Snow that there was an unbridgeable divide between the “two cultures”, as Snow called them.) In the 1930s and into the early years of the war, Bronowski was, like many intellectuals then, a committed leftist. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he engaged minimally in discussions of science policy.īronowski can also stand as one of many British figures who straddled the worlds of science and letters (refuting the claim by chemist and novelist C. He had a brief stint at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris then, from around 1950 to 1964, he became director of the British National Coal Board’s new central research facility, where he focused on a project to make fuel briquettes from coal dust (not, as Sandefur implies, the first smokeless fuel). After the war, he worked on house-building techniques: affordable construction was crucial, not least because of the destruction caused by the Blitz. He conducted classified research on saturation bombing for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and travelled to Japan to document the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. For the next six years, he worked as a scientific civil servant. After graduating from the University of Cambridge, he taught at University College Hull in northern England from 1934 to 1943. From Cambridge to coalīronowski had a remarkably varied career as an academic and state-employed scientist. Yet Bronowski is interesting for what he was: a scientist and administrator, and a major popularizer of science. And at best, The Ascent of Man might be among the top television science documentaries. Chemist Michael Polanyi’s philosophical works, notably Personal Knowledge (1958), were in a different league from Bronowski’s mushy apologias, such as The Common Sense of Science (1951). Just among British mathematician-philosophers, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were more significant in both fields than Bronowski. There were more Renaissance men (and inequality meant that all too many were men) in the twentieth century than one can shake one’s specialist fist at. Sandefur describes him as more than a mere polymath, suggesting that he “was involved with nearly every major intellectual undertaking of the twentieth century” that he was a “serious philosopher” who made “probably the finest documentary film ever made”. Now, Timothy Sandefur, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute in Washington DC, makes great claims in The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski. It was followed that year by a book of the same name. Aiming to trace what art historian Kenneth Clark did not in his 1969 series Civilisation, Bronowski’s programme was a long look at the development of society through a scientific lens. ![]() More than half a century later, his finest hour came with the 1973 television series The Ascent of Man, made by the BBC. ![]() The Polish-born mathematician arrived in London in 1920, at the age of 12. The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski: The Life and Ideas of a Popular Science Icon Timothy Sandefur Prometheus (2019)įor millions of people in the 1970s, the name Jacob Bronowski was synonymous with science. Jacob Bronowski in a still from The Ascent of Man.
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