{"id":20984,"date":"2018-01-13T13:43:37","date_gmt":"2018-01-13T20:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=20984"},"modified":"2018-01-13T13:45:11","modified_gmt":"2018-01-13T20:45:11","slug":"charles-darwin-mountaineer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/01\/charles-darwin-mountaineer\/","title":{"rendered":"MSU professor looks at how mountains shaped thinkers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Provost\"<\/a>

Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez\/MSU<\/p>

Michael Reidy, a history professor at Montana State University, will be speaking on Jan. 23, as part of the MSU Provost\u2019s Distinguished Lecturer Series.<\/p><\/div>\n

A Montana State University history professor whose work focuses on the impact of mountains on some of history\u2019s most influential scientific minds will discuss his work at Montana State University\u2019s next\u00a0Provost\u2019s Distinguished Lecturer Series,\u00a0<\/a>set for 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 23, in the Museum of the Rockies\u2019 Hager Auditorium.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Michael Reidy<\/a>\u00a0will lecture on “Mountaineering and Science:\u00a0How Alpinism Fundamentally Transformed the Nature of Scientific Research in the Nineteenth Century.” The lecture will be followed by a reception at 8.<\/p>\n

Reidy, who is the is the Michael P. Malone professor of history in MSU\u2019s\u00a0Department of History and Philosophy<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0College of Letters and Science<\/a>, has been studying how mountaineering experiences influenced important scientific thinkers in the 19th century, including Charles Darwin and John Tyndall.<\/p>\n

While Tyndall, an Irish scientist who was an early researcher of the natural greenhouse effect among other concepts, has long been associated with mountains \u2013 the Tyndall Glacier in Colorado\u2019s Rocky Mountain National Park was named for him, for instance \u2013 Darwin\u2019s work is usually associated with ships and islands. However, Reidy has found that Darwin\u2019s journals are full of inspiration resulting from trips the scientist took to two high mountain passes in Chile.<\/p>\n

\u201c(Darwin’s) writings transformed the way we think about geology, and his thinking about biogeography and mountains as barriers \u2013 as islands on the land \u2013 affected his thinking about coral reef formation and evolutionary theory,\u201d Reidy said.<\/p>\n

Reidy said he understands first-hand how experiences in mountains can have a transformational effect on research. A native of Mississippi who graduated with a bachelor\u2019s degree from the University of Notre Dame, Reidy spent nine summers on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska. His adventures there fostered an interest in the science of oceans and research into the history of tides.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love everything about science except for doing it,\u201d Reidy said. \u201cWhen I learned you could study science from a humanistic and cultural angle, when I found that there was a field that did that, I knew that\u2019s what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>That led to Reidy earning a doctorate in the history of science and technology from the University of Minnesota. His dissertation was on the early Victorians\u2019 study of tides. His book on the subject, \u201cTides of History,\u201d was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008. He is also the co-author of both \u201cExploration and Science,\u201d published by ABC-Clio in 2006, and \u201cCommunicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present,\u201d published by Oxford University Press in 2004.<\/p>\n

Reidy came to MSU in 2000 to join a department that has long been known for the quality of its historians of science and technology, beginning with professor emeritus Pierce Mullen and now including several noted environmental historians.<\/p>\n

\u201cOften the fields of science and humanities don\u2019t talk to each other, so it is important to have people in between the two spheres to fill the gaps,\u201d Reidy said.<\/p>\n

Reidy said that because there are no oceans in Montana, he turned his professional and recreational sights to the nearby mountains and became interested in how a change of perspective can revolutionize thought, something he calls \u201cvertical thinking.\u201d His longstanding interests in both the history of 19th-century scientific thinkers and mountaineering naturally led him to Tyndall, an experimental physicist who Reidy says was \u201cone of the most outspoken advocates and controversial defenders of science in the 19th century.\u201d Tyndall was also one of the pioneers of modern mountaineering, spending each summer climbing in the Swiss Alps.<\/p>\n

Reidy said that through Tyndall\u2019s position as a prominent \u201cscientist, lecturer, defender of naturalism and mountaineer,\u201d Tyndall built a network of friends and correspondents from nearly every field possible in the 19th century.<\/p>\n

\u201cA list of his correspondents in Britain and abroad reads like a \u2018who\u2019s who\u2019 of 19th century cultural and scientific life,\u201d Reidy said. Tyndall kept a correspondence with Darwin and other scientists including Michael Faraday, Asa Gray, Hermann Helmholtz, T. H. Huxley and Charles Lyell, as well as important literary figures, such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Alfred Tennyson.<\/p>\n

Tyndall died in 1893 when his wife accidentally gave him an overdose of a powerful narcotic he took for insomnia, Reidy said. Tyndall\u2019s widow received control of all of his journals, correspondence and unfinished writings so she could celebrate his life in a book. However, she had not published anything by the time she died in 1940.<\/p>\n

In recent years, Reidy has become one of a handful of historians in the world specializing in Tyndall and helping to resurrect Tyndall\u2019s work. Reidy is the general editor of the ongoing 19-volume John Tyndall Correspondence Project published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, a collection of writings by scholars from around the world who have collected Tyndall\u2019s prolific correspondence. The third volume of the set was published in December. He has also co-edited \u201cThe Age of Scientific Naturalism\u201d in 2014, a volume about Tyndall.<\/p>\n

Reidy said the legacy of Tyndall, Darwin and other innovative scientific thinkers inspired by time in the mountains is particularly relevant at MSU, where the vertical landscape influences a cadre of scientists and alpinists making new discoveries about the planet and beyond.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more we climb, the more we have access to what in the universe there is yet to know,\u201d Reidy said. \u201cWe still have room to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Montana State University history professor whose work focuses on the impact of mountains on some of history\u2019s most influential scientific minds will discuss his work at Montana State University\u2019s next\u00a0Provost\u2019s Distinguished Lecturer Series,\u00a0set for 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 23, in the Museum of the Rockies\u2019 Hager Auditorium.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":193,"featured_media":20985,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[401,6635,6637,6636,1065],"class_list":["post-20984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-montana","category-news","tag-charles-darwin","tag-distinguished-lecture-series","tag-john-tyndall","tag-michael-reidy","tag-montana-state-university","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/193"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20984"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20988,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20984\/revisions\/20988"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}