Abstract
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This introduction discusses
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species 20 years after first formulating his ideas about natural selection. A preliminary abstract written in 1842 had, by 1844, expanded to 230 pages. Insecurities regarding the theory persisted, and in his autobiography, Darwin later argued that he had “gained much” and “lost nothing” by delaying publication until 1859 (Bowler, 2000: 303–304). Certainty took time: knowledge of patterns in nature depended on sustained reflection and the accumulation of empirical evidence. Nevertheless, Darwin's life also included one of the most famous and compressed episodes in the history of science. Upon receiving a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace in 1858, in which Wallace announced his intention to publish a paper outlining a nearly identical theory, Darwin was compelled to shift abruptly from a protracted process of thinking and writing to rapid action in a contest over priority. He hastily prepared his ideas for presentation in a paper read jointly with Wallace's before the Linnean Society in London (Toulmin and Goodfield, 1965: 204–205). Moreover, On the Origin of Species articulated a vast temporal scale of nature. For the theory to hold, millions of years—entire eras shaping species—were required. This was a timescale that could only be uncovered through systematic scientific investigation. In short, Darwin's work encapsulated interrelated timescales and rhythms: prolonged contemplation, swift intervention, and deep earth history.
The institutions, practices and methods of scientific knowledge making are profoundly related to time, often in tumultuous ways. Experimentation, fieldwork, interpretation, and writing proceed at different paces; conversely, science produces temporal imaginaries that imply or explicate timescapes ranging from billions of years to nanoseconds. As Hansun Hsiung, Laetitia Lenel and Anna-Maria Meister have argued, at the heart of creating knowledge are “cacophonic times” characterized by “competing tempos, rhythms and time scales” (Hsiung et al., 2023: 10).
In this special issue, we explore how nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific knowledge produced temporalities. Conceptually, we understand temporalities as ways in which time was described and experienced through “configurations, perceptions and measurements,” resulting from situated, historical and material practices, representations and interpretations (Champion, 2019: 247). As discussed by the research collective Lifetimes, time takes shape through “technologies, texts, mediations and visualizations” (The Lifetimes research collective, 2022: 5). In a similar vein, Bruno Latour once described time as the outcome of long-standing assemblages of technical practices and record-keeping rather than as an individual experience or an external physical reality (Latour, 2005). With a focus on such knowledge practices and records, one might critique the old Augustinian notion that time is ultimately beyond the grasp of human thought. As Latour puts it, this is an “extravagant claim” given that humans have produced evolutionary time, geological time, and historical time. Science has added temporalities to the world by continually describing and revolutionizing scales, velocities, and units of time through laboratories, collections, forecasts, and scientific journals (Latour, 2005).
In our articles, temporalities include depictions of relations between past, present, and future, as well as views on historical trajectories, previous eras, contemporary society, and future developments. We investigate how the sciences articulated temporal rhythms, directions, or continuities through knowledge of genetic diversity, alien species, geological strata, historical archives, deep sea cores, or graphs displaying publication patterns within science itself. The articles address climate models, collections from nature and culture, science-based risk assessments, as well as texts and materialities, including bio-material, soil, written documents, and images. We contend that temporalities in science should be examined through empirically grounded analyses of material and concrete practices of knowledge making, which in many cases become woven into the fabric of society. As Erik Isberg has argued, the ways in which “materials can become time” depend on “historical contingencies, knowledge regimes and the active labor of […] scientists” (Isberg, 2023: 19).
The contributors to this special issue come from adjacent fields of historical research, including history of science, history of humanities, intellectual history and environmental history. We share an interest in the cultural history of scientific knowledge, broadly construed. Moreover, all contributions examine historical cases and investigate the production of temporal ideas, concepts and images shifting over time. In this respect, our work is closely related to studies of “historical time.” As defined by Zoltán Boldiszár Simon and Marek Tamm, historical time is shaped by events, structures and norms in different settings and changes due to—using Reinhart Koselleck's formulation—“acting and suffering humans and their institutions and organizations” (Koselleck, 2004: 2; Simon and Tamm, 2023). Koselleck, Fernand Braudel, and Krysztof Pomian were early contributors to scholarship turning time from a background condition into an object of historical inquiry. The articles that follow are thus indebted to research demonstrating how “time has a history” (Tanaka, 2015).
At the same time, this special issue intervenes in research on historical time in three ways. First, we draw inspiration from scholarship on “multiple temporalities”—sometimes described as “entangled temporalities,” “polychronic history” or “mingled pasts, presents and futures.” This body of work has developed in critical dialogue with studies of overarching modern temporal regimes, such as those by Aleida Assmann, François Hartog, and aspects of Koselleck's oeuvre (Assmann, 2020; Hartog, 2015; Koselleck, 2004). In contrast, scholarship on multiple temporalities has argued that entangled times affect each other in any instance of the past (Tamm and Olivier, 2019: 2–3 and 10–14; Jordheim, 2012, 2014; Fareld, 2021). In the 1850s as much as in the 1970s, different timescales and rhythms were interconnected, sometimes moving in tandem and sometimes diverging. We investigate in some empirical detail how coexisting “threads of time” were composed in different historical settings (Fryxell, 2019: 296).
Second, as noted by Willibald Steinmetz, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Kirill Postoutenko, studies of historical time have often focused on ideas, intellectual debates or wholesale philosophies of history (Steinmetz et al., 2021). There is also a tendency to describe the natural sciences as a powerful driver of modernity (see, e.g. Assmann, 2020). Allegra Fryxell has suggested that “paradigms of modern time” typically emerged from “histories of science and colonialism,” particularly through precision measurements and nineteenth-century standardization (Fryxell, 2019: 287 and 294). Such narratives tend to black box the contexts and practices of the sciences. In contrast, we explore scholarly work that was not explicitly about time or theories of history. We also refrain from assigning science (as a monolith) to the modernizing forces. Rather than discussing overarching themes like Einsteinian relativity theory or global systems of time keeping, we examine how scientists contributed to multiple temporalities in practical ways, and suggest that research on temporalities benefits from a closer engagement with the sciences in their situated, material and concrete contexts.
Third, and conversely, we proceed from the assumption that research on temporalities and historical time can inform studies of scientific knowledge. Since the 1990s, much of the cultural history of the sciences have been organized around spatial analytical frameworks, emphasizing “the where of scientific work,” i.e. spaces, places and circulation of knowledge, while the timescales and rhythms of science have often remained in the background (Bergwik, 2025; Hussey and Douglas-Jones, 2024). As Filip Vostal, Libor Benda and Tereza Virtová have observed, studies of “the temporal structure of science” have been relatively limited (Vostal et al., 2019: 784 and 787).
Over the last decade, however, a growing discussion of the temporalities of science has emerged. Contributions such as Hsiung, Lenel and Meister's discussion about “entangled temporalities” exemplify efforts to integrate questions of temporality into historical analyses of scientific knowledge (Hsiung et al., 2023: 11–12). Vostal, Benda and Virtová analyze scientific discoveries as comprising experimental, cognitive, and institutional temporal dimensions, including processes of synchronization among scientific practitioners (Vostal et al., 2019: 785–787 and 794). Scholars like Ulrike Felt and Oili-Helena Ylijoki have studied universities and their governing temporal regimes, arguing that academic time is structured through disciplinary, career and project time, as well as through temporal orderings like projectification or future thinking (Felt, 2016; Ylijoki, 2016). Furthermore, discussing “laboratory time,” Kristin D. Hussey and Rachel Douglas-Jones explore how the laboratory figures in “times studies.” Drawing on ethnography, they argue that research can illuminate how time is experienced and manipulated in laboratory settings, as well as how laboratories themselves produce time (Hussey and Douglas-Jones, 2024: 2).
While this special issue resonates with these discussions, we pursue a somewhat different path in approaching scientific temporalities. Our contributions focus on historical cases, often situated outside laboratories or other scientific settings, and they do not adopt ethnographic methods. Moreover, the cases examined here do not primarily concern scientific endeavors that explicitly study time. Instead, the articles in this special issue touch upon scientific knowledge and discourse related to other phenomena, such as invasive species, historical remnants or biological diversity. In this sense, we address knowledge in the past that contributed to ideas about “measuring and thinking about time” (Hussey and Douglas-Jones, 2024: 4), but often in implicit ways.
The following articles offer multiple examples of how scientific knowledge making produced temporalities. Emma Hagström Molin shows how nineteenth-century Baltic-German scholars shaped historical time through their accounts of the past of the Baltic region of Livonia. These researchers mobilized historical knowledge to create or reestablish social and political privileges. In a manner characteristic of Western historiography in the nineteenth century, they separated a German Christian past from indigenous times. In academic historical narratives, Livonian history was understood to begin only with German colonization of the provinces. Hagström Molin analyzes the synchronization of historical time into orders, relationships and differences, for example, between a German and ostensibly “civilized” timeline, and a “pagan pre-time.” Time-binding practices included the collection and arrangement of material traces, through which periods, processes, and events of history were rendered intelligible.
Erik Isberg examines a case from natural history by focusing on deep-sea core research in the 1970s. What began as a small scientific field gradually developed into a key arena for producing visions of past, present and future climates. As Isberg indicates, emerging imaginations of planetary futures became closely connected to visions of a geological past derived from deep-sea cores. This research produced multiple temporalities, collapsing distinctions between past and future, and contributing to broader discussions of how planetary futures might be modeled. As Isberg concludes, at a time when “abstract notions of ‘planetary time’ or ‘deep time’ abound in humanities research and societal debates at large, following how geoscientific timescales enter political frameworks is worthy of scholarly attention.”
The production of futurity is also central to Emil Flatø's article, which investigates a chapter in the history of long-termism. Departing from the concern that long-term thinking threatens to become “chronowashing,” with Michelle Bastian's term, Flatø investigates a cluster of scientists and intellectuals in the 1960s, engaged in what he describes as “jet set science.” This milieu generated a knowledge infrastructure oriented toward producing insights into the future. As Flatø argues, future studies merged with climate science in debates about long-term thinking; the future became an objective (rather than object) of knowledge making.
Marit Ruge Bjaerke addresses invasion biology in the twenty-first century and examines how this research field both depends upon and produces spatiotemporal understanding. Assessments of species migrating across the globe—and thus potentially becoming “invasive species”—generate what Bjaerke terms a “chronotope of evolution.” This temporal framework posits slow and natural adaptation of species to their surroundings as a normative ideal of co-existence over time, largely, beyond human intervention. By contrast, risk assessments of invasive species involve “time-binding practices,” that project possible and continuously extended futures in order to communicate risks of invasion, often in relation to the broader hazards associated with climate change.
In his article, Adam Wickberg examines how economic theory, and in particular neoliberal economics, contributed to a notion of “sustainable development” in the face of climate change around 1990. The idea of sustainable development emerged in relation to a joint global response to climate change, including the founding of the IPCC and the Rio Declaration. Notions of sustainable development emerged from a clash of temporalities, between on the one hand a human time of politics and economics, and on the other hand the timescales of the Earth system. The fundamental contradiction to be solved was between ideals of economic growth and environmental protection. Ideas about sustainable developments were an attempt to reconcile the wish for global economic developments with human impact on the Earth system. Notions of sustainable developments were a way of bringing together conflicting temporalities of human and natural time. The answer was to “mortgage the future.”
The shaping of temporalities by the sciences is also powerfully exemplified in knowledge about geological deep time that emerged in the eighteenth century. In his article, Leander Diener intervenes in scholarship on this well-known episode in the history of the natural sciences by investigating how geologists sought access to Earth's history through practices designed to reveal timescales hidden in the ground. In response to epistemological challenges, they developed what Diener calls “tempotechnical practices” to make deep time accessible to understanding and display. Geological experiments offered opportunities to reclaim epistemic power by bringing deep time into scientifically manageable timescales. Through tempotechnical practices, human time was synchronized with geological time: processes that unfolded over vast eras were reproduced within hours in a laboratory setting. As Diener notes, “eons were compressed in a few minutes.” Deep time, he argues, thus consists not only of vertiginous timescales beyond human understanding but also of the “engineerability” of geological timescales.
Through his analysis, Diener adds to our joint ambition of investigating scientific temporalities as they are produced in sometimes mundane practices, materialities and methods. Geologists, he shows, reproduced deep time through “dirty, muddy, dusty handwork.” In this process, deep time was refashioned as “an epistemic thing,” rendered both explorable and manageable. Erik Isberg makes a similar case by foregrounding the material and situated character of scientific knowledge production. Teutonic changes in temporal worldviews emerge from somewhere, in Isberg's case from something as tangible as clay retrieved from the ocean floor.
Emma Hagström Molin displays how a related analysis can be applied to historical writing and the mobilization of material fragments of the past. German scholars labored to create archives, libraries and museums, through which historical time emerged from material things. Hagström Molin argues that the rallying of remnants functioned as a means of binding and synchronizing time, relating disparate periods to one another. At the same time, German-Baltic historiography in Livonia developed into a narrative of decline, mirrored in the loss of large portions of the past. The chronological timeline of Livonian history thus became fragmented due to scarcity of surviving fragments; sources lost became as consequential for historical writing as sources found.
Emil Flatø likewise takes seriously the materials and practices involved in producing knowledge about time, including papers, interactions and frequent air travel that brought intellectuals together in “jet set science.” Entrepreneurs operating in elite settings worked to coordinate an “assemblage,” thereby exerting considerable influence over thinking about long-term futures through transnational, interdisciplinary and technological coordination. Flatø makes a particular case for “document analysis,” arguing that documents were not merely containers of historical discourse but also vehicles for tying together a community and its knowledge infrastructure. His study of long-termism thus reveals “the nuts and bolts of how shared futures are shaped by the interests of powerful actors.”
In my (Bergwik) article, I examine early “scientometrics” and debates on scientific citations between 1950 and 1980, which generated ideas about the temporal direction and rhythms of science. I focus in particular on how the scientific publication became a locus for shaping temporalities through language and imageries. Narratives and visual representations, I argue, were “time-binding techniques,” arranging and displaying temporalities. Timescales of science emerged in papers, words and chronographics, that turned time into an intelligible phenomenon. Past, present and future were not simply sequential but intertwined in the time-binding techniques of scientometrics. From such displays emerged notions of both progress and the potential threats posed by unchecked scientific growth.
Although emerging in and through practical research, scientific temporalities brought science and politics into dialog throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scientists offered expertise on the long-term, identified imminent crises, and articulated narratives of societal transformation, thereby shaping policymaking and the governance of society.
In her article, Julia Nordblad investigates notions of time emerging from discussions about plant genetic resources and evolution among UN-affiliated scientists in the 1960s and 1970s. Concerns about a loss of biological variations came to the fore, as scientists framed the future of evolution and the basic conditions for agriculture as being at stake. Perceived risks of genetic erosion were deeply entangled with political questions concerning social organization. In particular, Nordblad discusses how biologists articulated an opposition between developmental temporalities and the timescales of evolution. Ongoing changes threatened both the evolution of human shaped agricultural crops and evolution in the wild, the latter unfolding across vast temporal spans.
Temporal questions thus became political and ethical imperatives to protect evolution for future generations, understood as the foundation of human existence and a livable world. Evolutionary time had emerged in nature, yet it now required deliberate intervention and protection within society. According to biologists, internationally coordinated social institutions needed to steer and maintain evolutionary processes, they were called upon to assume control over a material development that had previously shaped societal transformation but now appeared to endanger the very foundations of those developments. Questions concerning the temporalities of nature and society were, in this sense, political through and through.
The entanglement of scientific temporalities and politics is also evident in other contributions. As Adam Wickberg shows, political considerations decisively shaped the notion of sustainable development and the associated idea of mortgaging the future. Sustainability relied on technological development, market forces, and economic theory—a scientific temporality rooted in economics with significant policy impact. Emerging in the 1970s after decades of global economic expansion, sustainability built on a post–World War II “growth-by-industrialization-paradigm” aimed at fostering development in both industrialized and developing regions. In the 1990s, it was reformulated as “sustainable development,” rendering it compatible with the demands of late capitalism. Wickberg argues that temporality is key to understanding this connection. Policy frameworks came to address environmental problems by deferring their resolution to an envisaged future, typically some three decades ahead, thus enabling visions of technological remedies. Such frameworks remained confined to the very logic of technological progress that produced the problems, imposing “an economic temporality” on Earthly temporalities. Sustainable development, ultimately, privileged human time over Earth time.
Marit Ruge Bjaerke analyzes Norwegian guidelines for risk assessments of invasive species between 2007 and 2023, showing how measurements and policy recommendations increasingly incorporated threats associated with high-emission scenarios and a radically altered climate. One consequence was the classification of certain species as “killable,” with time itself becoming an argument for preventing species from entering Norwegian fauna. Although these scientifically based risk assessments presented themselves as “neutral,” explicitly refraining from addressing societal and economic effects, there were, as Bjaerke emphasizes, “no such thing as a neutral future.” Similarly, Isberg demonstrates how deep-sea core research was interpreted in relation to politically fraught questions of overpopulation and future energy production. Ongoing debates reshaped oceanographic studies of sediments, reconfiguring their material into entirely new applications. Oceanographers undertook “disciplinary and temporal jumps” in order to address questions such as the world's food supply in impending futures.
In my article, I argue that temporalities produced in scientometrics carried research policy implications. Put differently, conceptions of the history of science and narratives of the rapid, ongoing expansion in research generated policy effects. Accounts of the timescales of science defined a condition of contemporary society situated within a chronological temporal flow. These descriptions, in turn, produced a perceived need for rational science policies, understood as forms of stewardship over science itself. If, as scientometrics suggested, scholarly research was undergoing an information explosion, society was compelled to accommodate, guide, and govern that information, transforming it into viable and sustainable scholarship.
Over the last decade, humanities research has increasingly emphasized conflicting temporal scales, with human induced climate change and species extinction as drivers. Among the starting points were Dipesh Chakrabarty's 2009 article “The Climate of History” and an increasing interest in the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty, 2009). Explanations of a changing climate caused by humans is moreover a pivotal factor behind a “collapse of the humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (Chakrabarty, 2021: 26; Simon and Tamm 2023: 7).
More broadly, scholars have described the early twenty-first century as an era of “temporalization,” where long-term and short-term timescales are increasingly interconnected. These shifts both create and upend historical understanding, shaping a turbulent landscape of discourse on chronology and progress. They also challenge conventional ideas about history and distinctions between past, present, and future (Bergwik and Ekström, 2022; Renn, 2020; Verburgt and de Waal, 2022). There is, in the words of Zoltan Boldisar Simon and Marek Tamm, “tears in the fabric of modern historical time” (Simon and Tamm, 2023: 16).
This development demands renewed scholarly focus, akin to the way postcolonial studies emerged in the 1970s, following decolonization. In response, scholars in the humanities increasingly explore historical, social, and cultural timescales with an interest in manifold and conflicting temporalities of nature, culture and politics (Bergwik and Ekström, 2022; Chakrabarty, 2021).
With this special issue, we hope to contribute to that research, by way of offering—to echo Julia Nordblad in her framing of her article—an intellectual history of scientific thinking about multiple timescales. Ultimately, we seek to contribute to a disentanglement of some the intricate ways in which knowledge making practices shape temporal thinking.
Footnotes
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Grant No. P24-0202).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.