This paper examines how the production, content and reception of the film Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1924) influenced the historical framing of science. The film features microcinematography by the pioneering Dutch filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891–1954), and was part of a dynamic process of commemorating seventeenth-century microscopy and bacteriology through an early instance of visual re-creation – a new way of using scientific material heritage, and of enabling audiences to supposedly observe the world of microscopic organisms in just the same way as the Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) had observed them for himself. Knowledge transfer concerning material culture, around both historical and contemporary instruments, was the determining factor in the microcinematography practices applied in this film. The production and experience of the film also mirrored the seventeenth-century process of experimentation, playing with optics, and visualizing an entirely new and unknown world. Unlike other biographical science films of the 1920s, Antony van Leeuwenhoek featured abstract depictions of time and movement that allowed the audience to connect the history of science with microcinematography, contributing to the memory of Van Leeuwenhoek's work as the origins of bacteriology in the process.

Sketched in 1979 by graphic designer Peter Saville, the record sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures seemingly popularized one of the most celebrated radio-astronomical images: the ‘stacked plot’ of radio signals from a pulsar. However, the sleeve's designer did not have this promotion in mind. Instead, he deliberately muddled the message it originally conveyed in a typical post-punk act of artistic sabotage. In reconstructing the historical events associated with this subversive effort, this essay explores how, after its adoption as an imaging device utilized in radio astronomy, the stacked plot gave representation to the diplomacy agendas of two distinct groups. The post-punk reworking of the stacked plot exemplified the ambition of this artistic movement to attack the images associated with social conventions and norms by amplifying their ‘semantic noise’, and, in so doing, seeking to negotiate a social space for those sharing these subversive goals. Conversely, radio astronomers used the stacked plot to display the presence of interfering radio transmitters in the frequencies exclusively allocated to astronomical research, thus advocating the removal of this electronic noise in the context of international telecommunication negotiations. The article thus shows how the representation of different types of noise through similar images shaped contrasting ambitions in the separate domains of science diplomacy and everyday diplomacy.

This essay deals with the cultural-political motivations behind the cosmological conceptions of the Padua Aristotelian Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631). A defender of the interests of the university against Jesuit teachings, and one of the philosophers who was most frequently scrutinized by the Inquisition, he was an important actor in Venetian cultural politics during the years of European religious conflict that culminated in the Thirty Years War. In those years, he was officially titled ‘protector’ of the multi-confessional German Nation of Artists, one of the largest groups of foreign students at the University of Padua, and had to act as mediator in cases of conflict. His efforts to keep teaching free from religious concerns is reflected by his commitment to pursue philosophical and cosmological inquiries without engaging in revealed theology. In particular, his strict adherence to Aristotelian cosmology proved to be at odds with central Christian dogmas as it relinquished, among other concepts, the ideas of Creation and divine Providence. I argue that this position of Cremonini's fostered a tolerant and universalistic attitude in line with a secular programme that could enable cross-confessional coexistence in a cosmopolitan institution like Padua.

Joseph Needham occupies a central position in the historical narrative underpinning the most influential practitioner-derived definition of ‘science diplomacy’. The brief biographical sketch produced by the Royal Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science sets Needham's activities in the Second World War as an exemplar of a science diplomacy. This article critically reconsiders Needham's wartime activities, shedding light on the roles played by photographs in those diplomatic activities and his onward dissemination of them as part of his self-fashioning. Images were important to the British biochemist, and he was an avid amateur photographer himself, amassing a unique collection of hundreds of images relating to science, technology and medicine in wartime China during his time working as director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office. These included ones produced by China's Nationalist Party-led government, and by the Chinese Communist Party. Focusing on these photographs, this article examines the way Joseph Needham used his experiences to underpin claims to authority which, together with the breadth of his networks, enabled him to establish himself as an international interlocutor. All three aspects formed essential parts of his science diplomacy.

This article explores the complex process of integrating Tycho Brahe's theories into the Jesuit intellectual framework through focusing on the international community of professors who taught mathematics at the College of Saint Anthony (Colégio de Santo Antão), Lisbon, during the first half of the seventeenth century. Historians have conceived the reception of the Tychonic system as a straightforward process motivated by the developments of early modern astronomy. Nevertheless, this paper argues that the cultural politics of the Counter-Reformation Church curbed the reception of Tycho Brahe within the Jesuit milieu. Despite supporting the Tychonic geo-heliocentric system, which they explicitly conceived of as a ‘compromise’ between the ancient Ptolemy and the modern Copernicus, and making recourse to some of the cosmological ideas produced in Tycho's Protestant milieu, the Jesuits strove to confine the authority of the Lutheran astronomer to the domain of mathematics. Philosophy was expected to remain the realm of Catholic orthodoxy. Thus, while Tycho Brahe entered the pantheon of ‘Jesuit’ authorities, he nonetheless was not granted the absolute status of intellectual authority. This case demonstrates how the impact of confessionalization reached well beyond the formal processes of science censorship.