The group of research Science, Reason and Faith (CRYF ) of the University of Navarra invited last January 20th to Juan Meléndez SánchezProfessor of Physics at the University of Navarra, department Carlos III University of Madrid to talk about "Is it possible to be pop without being a whig?

The speaker showed that nowadays it is common to make a history of science of subject divulgative (pop) that is unfair to those who made it progress or to their contemporaries: it focuses only on the scientific claim without taking into account the context and the worldview of the time in which that claim was made. It judges only from what we know and not from what was known at the time.

This subject of proposals, which he calls whig, end up being stories of good guys and bad guys, and it seems that the difficulties that the truth encounters in breaking through are always the fault of occult forces, obscurantist assumptions, etc.

A paradigmatic case of pop and whig science history is that made by Carl Sagan in his monumental work entitled Cosmos: this thesis was illustrated with suggestive quotes at seminar.

Professor Meléndez's proposal , collected in a recently published book, focuses on how to make a story that is pop, that is, popular and accessible to the general public, without being whiggy; that is, without falling into simplistic or self-serving stereotypes.