The third and final part, “Strange Energies: Reconceptualizing the Physical Universe,” moves the volume’s focus from an observational study of the natural world to the abstract field of theoretical physics and unseen phenomena. Long before the technological developments of electron microscopes and particle accelerators, the Victorians were tackling the problem of how to detect and demonstrate the structure of unseen forces. Barri Gold identifies one such method as “nonlinear reasoning,” a way of thinking about apparently random natural systems. In her reading of “chaotic fictions” by such writers as Alfred Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, James Prescott Joule, and Charles Dickens, she identifies structures that uncannily anticipate key ideas in twentieth-century chaos theory, such as fractals, butterfly effects, and sensitive dependence on initial conditions. (From Introduction, page 11)
...MoreBook Lara Pauline Karpenko; Shalyn Rae Claggett (2016) Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age.
Similar Citations
Thesis
Zimmerman, Virginia Lee-Alice;
(2001)
The Grating Roar of Science: Victorian Revisions of Time
Article
Bayley, Mel;
(2007)
Hard Times and Statistics
Thesis
Picker, John Martin;
(2001)
Hearing things: Sound in the Victorian imagination, 1848-1900
Thesis
Perera, Nirshan;
(2012)
Dickens and Darwin
Book
Martin Meisel;
(2016)
Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science
Chapter
Wilmer, Clive;
(2013)
“No Such Thing as a Flower […] No Such Thing as a Man”: John Ruskin's Response to Darwin
Article
Geric, Michelle;
(2014)
Reading Maud's Remains: Tennyson, Geological Processes, and Palaeontological Reconstructions
Chapter
Stott, Rebecca;
(2013)
“Tennyson's Drift”: Evolution in “The Princess”
Article
Holmes, John;
(2012)
“The Poet of Science”: How Scientists Read Their Tennyson
Chapter
Rowlinson, Matthew;
(2013)
History, Materiality and Type in Tennyson's “In Memoriam”
Book
Purton, Valerie;
(2013)
Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science
Article
Jesse Oak Taylor;
(2016)
Tennyson's Elegy for the Anthropocene: Genre, Form, and Species Being
Thesis
Henchman, Anna Alexandra;
(2004)
Astronomy and the Problem of Perception in British Literature, 1830--1910
Chapter
Nys, Michiel;
(2013)
“An Undue Simplification”: Tennyson's Evolutionary Afterlife
Chapter
Ebbatson, Roger;
(2013)
Tennyson's “Locksley Hall”: Progress and Destitution
Thesis
Shearer, Emily Carroll;
(2014)
“Our Little Systems Have Their Day”: Tennyson's Poetic Treatment of Science
Book
Henchman, Anna;
(2014)
The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature
Book
Laidler, Keith James;
(2002)
Energy and the Unexpected
Book
Samuel, Nina;
(2012)
The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals and the Materiality of Thinking
Article
Keene, Melanie;
(2014)
Familiar Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Be the first to comment!