August 2008 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Fun with Wikipedia

I mentioned a while ago that I was thinking of rewriting the Wikipedia page on the History of Physics from scratch. And I did. (Archived copy here, in case you’re reading this post from this blog’s archives). Now, there are a lot of complaints to be made about Wikipedia articles. In the history of science, they can be almost painfully Whiggish. In this case, I felt justified because the prior version of the History of Physics article was not only methodologically suspect, but, really, more or less unreadable, and it was clear that piecemeal amendment would not be a useful path and that no one else was going to undertake the project.

So, if an academically-trained historian is going to just swoop in and do this kind of thing, what ought to be taken into account? I feel Wikipedia is an opportunity not only to correct inadequate views, but to create a resource that can serve as both a primer on a topic, as well as a guide to various levels of literature (popular, scholarly overview, detailed scholarly work, etc…). This can be done, I think, with judicious use of documentation.

I don’t think my take on the history of physics required many references by academic standards, but the Wikipedians can be persnickety about this kind of thing. The Master of Physics Articles on Wikipedia, known as “Headbomb”, reverted my edit earlier this month, because I hadn’t yet put in new documentation and pictures. That’s fixed. I now have used the “Further Reading” section to suggest some general overviews for interested readers, while the “References” section basically serves as a “books about this

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Primer: Galenic Theory

I am not a historian of medicine by any stretch of the imagination, which is why it was sort of fun(ny) when the students from my intro to the history of science course this past spring seemed to take more interest in the medicine-related topics than any other. So, for today’s history lesson, we’re going to do a quick overview of Galenic medical theory, which dominated university-based medicine instruction prior to the rise of anatomy and physiology in the early modern period, and which remained influential in the medical community as well as in geography (particularly in what we would now call ethnography). Below we have a mixing of Galenic theory and physiognomy.

For reference’s sake: Galen of Pergamum was a Greek physician who lived in the 2nd century AD, and was inheritor to a large body of medical theory, which he organized, commented upon, criticized, and extended. When Classical medical theory was revived in European university medical education in the later Middle Ages, his ouevre was still considered authoritative.

Galenic theory revolved around the balances of the four “humors”: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile (don’t try to connect it too much to current understanding of bodily fluids). These humors were associated with the four elements (air, water, fire, and earth, respectively) as well as the properties of dryness, wetness, heat, and cold (blood, for example, was wet and hot). Remaining healthy was a matter of maintaining a

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Looking Further Afield

What the heck is this stuff!? — What the!?

It seems like only yesterday that it was time to do the biannual roundup of physics-related articles for the AIP Center for History of Physics newsletter. Last time I did that, I fell privy to Harry Collins’ and Rob Evans’ exciting work in the sociological problem of expertise, and we’re hopefully revisiting that in September. This time, I was prompted to take a broader perspective on things because it struck me just how foreign a lot of what I was looking at was to my historiographical sensibilities. Specifically, I started considering the real need for this blog to look further afield for new ways for it to attack its mission of finding new and better ways to write history. Christopher’s posts will be of interest in this respect, because he spends a lot of time reading intellectual history as well as European and American history, and those perspective will show up as he continues to develop his historiographical world view in this space. My philosophy is: a little bit of an unabashedly good thing demands more.

Setting an agenda for future series of posts, I’ve been thinking about how much my work here is hampered by my own really very limited perspective on science studies from the HSS mainstream. Taking a skeptical

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Schaffer on Herschel’s Cosmology

William Herschel's 40 ft. telescope at Slough. Credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Brittle Books Collection

In thinking about why I enjoy working in the history of science so much, the answer I increasingly come up with is that it gives us a sort of understanding of why arguments are structured in the way that they are, and, crucially, why they make sense to those who make them. Others seem to like to study science as a repository of accepted knowledge, or as a tool for technological development or for structuring society, or simply as a subset of museological reconstruction. But, in my mind, work like, say, Peter Dear’s, which regularly traces not just the connection between scientific work and its time and place, but the reason why arguments make sense in different times and places, is the most exciting. Looking at science in this vein, it is possible to see it as more than just “knowledge functioning in society” but as a social institution dedicated to the construction of highly sophisticated methods of arriving at “knowledge one can rely on”.

So, what does an article about theories of things like sunspots being holes in the solar atmosphere leading down to a temperate layer where intelligent beings live have to do with “knowledge one can rely on”? As I explored a little bit in my prior post on “cosmology and the problem of the problem”, the ability to connect knowledge into a coherent world system has long been a crucial method of argumentation. It is misleading to look at the scientific revolution and assume one of its major products was an argumentative restraint that refused to intuit knowledge where no reliable knowledge could be found (case-in-point, Newton’s celebrated “hypotheses non fingo”). This is because, first, speculation is always necessary to the development of new knowledge, and, second, it is incredibly problematic to determine when one does or

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Primer: Deutsche Physik

Our inaugural post in the Hump-Day History series is a subject that is a touchstone to those who have studied the history of physics, but that does not feature in the top tier of popular knowledge of the history of science. This is a short-lived but stinging moment in the history of physics in Germany from the 1930s known in English as “Aryan physics” but in German as deutsche Physik, or “German physics”. The reason “Aryan” tends to be used is because “deutsche” had a very ethnic connotation that served to distinguish this style of physics from what the proponents of deutsche Physik considered to be “Jewish” physics, by which they meant relativity and quantum mechanics, the subjects that had over the prior two decades catapulted German physics to a clear position at the forefront of the profession.

Philipp Lenard receives an honorary degree from Heidelberg University. Credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection

Deutsche Physik proponents were generally physicists who sought to benefit from the takeover of the Nazi Party in 1933. They were led by Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard (Nobel, 1905) and Johannes Stark (1919). After the Nazis took power, new civil service laws banned most Jews from government service, which included research posts in universities and important institutions like the Kaiser Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institutes. By painting the highly abstract and philosophically unintuitive nature of recent physical theory as characteristically Jewish, Lenard et al attempted to tar non-Jewish physicists who had been a part of the new wave

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Cowboys, Scientists, and Curators

Will has been reminding me of my inactive presence on this blog so I finally decided to get my act together and contribute something more history of science-ish.

Having been inspired by Will’s numerous reviews on the recent Isis from June 2008, I thought I would tackle Jeremy Vetter’s essay (in the same issue) “Cowboys, Scientists, and Fossils,” which underscores several history of science questions about the tensions between local collaborators and experts from the “outside,” including professional collectors, scientists, and museum curators. While American paleontology in the early 20th century is not exactly a specialized interest of mine, it does, however, dovetail into some of the similar challenges faced by European geologists in the early 19th century (some of whom I do study). I did read the work of Robert Kohler a long time ago whose books Lords of the Fly and Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology stimulated my scholarly curiosity about how contestations in the field affected the bigger picture of making science and whose concepts are echoed in Vetter’s ideas about the status of the field site as a place of contentious negotiation. The intervention of

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The Hierarchy of Needs

In the following paragraphs, I argue that historians or philosophers must necessarily write about a thing according to a series of rules or a ‘hierarchy of needs’ so that their account (consisting of a narrative, a series of propositions, a taxonomy, etc.) may be considered as both valid (internally coherent) and as useful (generally applicable) by and for the work’s perceived public. That a specific study of Galileo or Descartes assumes a specific form in response to the needs of the wider scholarly community and emerges as a mediated product of the individual scholar’s realization that he or she must satisfy a series of ‘needs’ in order for that argument to be accepted by the wider community has a specific intellectual genealogy. The idea of the meditated and individual but nonetheless universally valid judgment can be traced back to the later days of the enlightenment with the fleeting supremacy of the romantic absolute subject that bridged the gap between individual intuition and understanding. This allowed the individual judgment to have the same force of assent as those judgments accorded to the work of reason alone (Kant’s ‘inter-subjective validity’).

The shared understanding that a particular narrative exists within a specific discipline attains visibility in every work of history or philosophy that situates itself in the ‘literature.’ In this way, every work of scholarship is by its very nature a work of intellectual atavism, a rehearsal of intellectual formulations to be defensively considered and offensively discarded. Scholars appeal to literature to formulate a series of propositions from which they will depart. It is the habit of scholars to say, “historians of (subject) have noted x, while, in the following work, I will note y and z.” The degree to which such a statement represents the body of work in question is less important in comparison to how the author uses the previous literature

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Announcing: Hump-Day History

Here at Ether Wave Propaganda, we usually tackle obscure topics, which will primarily interest those people familiar with the history of science profession and its literature. Because the role of pop history has become a topic in the blogosphere, and because we’ve now been kindly linked to from some science blogs, starting next Wednesday we’re going to be posting weekly “Hump-Day History Lessons”: accessible vignettes from the history of science to help get regular non-historian visitors through the thick part of the week.

Historians tend to hear simple statements that have great interest to scientists and science enthusiasts, say “Joseph Fourier discovered global warming”, and suddenly, for unclear reasons, we get all excited and start dancing around, chanting bizarre things like “whig! whig! teleological claim!” (On Fourier and his link to climate science, click here). But we’re also interested in refreshing ourselves on the basics, and communicating what we view as “good history” to larger audiences. So, be sure and check in next Wednesday when we’ll start our new experiment with a discussion of “Aryan physics”, a concept pushed by antisemitic Nobel-Prize-winners during the Nazi era.

Isis Round-Up, Pt. 2

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of scholars, including Steven Shapin, Martin Rudwick, Mario Biagioli, and Raine Daston, demonstrated the clear and powerful links between scientific methods of argumentation and the moral economy in which those arguments took place. That is, scientific arguments obey rules of etiquette (initially derived from courtly and gentlemanly culture) that dictated who could make what kinds of claims and in what manner. Turning this mirror away from science and on ourselves in the history biz, it’s worth asking what our moral economy of argumentation looks like. What follows is speculative.

I’d suggest that our moral economy is heavily influenced by the history of science’s location at an absurdly busy crossroads, through which sociology; philosophy; anthropology; art, architecture, literary, and media studies; gender, race, and colonial history; the history of technology; not to mention scientific practice, science journalism, science heritage, and popular science pass. This confluence of fields provides an enormous richness of argumentative style from which historians may draw. But it also presents some

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Isis Round-Up, Pt. 1

In the intro to this last Isis focus section, Jane Maienschein and George Smith wrote that they intended for the section to be “a start for what we hope will be a continuing and lively conversation.” Outside of niche areas, I’m not 100% sure what the last big conversation in our profession was, at least a conversation with more than one side. If there is to be such a conversation, the existential one about the use of our profession is a well-chosen place to begin.

The first problem is: how can such a conversation take place? Ben Cohen at World’s Fair wondered about just this point; John Lynch (who co-wrote the piece on science and education) replied in the comments that there was some thoughts to creating online fora, or maybe an HSS session, but that it seems to be “down to the blogs”. (John also asked the crucial question at Stranger Fruit: who in the history of science is blogging? which seems to have led, among other things, to much higher hit counts back here). Unsurprisingly, I’m a big supporter of the blog option. To me, a blogging community is sort of like a laboratory of culture and methodology. It’s less formal and less final than a journal or a conference. It’s harder to let points drop on account of the fact that any replies will be months-off. It’s more inclusive to any who are interested in participating. It can also support different rules of argumentation (more on this soon).

A community of science blogs took up the Focus section heartily, with discussion revolving primarily around to what extent the history of science can provide valuable context and a sense of motivation to scientific work, especially in scientific education, to help them see science as more than a collection of facts to memorize. See A Blog Around the Clock, “Hopeful Monster” at Chance and Necessity, David Ng at World’s Fair, and Brian Switek at Laelaps, and the comments section in all. All of these basically deal with the need for perspective on what it means to do science,

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