“Diagramming Scientific Knowledge in Early Modern China”

Nathan Vedal (Harvard University)

A mainstay of the present day scientific journal article is the figure, which visually depicts the data and conclusions of a paper. But the visual representation of information is not a new phenomenon. Recent research on medieval and early modern scientific knowledge production has identified the central position of cosmological diagrams as tools for the synthesis and presentation of knowledge. Occupying an uneasy position between the hermetic tradition and science, such diagrams have often been dismissed as occult tools geared more toward perceived magical properties than the generation of scientific knowledge. This paper draws evidence from a renaissance of cosmological thinking in 17th century China in order to demonstrate the ways in which diagrams provided new methods of presenting and validating scientific knowledge in the early modern world. In particular, this paper will examine a 17th century Chinese compilation of cosmological diagrams, which was intended to provide an improved basis for scholarly analysis and the presentation of information in several fields, such as astronomy, medicine, and philology. In addition, I will analyze a set of hybrid diagrams that emerged as a result of the interactions between Chinese scholars and Jesuit missionaries, which highlight both shared and differing approaches to “visual thinking” throughout the early modern world. Situating these diagrams within a context of 17th century intellectual culture, I argue that the use of diagrams in early modern scientific scholarship emerged as a response to new anxieties about objectivity and the limits of human observation. Visual representations were believed to provide an infallible basis for generating and conveying scientific knowledge.

“Visual Illusion and Visual Thinking in Roger Penrose's Art, Psychology, and Physics”

Aaron Wright (Stanford University)

The British physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose is well-known for his contributions to General Relativity and Cosmology, as well as for his interactions with the Dutch artist MC Escher. Penrose's work is characterized by an extensive use of diagrams of spacetime, many of which represent an entire infinite expanse with a single bounded figure (as discussed at HSS 2010). In this presentation, I argue that specific forms of visual reasoning which were applied to Penrose's spacetime diagrams were rooted in a variety of Penrose's earliest publications, which he co-authored with his father, the geneticist Lionel Penrose. These publications, in the 1950s, include academic articles on the psychology of perception and visual illusion, and recreational mathematics puzzles. In psychology, Penrose and Penrose were particularly drawing from the American psychologists Hadley Cantril and Adelbert Ames. In this paper I show a continuity among the activities of drawing, building, and seeing visual illusions and the activities of mathematics- and physics-representation.