Aura Heydenreich – författare

Physics and Literature is a unique collaboration between physicists, literary scholars, and philosophers, the first collection of essays to examine together how science and literature, beneath their practical differences, share core dimensions – forms of questioning, thinking, discovering and communicating insights.This book advances an in-depth exploration of relations between physics and literature from both perspectives. It turns around the tendency to discuss relations between literature and science in one-sided and polarizing ways. The collection is the result of the inaugural conference of ELINAS, the Erlangen Center for Literature and Natural Science, an initiative dedicated to building bridges between literary and scientific research. ELINAS revitalizes discussion of science-literature interconnections with new topics, ideas and angles, by organizing genuine dialogue among participants across disciplinary lines.The essays explore how scientific thought and practices are conditioned by narrative and genre, fiction, models and metaphors, and how science in turn feeds into the meaning-making of literary and philosophical texts. These interdisciplinary encounters enrich reflections on epistemology, cognition and aesthetics.

This volume explores cognitive perspectives on how science and narrative shape one another. Narrative is a principle of cognition, and cognition is fundamental to narrative. This duality enables a deeper mapping of the feedback between story and the natural sciences. Science, as a culturally-organized and systematic mode of knowing the world, may seem opposed to narrative thinking. Yet they are deeply interwoven. Scientists tell many kinds of stories, across genres and media. In thought experiments, lab experiments, written arguments, and histories and philosophies of fields, they recount and interpret unfoldings of events at often uncanny scales—from particle collisions to the evolution of life to cosmic expansion. Science stories go beyond science. Early science is entwined with myth, religion and magic. We still mythologize beneficent or evil geniuses, the promises and perils of technology. Teachers, journalists, politicians and lawyers all tell science stories for their own purposes. Literary artists use scientific ideas and forms, reimagining physical forces, causality and time in storyworlds, themes and figures. This is the first cognition-focused multi-disciplinary analysis of these narrative-science relations.

In the Middle Ages and early modernity, celestial observation was frequently a subject for verbal rather than numerical and geometrical recording. These records can now be difficult to decode, since what they address is frequently obscured by formal conventions of genre, imagery, rhetoric, prosody, to name but a few. The volume collects essays exploring such configurations between literature and observation from Europe to China. How, contributors ask, were verbal representations of celestial phenomena encoded and self-consciously placed vis-à-vis other systems of representation and knowledge? What kinds of data are represented, and what are the modes in which they are communicated? What interpretational problems arise when present-day disciplines like climatology, meteorology, geophysics, and astronomy, but also literary studies, try to access them? How were discourses on religion, law, anthropology, aesthetics, colonialism etc. linked, in and through their verbal presentation, with astronomical observation and knowledge? How did individual scholars, texts, and concepts travel between European and non-European cultures, both in space and in time, and which constructions of self and other arose in the process?