This article considers the role of overseas academic travel in the development of the modern research university, with particular reference to the University of Cambridge from the 1880s to the 1950s. The Cambridge academic community, relatively sedentary at the beginning of this period, became progressively more mobile and globalized through the early twentieth century, facilitated by regular research sabbaticals. The culture of research travel diffused at varying rates, and with differing consequences, across the arts and humanities and the field, laboratory and theoretical sciences, reshaping disciplinary identities and practices in the process. The nature of research travel also changed as the genteel scholarly excursion was replaced by the purposeful, output-orientated expedition.

In the extended introduction to this special issue on British nuclear culture, the guest editors outline the main historiographical and conceptual contours of British nuclear scholarship, and explore whether we can begin to define ‘British nuclear culture’ before introducing the contributors to this special issue, whose work we have organized into three broad areas. The first part is devoted to three articles that offer explicit and extended attempts to reconceptualize British nuclear culture, illuminating the complex links between nuclear science, the state and the individual citizen. The second part of this issue is devoted to three articles that concentrate on aspects of the history of nuclear science – focusing particularly on intellectuals, nuclear scientists and enthusiasts – alongside analysis of the popularization of nuclear science as well as the relationship between the state and nuclear science and its practitioners. In the third part, four articles examine the diverse ways in which ‘official’ narratives of the atomic age can be questioned, disrupted or enhanced by analysing the significance of journalistic, anti-nuclear and fictional narratives to the development of nuclear culture in Britain.

As the royal agent for British West Florida and an avid naturalist, John Ellis, FRS, took a keen interest in both the scientific and the commercial potential of the nascent colony. This article explores how Ellis and his West Floridian correspondent Bernard Romans illuminate the social and material practices of colonial science. In particular, it builds on recent scholarship to argue that new natural knowledge about West Florida did not simply circulate in the Atlantic World, but was in fact engendered by the movement of objects and ideas through the many circuits of transatlantic natural history and imperial administration. Foregrounding the Atlantic nature of such knowledge also raises questions about the limits of the categories of centre and periphery so frequently employed by historians of colonial science. Colonists such as Romans understood London to be just one centre amongst many and asserted their own epistemological claims, despite the asymmetries of power inherent to colonial science.

This article explores the history of mummy unwrappings in the West, culminating in Margaret Murray's public unrolling of two mummies in Manchester in 1908. Mummy unwrappings as a practice have shifted often between public spectacles which displayed and objectified exotic artifacts, and scientific investigations which sought to reveal medical and historical information about ancient life. Although others have looked at Murray's work in the context of the history of mummy studies, I argue that her work should be viewed culturally as poised between spectacle and science, drawing morbid public interest while also producing ground-breaking scientific work that continues to this day. Murray's main goal was to excite the interest of the public while at the same time educating them in the true history of ancient Egypt, while ascertaining new scientific information and contributing to the scholarly interpretations of ancient Egypt.

A Catoptrica attributed to Euclid appears in manuscripts amongst treatises dealing with elementary astronomy. Despite this textual background, the treatise has always been read literally as a theory of mirrors, and its astronomical significance has gone unnoticed. However, optics, catoptrics, and astronomy appear strongly intermingled in sources such as, amongst others, Geminus, Theon of Smyrna, Plutarch and Cleomedes. If one compares the optical reasoning put forward in these sources to account for the formation of moonlight with arguments of Catoptrica, one is able to shed new light on several principles and propositions of Catoptrica, some of which had been deemed corrupt, meaningless, and obscure. Moreover, the present analysis offers a glimpse at the context of a specific stage in the evolution of ancient catoptrics: Whether literally or by analogy, several of its results appear to have been set against a wider astronomical background, which explains the inclusion of Catoptrica in the group of texts loosely defined as “little astronomy.”

Recent studies of patents have argued that the very materiality and techniques of legal media, such as the written patent document, are vital for the legal construction of a patentable invention. Developing the centrality placed on patent documents further, it becomes important to understand how these documents are ordered and mobilized. Patent classification answers the necessity of making the virtual nature of textual claims practicable by linking written inscription to bureaucracy. Here, the epistemological organization of documents overlaps with the grid of patent administration. How are scientific inventions represented in such a process? If we examine the process of creating a new patent category within the International Patent Classification (IPC), it becomes clear that disagreements about the substance of the novel inventive subject matter have been resolved by computer simulations of patent documents in draft classifications. The practical needs of patent examiners were the most important concerns in the making of a new category. Such a lack of epistemological mediation between the scientific and legal identities of an invention depicts a legal understanding that science is already inside patent law. From an internal legal perspective, the self-referential introduction of the new patent category may make practical sense; however it becomes problematic from a technological and scientific standpoint as the remit of the patent classification also affects other social contexts and practices.

The sixteenth-century physician and philosopher Julius Caesar Scaliger suggests that in particular cases plants can come into being that belong to a plant species that did not exist before. At the same time, he holds that God could not have created a more perfect world. However, does the occurrence of new species not imply that the world was not the best possible world from the beginning? In this article, I explore a set of metaphysical ideas that could provide Scaliger with the means of solving this problem: (1) His version of the notion of a plurality of substantial forms in every living being, and (2) his version of the notion of the ordained divine power. As it turns out, Scaliger analyzes the generation of new species in terms of a development of subordinate substantial forms into dominant substantial forms. Thereby, previously existing essences of plant parts become essences of plants. These plants, thus, possess essences that no previously existing plant possessed and, in this sense, belong to a new species. In this way, Scaliger avoids positing the occurrence of new essences, thus saving the best possible world thesis. Moreover, he believes that all substantial forms stand in a relationship of mutual existential dependence by means of which God safeguards the persistence and unity of the world. This is why the agency of subordinate forms turned dominant can be understood as an expression of the ordained power of God.

Often the truth value of a scientific claim is dependent on our faith that laboratory experiments can model nature. When the nature that you are modelling is something as large as the tallest terrestrial mountain on earth, and as mysterious (at least until 1953) as the reaction of the human body to the highest point on the earth's surface, mapping between laboratory and ‘real world’ is a tricky process. The so-called ‘death zone’ of Mount Everest is a liminal space; a change in weather could make the difference between a survivable mountaintop and a site where the human respiratory system cannot maintain basic biological functions. Predicting what would happen to the first human beings to climb that high was therefore literally a matter of life or death – here inaccurate models could kill. Consequently, high-altitude respiratory physiology has prioritized not the laboratory, but the field. A holistic, environmentally situated sort of science used a range of (often non-scientific) expertise to prove the laboratory wrong time after time. In so doing, Everest was constructed paradoxically both as a unique field site which needed to be studied in vivo, and as a ‘natural laboratory’ which could produce generalizable knowledge about the human (male) body.

This essay explores how the scientific community interpreted the discoveries of extinct giant birds during the mid-nineteenth century on the islands of New Zealand and Madagascar. It argues that the Aepyornis of Madagascar was understood through the moa of New Zealand because of the rise of global networks and theories. Indeed, their global connections made giant birds a sensation among the scientific community and together forged theories and associations not possible in isolation. In this way, this paper argues for a closer look at how the creation of science emerged from a world framework that involved multiple sites of discovery and interpretation that continually influenced and reshaped scientific theories. It also stresses the importance of local naturalists in participating in this global exchange of knowledge.

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anatomy depended upon a variety of visual displays. Drawings in books, particularly expensive, beautiful and elaborately illustrated books that have been the objects of historians' fascination, were understood to function alongside chalk drawings done in classrooms, casual and formalized experience with animal and human corpses, text describing or contextualizing the images, and preserved specimens. This article argues that British anatomists of the late Enlightenment discovered and taught an intelligible, orderly Nature through comprehensive systems of display. These systems trained vision, and, taken as a whole, they can be used to understand a visual culture of science. Displays helped anatomists, artists and natural philosophers learn to see both the tiniest and the rarest of parts and an overall general plan of anatomy and relationship of parts. Each type of display was materially different from the others and each served to perfect human vision for a group of natural philosophers who valued sensory experience – primarily that of vision, but also that of touch – as the basis of learning. Together, these displays allowed the anatomist to see, in all of its dimensions, human nature, frozen in the ordered and unstressed state of fresh death, a comprehensible guide to life and its functions. A pedagogical context of use defined and bound such displays together as complementary parts of a unified project. A system of display stood in for Nature and at the same time represented her ordering by anatomists.