Focusing on Menippus’ description of his celestial journey and the great cosmic distances he has travelled, I argue that Icaromenippus is a playful point of reception for mathematical astronomy. Through his acerbic satire, Lucian intervenes in the traditions of cosmology and astronomy to expose how the authority of the most technical of scientific hypotheses can be every bit as precarious as the assertions of philosophy, historiography, or even fiction itself. Provocatively, he draws mathematical astronomy – the work of practitioners such as Archimedes and Aristarchus – into the realm of discourse analysis and pits the authority of science against myth. Icaromenippus therefore warrants a place alongside Plutarch’s On the Face of the Moon and the Aetna poem, other works of the imperial era that explore scientific and mythical explanations in differing ways, and Apuleius’ Apology, which examines the relationship between science and magic. More particularly, Icaromenippus reveals how astronomy could ignite the literary imagination, and how literary works can, in turn, enrich our understanding of scientific thought, inviting us to think about scientific method and communication, the scientific viewpoint, and the role of the body in the domain of perhaps the most incorporeal of the natural sciences, astronomy itself.

In science, to be ‘conservative’ is to understate your findings. In insurance, it means the opposite: erring on the side of overstatement of risks. For a clear assessment of the risks of climate change, we need these two cultures to meet in the middle. This requires a separation of tasks: between those who gather information, and those who assess risk.

Neither scientists, nor economists, nor insurers, nor military planners have assessed the risks of climate change in full. Heads of government are left to guess. A clear understanding of the scale of the risks will not on its own guarantee a proportionate response. But unless we have such an understanding, we can hardly be surprised if our response is inadequate.

People often assume that to give ourselves a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we need either inspired political leadership, or a moral revolution in society. Both would be nice to have, but there are more plausible ways to make faster progress. They involve thinking differently. We need science that gives us risk assessment instead of prediction; economics that understands change instead of assuming stability; and diplomacy that focusses on international collaboration instead of unilateral national action.

This chapter aims to redescribe the IPCC through the analytical framework of the book by identifying the actors, activities and forms of authority that shape the organisation and its assessment practice. Reviewing existing studies of the IPCC, the chapter begins by identifying two central concerns within this scholarship: first, the relationship between science and politics and second, the asymmetries between developed and developing country participation. The chapter contributes to this literature by using the framework of the book to identify the IPCC as five distinct units: the panel, the bureau, the technical support units (TSUs), the secretariat and the authors. This identifies other forms of authority that matter alongside scientific and political forms, most importantly the administrative, as found within the TSUs. Describing the historical emergence of the social order over thirty years and six assessment cycles reveals the relationship between economic capital and meaningful participation. It requires economic and human resources to undertake IPCC activities, and it through this investment individual actors and member government becomes meaningful and authoritative participants, with knowledge of and the symbolic power to write the meaning of climate change.

I open the book with the political struggle that took place between parties at COP24, over whether the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C should be noted or welcomed. This provides the context for exploring the IPCC as a central site in and producer of climate politics. In the chapter, I take the reader back to where this study began, with the question, who has the power to define climate change for collective response and what constitutes this power? The answer the book offers is the practice of writing. The actors, activities and forms of authority framework provides the analytical framework for exploring the asymmetries in power to effect how climate change is written. This approach has developed from interviews, observation and extensive data collection from IPCC documentation. The resulting book takes the reader on a journey into the intricate details of writing an assessment, the social order through which it is written and how climate change is known and acted upon through the process.

The character Astro Boy, which was called “child of science” in the 1963 anime series, is related here to Imperial Japan’s wartime policy of science. The term “child of science” was also applied to other characters at the time of the Asia-Pacific War, and intriguingly, the use of it covered not only mechanical but also human children. Seeking to find answers to the question of how such different things could be subsumed under the same term, the focus is on the empire’s policies and discourses of scientific warfare, and how they transformed children’s media of entertainment and education – manga, magazines, toys, and music – and even children’s bodies into weaponry at perceptual and physical levels. The issue of the “weaponization” of human bodies helps to reconsider the military traits and the subhuman qualities of Astro Boy. Extending this to Imperial Japan’s history of child soldiers, and conducting both intratextual and transtextual research of related anime and manga by Osamu Tezuka, this study brings to light the unnarrated life of Tobio, the human original of Astro Boy, as well as the implication of his premature death.

In the concluding chapter, I look back at the question I began with and the answer I found in the practice of writing. I re-visit accounts of science and politics and describe the three sides to this relationship that I observed in the IPCC. I identify sites within the UNFCCC that have been designed to bring climate science and climate politics closer together, such as in the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement. While this brings accountability against the approved knowledge base, it is likely to further increase the political pressure on the IPCC as an organisation and as a practice for writing climate change. From the IPCC’s location in global climate politics, I move inward to the actors, activities and forms of authority that constitute and shape this practice of writing. The book reveals the importance of looking beyond scientific and political forms of authority and describes why the TSUs matter as actors that have the potential to uphold or challenge the scientific order of relations. I explore the implications of science as a site of politics, the global asymmetries in the knowledge economy, and their effects on participation for the design of new intergovernmental assessment bodies, which from the outset must design for meaningful participation by all in these critical sites of agreement-making.

This chapter focuses on the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), Health and Physical Education, Science, Technologies and Languages and we approach these areas using the critical framework of the Ten Teacher Questions. We hope that you may revisit Chapter 6 to refresh your understanding of the ACARA Cross-curriculum Priorities, and as you progress into the Teaching Ideas of this chapter.

The nature of religions, why they cannot really be distinguished from culture and other ideological products, and what the political implications are, including regarding the “separation of church and State.”

This chapter takes on the nature of scientific activity, particularly in medicine, setting out to defend the "Systematicity Thesis," which posits that medicine, like science, is systematic inquiry. Referencing literature on the demarcation issue in philosophy of science, it maintains that despite the failure of established approaches, the issue should not be abandoned. Science, it suggests, is a family resemblance concept unified not by an intrinsic property but by a relational property that allows gradational differences from nonscientific pursuits. Using Hoyningen-Huene’s (2013) account of systematicity as a necessary criterion for science, the chapter shows that both medical science and clinical medicine meet this criterion. In a critical dialogue with Oreskes (2019), the thesis is applied and tested, demonstrating that homeopathy lacks the systematicity present in scientific pursuits, making it vulnerable to biases. It also underscores that systematicity fosters reasoning and inquiry that yield reliable knowledge and understanding.

Chapter 25 examines Goethe’s Italian journey of 1786–8, the turning point in his life. It was crucial not only in furthering his knowledge of antiquity, which had been the original purpose of his journey, but also for his development as a poet and as a human being. The chapter focuses in particular on his time in Sicily, which Goethe had wanted to visit as a proxy for ancient Greece, but which exerted a lasting influence both on his aesthetics and on his science. For Goethe, Italy represented an organic fusion of nature and culture.

Swift was not the first satirist and parodist to explore science and its texts and technologies, but his works demonstrated an acute sophistication in how they assimilated and imaginatively transformed natural knowledge, as often a vehicle as a target of satire, and with a recognition of science’s increasing cultural power. The first section of this chapter reconstructs the sources and systems that influenced Swift’s allusions to contemporary science, and how they shaped his early prose. The second section looks at the influence of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions and other scientific and ethnographic writings on the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels.