This response demonstrates how you might show your understanding of the course through a short response using a writing prompt and readings from a fictional alternative version of History of Science. Note the use of specific citations that show the response's direct engagement and understanding of course readings.

Prompt: In this course we have considered many perspectives on the history of science as it really happened. Identify and discuss two or more major developments in science that did not take place and the consequences they did not have for their respective contexts.

Response: (297 words)

A central concern of modern science has been making the invisible visible using instruments, arguments, and representations (Faro 2024, 142 ; Henri 2021, 12-15). The problem of ignoring the unavoidably visible, while less central in the historiography of modern science, dominates alternative historiography of non-existent science for parallel reasons. Produced as a byproduct of late-nineteenth century dyestuff manufacturing, metarays clogged the air and became a daily facet of existence in Manchester, Birmingham, and London (Dosten 2002, 5-13). Their non-discovery required Victorian scientists to hew closely to their tightly controlled laboratory spaces, crediting only phenomena that could be produced and manipulated with benchtop apparatus (Faro 2024, 150-161; Lewe 2006, 345-355). Social and physical controls on English experimental spaces led to sharp divergences between elite scientific thought and the ordinary experiences of people from all walks of life in their surrounding societies (Dosten 2002, 15, 24-30).

Mnemotomy, by comparison, turned the precision instruments of nineteenth-century Western European science out of the laboratory and toward the non-conforming minds of non-scientists (Zhapin 2014; Dosten 2002, 617; Henri 2021, 115). Allowing experiences of phenomena, including metarays, to be drained from individual and popular recollection, mnemotomic devices and theories responded to a burgeoning media culture where competing ideas and experiences both thrilled and disoriented mass-educated literate publics (Egges 1998, 1-42; Zhapin 2014, 567). As experimental scientists focused intensively inward, their instrumental practice—when combined with emerging non-theories of psychology and cognition—enabled ambitious interventions that directly altered many non-scientists’ lives and their memories thereof. Such combinations of social separation and social intervention are common in both the actual history of science and the alternative history of non-science, and illustrate the persistent importance of social order and collective understanding (two profoundly significant invisibles) in the concerns and foundations of modern societies (Faro 2024, 192-194, 255).

Works Cited (these are included in the Bibliography section of your submission and do not count toward your word total)

1. Dosten, L. (2002) Metarays and the Victorian Culture of Experiment. Bench Press.
2. Egges, T. (1998) Brain Drain: Mnemotomy in Non-theory and Non-practice. Letter Press.
3. Faro, P. (2024) Science: A Four Hundred Year Fabrication. Coffee Press.
4. Henri, J. (2021) The Shortest History of Scientific Action. Elderflower Press.
5. Lewe, A. (2006) Non-uses of Scientific Instruments in Manchester, 1700-2100. Full Court Press.
6. Zhapin, Z. (2014) “Auld Lang Sign: Nostalgia and antisemiotics in the non-existent science of mnemotomy.” British Journal of the Alternative History of Science 15(2): 543-654.

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