the Doctor uses the example of James Watt's kettle to illustrate how small things can lead to great discoveries
Although he as a scientist would surely know that the tale is wholly fictitious. (Watt after all, did not invent the steam engine he improved the existing steam engine with an idea which is not related to the kettle).
Ah, but the Doctor claims that he was with Watt at the time! Presumably this is because the script-writer (Glyn Jones) had not bothered to look into the story in any detail, and was simply trying to insert the Doctor into a famous 'historical' story. But it does get right to the heart of the sort of issues I'll be talking about in my conference paper about this.
You're probably right that the kettle story is fictitious - but actually in the absence of time travel we can never be completely sure. And this is why Doctor Who offers such a great medium for raising and exploring the issues involved in the writing of history. It places what actual historians do alongside the fictional concept of what a time traveller can do, and asks us to think about the differences between the two. It's incredibly exciting.
What we can be sure of is that Watt was not led to his famous inventions by looking at a kettle -- his inventions were things like a separate condenser, gearing systems and speed governors are not present in kettles. You can find more than you would ever want to know about the famous Kettle Myth here
( ... )
My point here, though, is that we can never be 100% sure of the truth of anything from the past. How do we even know that James Watt really existed, for example? His actions and life as we think we know them could actually be the result of an extremely clever series of forgeries.
Obviously we can weigh up the probabilities, and argue for what seems to be the most plausible case, but we can never achieve complete certainly about what 'really' did or didn't happen in the past. (Philosophers, of course, would add that we can't be any more certain about how 'real' anything we think we are experiencing in the present is either). This is one of the issues that time travel stories throw up - they invite us to compare our own situation with the hypothetical situation of a time traveller, thus underlining the limitations which restrict our knowledge of the past.
*laugh* Isn't that a rather dangerous position for a historian to take?
[Even if one time travels it could, of course, be argued that the James Watt looking eagerly at a kettle one encountered was merely an actor/hallucination/clever simulacrum and so on -- so you really still haven't proved it. Outside the realms of mathematics and philosophy I guess everything is pretty uncertain really.]
Kind of liberating too, though. It means you can start to say things like - well, since we will never know what actually happened in the past, let's focus instead on how people in the present have interpreted the past, and what that says about what is important to us today. That's great fun, and is part of what the author of the kettle article you linked to is doing, actually - and I meant to say before, thanks for the link, because that really is an excellent article.
Of course you're right that even a time traveller may not interpret what they're seeing correctly - and, to go back to the example from Doctor Who that sparked all this off, the Doctor could also be lying when he says that he met James Watt and saw his kettle experiments. It's totally in keeping with his character to do so - I think he lies about (or at least obscures) quite a lot of things.
since we will never know what actually happened in the past, let's focus instead on how people in the present have interpreted the past, and what that says about what is important to us today.
Hooray for historiography. If you study how historiography was studied in the past and what it says about what is important today then I've heard the worm Ouroborus rises to devour you but it happens very slowly indeed.
Although he as a scientist would surely know that the tale is wholly fictitious. (Watt after all, did not invent the steam engine he improved the existing steam engine with an idea which is not related to the kettle).
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You're probably right that the kettle story is fictitious - but actually in the absence of time travel we can never be completely sure. And this is why Doctor Who offers such a great medium for raising and exploring the issues involved in the writing of history. It places what actual historians do alongside the fictional concept of what a time traveller can do, and asks us to think about the differences between the two. It's incredibly exciting.
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Obviously we can weigh up the probabilities, and argue for what seems to be the most plausible case, but we can never achieve complete certainly about what 'really' did or didn't happen in the past. (Philosophers, of course, would add that we can't be any more certain about how 'real' anything we think we are experiencing in the present is either). This is one of the issues that time travel stories throw up - they invite us to compare our own situation with the hypothetical situation of a time traveller, thus underlining the limitations which restrict our knowledge of the past.
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[Even if one time travels it could, of course, be argued that the James Watt looking eagerly at a kettle one encountered was merely an actor/hallucination/clever simulacrum and so on -- so you really still haven't proved it. Outside the realms of mathematics and philosophy I guess everything is pretty uncertain really.]
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Of course you're right that even a time traveller may not interpret what they're seeing correctly - and, to go back to the example from Doctor Who that sparked all this off, the Doctor could also be lying when he says that he met James Watt and saw his kettle experiments. It's totally in keeping with his character to do so - I think he lies about (or at least obscures) quite a lot of things.
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Hooray for historiography. If you study how historiography was studied in the past and what it says about what is important today then I've heard the worm Ouroborus rises to devour you but it happens very slowly indeed.
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