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.
Thesis
Zimmerman, Virginia Lee-Alice;
(2001)
The Grating Roar of Science: Victorian Revisions of Time
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Thesis
Picker, John Martin;
(2001)
Hearing things: Sound in the Victorian imagination, 1848-1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001560933/)
Article
Bayley, Mel;
(2007)
Hard Times and Statistics
(/isis/citation/CBB000831565/)
Thesis
Perera, Nirshan;
(2012)
Dickens and Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001562808/)
Chapter
Rowlinson, Matthew;
(2013)
History, Materiality and Type in Tennyson's “In Memoriam”
(/isis/citation/CBB001422073/)
Chapter
Nys, Michiel;
(2013)
“An Undue Simplification”: Tennyson's Evolutionary Afterlife
(/isis/citation/CBB001422075/)
Thesis
Shearer, Emily Carroll;
(2014)
“Our Little Systems Have Their Day”: Tennyson's Poetic Treatment of Science
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Book
Purton, Valerie;
(2013)
Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001421851/)
Article
Geric, Michelle;
(2014)
Reading Maud's Remains: Tennyson, Geological Processes, and Palaeontological Reconstructions
(/isis/citation/CBB001201801/)
Chapter
Wilmer, Clive;
(2013)
“No Such Thing as a Flower […] No Such Thing as a Man”: John Ruskin's Response to Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001422077/)
Chapter
Stott, Rebecca;
(2013)
“Tennyson's Drift”: Evolution in “The Princess”
(/isis/citation/CBB001422072/)
Article
Adelene Buckland;
(2021)
Charles Dickens, Man of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB070659844/)
Book
Alexander, Sarah C.;
(2015)
Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable
(/isis/citation/CBB001422481/)
Article
Winyard, Ben;
Furneaux, Holly;
(2010)
Introduction: Dickens, Science and the Victorian Literary Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB001022452/)
Book
Martin Meisel;
(2016)
Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science
(/isis/citation/CBB204147348/)
Book
Craton, Lillian;
(2009)
The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001230849/)
Book
Grossman, Jonathan H.;
(2012)
Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transport and the Novel
(/isis/citation/CBB001421330/)
Book
Frank, Lawrence;
(2004)
Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle
(/isis/citation/CBB000471396/)
Article
Price, Cheryl Blake;
(2013)
Vegetable Monsters: Man-Eating Trees in fin-de-siècle Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001201799/)
Article
Holmes, John;
(2012)
“The Poet of Science”: How Scientists Read Their Tennyson
(/isis/citation/CBB001211491/)
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