ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the use of silence by the scientist whose British Antarctic Survey (BAS) team discovered the ‘ozone hole’ over Antarctica in the early 1980s: Joseph Farman. Close attention to life story oral history interviews recorded with Farman and his colleagues reveals forms of silent presence and practice that were central to the acquisition and communication of scientific knowledge about damage to part of the planet’s atmosphere. I am not concerned with silence in the way that others using interviews
have tended to be: silence as gaps, pauses and omissions in the process of interviewing (Greenspan, 2014; Jesse, 2013; Layman, 2009). I ignore what Farman and others didn’t say in interview. Instead, I take what was said to reconstruct ways in which silence was a part of the way Farman worked, interacted with colleagues, viewed and presented results and, after the revelation of the ‘ozone hole’, communicated with journalists and politicians. In other accounts of the discovery of the ‘ozone hole’, short quotes from private
interviews with scientists, including Farman, are used to offer readers a view behind the scenes of science and an apparent closeness to people and facts (Booth, 1994; Roan, 1989). The use of interviews in this chapter could not be more different. I examine the agency of different kinds of silence by attending to several extended extracts from unusually long and detailed life story interviews recorded for National Life Stories’AnOral History of British Science at the British Library, available in full through the British Library sounds website.1
