LIT 239 Science in the Making

3 hours 

This unique, interdisciplinary class explores what it takes to make science. What does it take to produce a scientific fact? How are those facts deployed to make up a theory? How does a theory make it by being accepted as a settled truth among the scientific elite as well as among the public at large? Focusing on several crucial scientific discoveries from a given historical period, students will read primary sources in the history of science, perform laboratory experiments modeled on historical practices, and read literary responses to these innovations to investigate how these ideas traversed domains of culture. Students will be assessed on both their lab reports and their critical essays. By exploring science as an embodied and social knowledge-making practice, students will arrive at a nuanced and critical perspective on how we became modern in a scientific world.