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HELGA NOWOTNY Past President, European Research Council and Professor Emerita of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich

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HELGA NOWOTNY Past President, European Research Council and Professor Emerita of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich HELGA NOWOTNY Past President, European Research Council and Professor Emerita of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich Helga Nowotny is Professor Emerita of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich, and a founding member of the European Research Council. In 2007 she was elected ERC Vice President and in March 2010 succeeded Fotis Kafatos as President of the ERC. Her term as President of the ERC ended in December 2013. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, NY. and a doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Vienna. After a distinguished teaching and research career with positions in Vienna, Bielefeld, Cambridge, Berlin, Paris, Budapest and Zurich, her current host institution is the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). Helga Nowotny is a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a long standing member the Academia Europaea; member of the Governing Board of the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and of other international Advisory Boards and selection committees. Among the prizes and awards she has received is the J. D. Bernal Prize for her life-long achievements in STS, and doctorates honoris causa from several European universities. In November 2013 she received a doctor honoris causa at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She has published widely in social studies of science and technology and on social time. Her latest book publications include “Naked Genes, Reinventing the human in the molecular age”, (with Giuseppe Testa), MIT Press, 2011, “Insatiable Curiosity, Innovation in a Fragile Future”, MIT Press, 2008, and “Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation (ed.)”, New York and London, 2006. The embarrassment of complexity: A phase of transition? Innovation, it is sometimes said, turns the future into past. Conservation, one might add, turns the past into the future. Within each transformation processes a crucial selection mechanisms mediates and steers between the different temporal stages. In the case of heritage science, its function consists in bringing to life in the present what is deemed to be preserved from the past – heritage. The operation is carried out through a highly selective and dynamic filtering process, a kind of evolution in reverse. Only that is retained as valuable from the past which meets the criteria of being assessed as worthy for the present and, potentially, also for the future. In my presentation I will explore how this reduction of complexity of and from the past takes place. What was seen as highly relevant in the past may no longer possess relevance for the present, and what is relevant today may be projected backwards into the past, leading to a different process of selection. This applies to material artefacts as much as to immaterial ideas and sentiments, all of which are interwoven together into what Murray Gell-Mann described as ‚a crude whole’. Next I will delve into how the reduction of the complexity of heritage can actually be achieved: for whom and who is carrying it out. I will argue that modern interactive technology provides new tools for new types of collaborations and novel forms of sharing. Collaborative research, involving lay persons as much as professional researchers, is ideally suited for this task. The search for a shared identity which tacitly underlies much of heritage science, is best met by setting up such collaborative research, as identity is best built by interacting with each other. .
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