🍎your Scholarly Digest 24th April, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Image Credits: Birkeland’s Electromagnetic Gun: A Historical Review

Hi Scholar, 

To get you warmed up for this week’s Brain Food, consider this limerick:

BRAIN FOOD

Out of The Groove: Rethinking Objectivity

In the passage above (quoted in Another Science is Possible), Alfred N. Whitehead - mathematician turned philosopher - reflects on how specialist, professional training limits the scope of our thought. He was particularly critical of the scientific education model that emerged in the 19th century and still shapes academia today: one that encourages scholars to “specialise in particular regions of thought” and add incrementally to “knowledge within their respective limitations of subject.”

Whitehead wasn’t critiquing specialisation or abstraction itself. As a mathematician, he understood that abstraction is essential to thinking. Instead, he was wary of the way such training traps researchers’ minds in ‘grooves’, leaving them unable to see beyond their abstractions and therefore creating narrow intellectual pathways. They begin to treat the world as if it were naturally carved along the lines of their discipline, forgetting that their methods, categories, and objects of study are not neutral. 

If you believe your abstractions map directly onto reality, then you’re likely to believe the knowledge they produce is objective. 

The training scientists receive often promotes a skewed version of objectivity: one that presents objective truth as something accessed from a “view from nowhere.” Abstractions are treated as value-free, and objectivity is seen as the elimination of ‘the evils of ideology’. But a “view from nowhere” doesn’t eliminate bias, it disguises it. 

Our inquiries are always entangled with and situated in the world; such situatedness means that knowledge is shaped by our context, our assumptions, and our position in the world. This isn’t a rejection of objectivity or a retreat to relativism. 

It is an invitation to reimagine it as strong objectivity: a view which recognises that objectivity isn’t about eliminating perspective, but incorporating many. Rather than pretending we can stand outside the world and know it, strong objectivity urges us to build knowledge through the intentional inclusion of diverse standpoints. It is a shift from accessing truths from ‘a view from nowhere’ to ‘a view from many places’. It’s a form of “knowing together,” where no single perspective claims the full picture, but through community and critique, a more complete understanding becomes possible.

Scientific education that trains thinkers to stay in their grooves tends to reproduce narrow, uncritical ways of knowing. And if we want to truly “open up” the STEM pipeline, not just in terms of diversifying access, but in expanding imagination: we need to embrace a deeper diversification of thought. 

Only then can we hope to see what our grooves won’t let us.

RESOURCE

The Syllabus For Relearning Science

This week’s resource complements the Brain Food on objectivity and situated knowledge. In the wake of recent attacks on DEI initiatives in U.S. colleges, Professor M.J. Crockett posted a thread on BlueSky, reflecting on how science is taught, and how it could be better - different.

In it, she shares the syllabus for her Princeton course, Unlocking the Science of Human Nature, which invites students to interrogate the invisible assumptions behind scientific inquiry and reimagine how we know what we know. It’s a gold mine of readings and questions for anyone willing to challenge their own science education, and rethink how knowledge gets made.

NEWS

Harvard Goes Full Elle Woods:
“You’re gonna sue the government?” “What, like it’s hard?”

The oldest (and richest) university in the USA has sued the Federal Government after it decided to freeze $2.2 billion dollars in funding, with an additional $1 billion freeze being considered. Tensions between the White House and elite universities have been rising following what the New York Times describes as a broad pressure campaign which forms “part of a bid by conservatives to realign the liberal tilt of academia”. Harvard University received a letter from the US government on the 11th of April (apparently sent in error) demanding the end of DEI initiatives, the screening of international students for their ideological beliefs and to submit itself to federal audits: Harvard refused to comply, resulting in the funding freeze. Just a few days later, on April 15th, President Trump floated the idea of revoking the University’s tax-exempt status. 

In response, Harvard filed a lawsuit, arguing that the Government is overstepping its authority and infringing on free speech as protected by the First Amendment. As the top ranked law school in the world with a previous win in court against Trump under its belt, you would think Harvard has a decent shot at getting the money. 

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and academic job openings

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KEEPING IT REAL

Self-funding by Failing Upwards: A Series of (Un)Fortunate Events

120 years ago, Kristian Birkeland, today considered one of the founders of modern space physics, faced a significant challenge to secure sufficient funding for his work. Birkeland was fascinated by the aurora borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, and proposed a theory to explain the underlying physics that resulted in the phenomena. However, the cost of gathering additional data to support his theory was hugely expensive; a previous expedition  had cost the equivalent of 12 years of his full salary. Aside from the cost, many of his mainstream contemporaries dismissed his theory, making securing the funds needed for future expeditions increasingly difficult.  

Deciding to take matters into his own hands, Birkeland tried to self-fund his research by using his knowledge of applied physics to design an electromagnetic gun. Powered by electricity, the gun would, in theory, fire a projectile using magnetic fields; Birkeland hoped to solve his funding crisis by selling his design to German weapons manufacturers. A key feature of an electromagnetic gun is that it is silent, but during a demonstration to industry representatives, the gun went off with a loud bang accompanied by a massive arc of lightning. It was a total failure. 

Birkeland planned to fix the issue and arrange another demonstration, but a few days later, he happened to be having dinner with Sam Eyde. Eyde was an engineer who was trying to develop a novel method for producing fertilizer by fixing nitrogen from the air. What was needed, the engineer explained, was “the biggest flash of lightning that can be brought down to Earth”. To which the ever entrepreneurial Bergensen replied “I have it!”. 

The company Birkeland co-founded, Norsk Hydro, became an enormous success using technology developed from the failed electromagnetic gun to produce fertilizer. The company still exists today. From then on, Birkeland had more than enough money to fund his research on the Northern Lights. In 1967, his theories (which had been so mocked by his contemporaries) came to be proven correct; our understanding of the aurora borealis is more or less unchanged from his original theory. Unfortunately, he was not alive to see it.  

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