Physics and Astronomy Calendar

Jacob Bronowski once pointed out,"Many people believe that reasoning, and therefore science, is a different activity from imagining. But this is a fallacy. Reasoning is constructed with movable images just as certainly as poetry is." An outstanding source of real examples of the productive use of images in the interconnected world of models, ideas, and experiments is the crucial period in the history of science when a path was charted to show how best to explore the world beyond the immediate reach of the senses. It will be argued that chemistry holds a special place in this story, for after about 1820, to reason chemically meant to exercise the visual imagination, precisely because its investigative objects, atoms and molecules, are beyond direct or immediate perception. The success achieved by chemists provided a model for other sciences, not just of the use of the visual imagination, but more generally, of transdiction and distant inference.