only takes the form of leaving her father and aunt to carve out a life of independence in London but also of pursuing a scientific education, something women were largely excluded from at the time.

H. G. Wells was primarily a science fiction writer, and held a BSc in biological sciences. It is not surprising, therefore, that his protagonist’s mode of finding emancipation and personal freedom involves pursuing a scientific education. As a woman myself who grew up in an Indian society that continues to be largely patriarchal, Ann Veronica’s feminist struggles throughout the novel felt deeply relevant. But as a scholar, Wells’ portrayal of feminist issues is rarely what provoked me to take note of Ann Veronica. Rather, it was the persistent discussion of “beauty” throughout the novel, interwoven with domains of scientific research, that I couldn’t help but notice — for it is something that has almost completely gone amiss from our modern discourse of scholarship, research, and science.

As Ann Veronica begins her research in the biological laboratory of the Central Imperial College, a constituent college of London University, she falls in love with her demonstrator, Capes. The unconventional and even scandalous romance between Ann Veronica — a student — and Capes — a teacher — is itself a core theme of the novel. But it is also through this juxtaposition of romance in a scientific setting that the reader becomes entangled with ideas of beauty, passion, and research. As a sincere and hardworking student, Ann Veronica dedicates herself to her scientific research. Initially, however, she takes on the cold, calculated posture of someone looking down microscopes and busily dissecting organisms. Severely “scientific” in the most rationalist sense, she appears to carry herself with rigid intellectual barriers that perform a sort of mental austerity. But when she meets Capes, she encounters an individual who is not only scientific but also literary and imaginative, awakening a kind of aesthetic sensitivity in her:

It is in this manner that she finds herself not only in love but also experiencing a kindling of her aesthetic senses, a new-born appetite craving “for the sight and sound of beauty.” And she goes on to discover beauty in what, for her, was the most unexpected place: the laboratory, her scientific work:

Following this moment of Ann Veronica’s obsession with beauty, Wells masterfully provokes us to consider beauty — not only in discussions of femininity — but also in the work of the researcher: whether in the aesthetic appeal of what one studies and inquires into, in the sawdusty texture of academic papers written with passion and desire, or in the beauty of the phenomena researchers themselves study, for instance in biological riddles of survival:

Notions of “beauty” are rarely encountered in our everyday academic discourse. There are some working in the humanities, and a rare few in the social sciences, who will occasionally wander down the route of talking about beauty. But by and large, when we think of research and our topics of research, we hardly concern ourselves with its beauty. And yet, our humanistic knowledge can hardly be disentangled from our aesthetic senses, given that research is ultimately an embodied exercise. It is the human researcher — with the human body — who conducts research, asks questions, inquires into phenomena. Our scientific training, instead, persistently teaches us to deprive ourselves of our aesthetic senses when conducting research. If Ann Veronica, as a woman in science in the early 1900s, found herself working under a kind of mental austerity, there can be little doubt that our scholars today have only heightened this austerity in their conduct. And I wonder if it is due to a suppression of our postures toward the aesthetic, the beautiful, and the passionate — the very things that undergird our human essence — that we keep encountering the devastation of our scholarly profession.

The Difference Between Science and Art
— The Tatler

Date: 3rd August 2025, 22:47

I read a blog today about the slow decline of online libraries - specifically text based ones like Libgen, Scihub or Anna's Archive. This author, Warwick, was making a point about the cultural importance of archiving: for example, what happens when one day YouTube becomes unprofitable? What will happen to the lifetimes of content stored there? All of these videos show how people thought, think, what they cared about etc. Warwick goes on to say that there is certain knowledge that can be rediscovered. But some things, like culture and what makes cultural products “art”, once lost are lost forever. 

Then this evening I was reading The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin. At the start of Chapter 1 he says:

When I read Shapin's passage later today, there was a small spark that stirred in my brain. A connection between these two pieces of writing was made in that split second. I suppose for me these two passages show the difference between "science" and "humanities" or "art". It was the first time I have been able to see clearly what makes a field of study like chemistry or physics different from the study of culture, music, or human behaviour. The natural world, according to Warwick, has properties or rhythms which are re-discoverable. Is this what would distinguish "science"? In contrast, culture, art, human behaviour, all these things are not: they are fleeting, and fade away if they are lost. In a way that makes them more precious - at least to me.

If todays Scholarly Letter stirred something in you, write back and share it with us. We would be delighted to hear from you. A letter without a response is only half a conversation.