Join us for an informal discussion about a scientific topic. Anyone is welcome, although seating may be limited. We will meet the first Wednesday of each month at The South Campus Gateway Landmark Movie Theater (location suject to change)
The Next Cafe:
| Date: | December 3, 2008 6:30 pm (doors open at 6 pm) |
| Speaker: | Marti Andrews, Department of Human Nutrition |
| Title: | Holiday time! How to enjoy the season without busting your diet |
| Summary: | Science fiction, let's face, seldom has much to do with science. The best we can say for it is that it typically concerns itself with applied science - engineering or technology - so that, in most cases, it really ought to be called "tech-fiction" (tf?) instead of science fiction. Sf is sometimes - rarely, but interestingly - concerned with the history or philosophy or institutional arrangements of science - Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is a classic example. On the other hand, if sf isn't typically "about" science, it can sometimes function analogously to science, in the sense that it conducts thought-experiments, as "real scientists" often do. Or, to put it the other way around: scientific thought-experiments (e.g., Schr?dinger's cat) could be thought of as miniature sf stories. Sf is a genre that foregrounds world-building; it proceeds from certain "what if?" premises, and extrapolates parts of its world more or less systematically from those premises, exploring the ramifications (material, social, psychological, metaphysical, what-have-you) of a few key innovations (or novums, to use Darko Suvin's invaluable term). Only rarely (much more rarely than sf apologists like to admit) does sf's projective world-building actually converge with real-world innovation; but even if its "what if?" extrapolations never come to pass, sf serves the valuable function of imagining alternatives to received reality. It allows us to think of reality-models not as inevitably given, but as merely one set of possibilities among a range of alternatives; it relativizes reality. Thus, for example, Alfred Bester in The Stars My Destination, a superior pulp-sf novel of 1956, imagines a future in which human beings possess the ability to travel from place to place simply by the force of thought - by telekinesis. Now telekinesis is not yet a reality of our world, and is unlikely ever to become one; but the foreshortening of space that this novum produces in Bester's fictional world allows him to model an alternative to the given reality of 1956 - a "small world" state of affairs that we have since learned to call globalization. |
| About our speaker: | Brian McHale is Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He was for many years co-editor of the international journal Poetics Today. He is a founding member of Project Narrative at OSU, and a member of the planning committee of the newly-formed Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). The author of The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems (2004) and of two previous books on postmodernist fiction, he has also published many articles on modernist and postmodernist fiction and poetry, narrative theory, and science fiction. He is co-editor (with Randall Stevenson) of The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006) and (with David Herman and James Phelan) of Teaching Narrative Theory, forthcoming from MLA Press. |
*** You can purchase drinks and food at the Theater ***
*** Park in the Gateway parking ramp-- it's $1.00 for three hours ***
Upcoming Speakers:
| February 4, 2009 | Jeff McKee | Darwin's Prescient Insights on Human Evolution. |
| March 4, 2009 | William J. Mitsch | Hurricane recovery after Katrina and Rita |
| April 1, 2009 | Clay Marsh | The transforming promise of personalized health care: health care transition from disease to health |
| May 6, 2009 | Jay Hobgood | Hurricane Activity in a Changing Climate |
Previouss Speakers:
| December 3, 2008 | Marti Andrews | Holiday time! How to enjoy the season without busting your diet |
| October 29, 2008 | Fritz Scheuren | Trust but Verify in Elections |
| October 1, 2008 | Robert Buerki | The Conscience Clause and American Pharmacy |
| August 6, 2008 | Dr Dave | Whiz Bang Science Show |
| July 2, 2008 | Dale Gnidovec | Snails and trilobites and mastodons, oh my! Fossils in your back yard. |
| June 4, 2008 | Jessica Hanzlik | Women in White Coats: Gender Equality in the Laboratory |
| May 7, 2008 | Fred Cope | Stem Cells: The Ethical, Political, and Clinical Realities |
| April 2, 2008 | Gordon Aubrecht | The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: What do they have to tell the world? |
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The Ohio State University's Science Cafe is sponsored by:
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Other Science Cafes:
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Last updated: 19 November 2008
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