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Svante Lindqvist, Director of the Nobel Museum, to speak at UC Berkeley: The Nobel Prize as Mirror of 20th Century Science and Culture

There are two peaks in the annual media reporting on the Nobel Prize: initially the first week in October when this year's prizes are announced, and later around December 10 when the Prizes are physically awarded in Stockholm and in Oslo. Each year new critical voices are heard. Is there is a pattern to this criticism? The lecture will discuss some of the most common objections raised each year against the Nobel Prize. It is argued that the criticism is interesting, not so much for what it tells us about views on the Nobel Prize, but as a mirror in itself of 20th-century science and culture.

Svante Lindqvist (b. 1948) was appointed Museum Director of the Nobel Museum in 1998, a position he still holds. Previously he held a chair as Professor of History of Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and he was Chairman of its Department for History of Science and Technology since 1989. He has a M.Sc.Eng. (Physics) from the Royal Institute of Technology (1977) and a Ph.D. in History of Science and Ideas from Uppsala University (1984). He was a Visiting Scholar in the Office for History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, during the academic year 1986–1987, and a Visiting Professor in the Department for History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania during the fall semester of 1992. During the academic year 1995–96, he was an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. In the fall of 2003 he was a Visiting Professor in the STS Program at MIT.

Wednesday, September 21, at 4 pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall
University of California, Berkeley
3 Crowns