Order Out of Chaos

Time: 5:00 to 6:00pm, Reception to Follow

Location: David Rittenhouse Lab A2, 209 South 33rd Street

Classification created the foundations upon which modern science, and thus the modern world, was built. In this illustrated lecture Jim Endersby, from the University of Sussex, UK, will use the displays at the Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park to show how new classifications created new sciences in the nineteenth century. In 1851 the elegant glass building nicknamed the Crystal Palace contained everything from absynthium to zithers, from cotton to cutlery, Peruvian bark and phantasmagoria, to steam-engines and telegraphs; a triumphant display of the wealth of both empire and industry. The exhibition exemplified the achievements of the Second Scientific Revolution. Over the previous century, the often chaotic practices of natural philosophy and natural history had been transformed into the modern sciences and Endersby will argue that what lay behind this dramatic revolution was the most humble of all scientific practices, classification. Giving nature new names created the distinctively modern world we live in, a world whose order remains inextricably entangled with the imperial purposes that shaped it.