Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

Drawing on several disciplinary areas, this article considers diverse cultural concepts of time, space, and materiality. It explores historical shifts in ideas about time, observing that these have gone full circle, from visions in which time and space were conflated, through increasingly divergent linear understandings of the relationship between them, to their reunion in contemporary notions of space-time.

Making use of long-term ethnographic research and explorations of the topic of Time at Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study (2012–13), the article considers Aboriginal Australian ideas about relationality and the movement of matter through space and time. It asks why these earliest explanations of the cosmos, though couched in a wholly different idiom, seem to have more in common with the theories proposed by contemporary physicists than with the ideas that dominated the period between the Holocene and the Anthropocene. The analysis suggests that such unexpected resonance between these oldest and newest ideas about time and space may spring from the fact that they share an intense observational focus on material events. Comparing these vastly different but intriguingly compatible worldviews meets interdisciplinary aims in providing a fresh perspective on both of them.

This article investigates the role of listening in the knowledge making practices of Western scientists, engineers, and physicians from the 1920s onwards. It does so by offering a two-dimensional typology of the modes of listening that they employ. Distinguishing between two dimensions allows us to make sense both of the purpose and of the ways in which scientists, engineers, and physicians have listened to their objects of study; and it also allows us to appreciate the importance of shifting between modes of listening. At the same time, we argue, understanding the role of sound in knowledge making cannot be limited to the study of listening alone; rather, we have to pay attention to how listening is embedded in broader sonic skills — including the handling of tools for the making, recording, storing, and retrieving of sounds.

Cohn (1996) and Taruskin (1985) consider the increasing prominence during the nineteenth century of harmonic progressions derived from the hexatonic and octatonic pitch collections respectively. This development is clearly evident in music of the third quarter of the century onwards and is a consequence of forces towards non-diatonic organization latent in earlier music. This article conceptualizes such forces as memetic — drawing a distinction between memetic processes in music itself and those in the realm of music theory — and interprets the gradualistic evolution of tonal systems as one of their most significant consequences. After outlining hypotheses for the mechanisms driving such evolution, it identifies a number of ‘musemes’ implicated in hexatonic and octatonic organization in a passage from Mahler's Symphony no. 10. Pople's (2002) Tonalities music-analysis software is used to explore the tonal organization of the passage, which is considered in relation to the musemes hypothesized to generate and underpin it.

The appropriation of scientific concepts by the humanities and the visual arts exemplifies what many feel are both the pitfalls and possibilities of interdisciplinary engagement. The principle of entropy, which C. P. Snow claimed could serve as a litmus test of the ‘two cultures’ divide, provides an excellent starting point for exploring how artists have employed scientific concepts far beyond their original contexts. As a case study in interdisciplinarity, the use of entropy in the visual arts is also a lens to consider the evolution of an artistic proposal from the 1960s known as ‘system aesthetics’. As an early challenge to the clean demarcation of art and science, system aesthetics was a precedent for what might be described as the emergence of an ecosystem aesthetics within contemporary art and design today.

The disparity between men and women in science is a hot topic in gender studies and a relevant target of scientific policies. The leaky pipeline metaphor illustrates the decreasing number of women along senior positions in academia; however many questions remain unanswered. What factors progressively diminish the number of women in scientific careers and why do they appear to be less successful than their male colleagues? In order to discover new insight, this work compares men's and women's career paths by taking into account academic and family milestones achieved throughout the life course. An innovative and interdisciplinary methodology (from bibliometrics, statistics, and sociology) has been constructed to examine men's and women's trajectories. Findings display gender differences in scientists’ trajectories. The evolution of scientists’ careers reveals linear careers for males, whilst women develop non-linear careers. Motherhood emerges as a problem for developing linear careers. And collegiate decisions of gatekeepers seem to systematically disfavour women scientists’ careers.

Hans-George Gadamer's dialectic of enlightenment is my point of reference. I mean to recover and revise Gadamer's thought by shifting it from a philosophical to a philological perspective. From the living example of certain individuals, I propose a model of humanist inquiry that seems to me worth preserving and emulating, particularly now when educational policy is reinvesting so heavily in the technical expertise offered by the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).