The second installment in the CRT's fall seminar series invites Prof. Charles Thorpe from the University of California, San Diego. We invite you to join for a guided discussion with lunch at 12:30pm and the seminar beginning at 1pm.
Seminar Abstract: Science is the universal culture and common property of humanity. Science is also an essential means of power and has been financially supported by nation states for its utility for military technology, while military problems have been an important spur to the development of scientific knowledge. The universality of science stands in contradiction with its mobilization for the particular power interests of states. Today, weapons of mass destruction, products of science, threaten human survival. Global scientific cooperation is necessary for securing the future of what is now a globally interconnected human species, as made evident by climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. In the relationship between science and war, the contradiction between the nation state and a globally interdependent humanity has its sharpest expression.
Charles Thorpe is professor in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago, 2006), on physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the politics of the atomic bomb and, most recently, Sociology in Post-Normal Times (Lexington, 2022).