Michael D. Gordin, “ The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Scientific Fringe”

Event Date: 

Monday, October 29, 2012 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm

Event Location: 

  • Loma Pelona Conference Center
This event is sponsored by the Badash Lecure Fund
 
This year's Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Michael D. Gordin and will be held from 7:00-8:30 PM on October 29, 2012 at UCSB's Loma Pelona Conference Center (located near Parking Structure 22 on the UCSB campus, close to the Faculty Club). Our invited speaker is Princeton University historian Michael D. Gordin, whose talk is drawn from his brand new book The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Scientific Fringe.

Appropriate for the Halloween week, Prof. Gordin will be discussing the tricky boundaries between science and pseudoscience that emerged after the publication of Velikovsky's controversial 1950 bestseller Worlds in Collision. 

Prof. Gordin is professor of history at Princeton University, where he teaches the history of modern science. He has written several books on the history of the physical sciences, concentrating on the history of Russia and the United States. His first book, Well-Ordered Thing (2004), was a cultural biography of Dmitrii Mendeleev, formulator of the periodic system of chemical elements. Since then, he has focused on the history of nuclear weapons, with a book on their use in World War II (Five Days in August, 2007) and another on the creation of the Soviet atomic bomb and the early arms race (Red Cloud at Dawn, 2009). His most recent book, The Pseudoscience Wars, is due to appear in late summer 2012 and explores disputes over the boundary between science and pseudoscience in Cold War America. 

February 8, 2016 - 10:46am