EWP Primer – Page 2 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Primer: Project Matterhorn and Early Fusion Research

At this moment, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is preparing to come online at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (see the New York Times story). The goal of NIF is to study small-scale nuclear fusion ignited by a precisely focused array of 192 high-power lasers. Reflecting a situation often seen in higher profile with America’s space program, the project is vastly over-budget, and its worth has been subjected to extensive criticism. Nuclear fusion has for decades remained a subject of intensive study and perpetually unmet promise. The “Array of Contemporary American Physicists” on which I am now at work for the AIP History Center will have fusion and related plasma research as one of its focuses, and includes information on some of those involved in the NIF as well as in prior generations of research.

Lyman Spitzer explains the stellarator at the Second Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, 1958 — Lyman Spitzer explains the “stellarator” at the Second Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, 1958

The study of nuclear fusion dates to the 1930s, when an emerging theoretical understanding of subatomic forces and particles suggested a way of accounting for the energy produced by stars and the synthesis of elements within them, as worked out by German émigré physicist Hans Bethe. During World War II, it was understood that artificial fusion could be created by using a fission bomb to ignite nuclear fuel—the idea behind the “super” or “hydrogen” bomb. This possibility was pursued during the war by Hungarian émigré physicist Edward Teller, and, following debate on whether

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Primer: The Royal Academy of Sciences

An imagined visit by King Louis XIV to the Royal Academy of Sciences, 1671.

OK, Hump-Day History got a bit lost the last couple weeks, but to restore some momentum, we present a special Friday edition. I hope American readers have a fine long Memorial Day weekend.

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The organization of scientific work and its communication necessarily involves the reconciliation of tensions between the inherent elitism of advanced inquiry and the aspirations of inquirers to produce universally valid knowledge, as well as between the individualism of personal initiative and the collectivism of rational agreement. Cultures of inquiry and invention have a wide variety of choices of how to enact such reconciliations, and their choices often create a conceptual resonance between scientific practice and the culture and politics beyond the community. This was clearly and influentially the case with the Royal Academy of Sciences, established in Paris in 1666 under the authority of absolutist monarch Louis XIV.

When the Academy was established, it represented a culmination of a decades-long proliferation of circles dedicated to the discussion of philosophical and cultural issues. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the interests of these circles crossed freely between art and rhetoric, general scholarship, the philosophical reformism of people like René Descartes (Jacques Rohault’s, 1618-1672, “Cartesian Wednesdays” in particular), and, of course, the then-recent vogue for experimental natural philosophy often associated with Francis Bacon (and exemplified by the “Academy” run by Melchisédech Thévenot, c.1620-1692).

The short-lived Accademia del Cimento in Florence (est. 1657), and the Royal Society in London (est. 1660), suggested the possibility that centralizing inquiry

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Primer: The Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company

Click to go to an online exhibit at Cambridges Whipple Museum. — An ad for the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company. Click to see a larger version in an online exhibit at Cambridge

Although it was perhaps the most important center for the development of mathematical physics in the 19th century, Cambridge University did not develop its reputation for experimental science until after its establishment of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1874. And while the era is best known as a time of “string and sealing wax” experimentation conducted with self-fashioned apparatus, the development and production of instrumentation was also carried out by specialist inventors and manufacturers, one of the more important of whom in England was Horace Darwin (1851-1928), the youngest son of Charles Darwin.

Horace Darwin had long been interested in the development of new kinds of instrumentation when in 1881 he acquired a controlling stake in a Cambridge instrument workshop. The workshop had been started a few years earlier by the mechanic Robert Fulcher to fashion and service instruments for Cambridge’s physiology department. It was backed financially by Albert Dew-Smith (1848-1903), a friend of Darwin who had trained at Cambridge in physiology. Fulcher, whose mechanical talents were deemed limited, was apparently driven out, leaving the way open for Darwin and Dew-Smith to become co-proprietors of what they decided to call the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company. Darwin obtained sole ownership in 1891.

Under Darwin’s supervision the company grew steadily, expanding its

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Primer: Charles Fourier and the Gravity of the Passions in the Wake of Revolution

Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was the son of successful cloth merchant whose fortune was lost in the Revolution. Fourier himself was almost executed in the Terror. Like Maistre, his philosophy was a response to the failure of the revolutionary project as well as an inquiry into the universality of reason and the problem of the good society. Fourier’s solution to the problem of the ‘good society’ was indeed novel: the ideal state would be brought about by the supremacy of the natural passions. This was an inversion of the traditional order between the regulative capacity of reason and the sublimation of sentiment. Society was to be regulated, in Fourier’s view, not through reason, but through the harmony of natural passion and action.

In 1808, Fourier published the Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies, (Cambridge ed.) which presented his vision of the universal history of humanity, the cosmos, and the prospects for a new order. Fourier presented his study as an inquiry into “the General System of Nature.” Such an inquiry was not only prudent but necessary as true happiness was impossible without a complete understanding of the General System. Fourier believed the first branch of the theory, the material, to be “unveiled” by Newton and Leibniz (3.) Fourier cautioned his reader in the preface , “It should be borne in mind that because the discovery announced is more important than all the scientific work done since the human race began, civilized people should concern themselves with one debate only: whether or not I have really discovered the Theory of the Four Movements.” If the answer was in the affirmative then “all economic and moral theories need to be thrown away” and preparations were to begin for the transition “from social chaos to universal harmony” (4.) Fourier’s universal history had thirty-two stages, all ordained by God, which began in savagery and which led, through the phase of civilization, to the subsequent stage of ‘socialism,’ and finally, Harmony. This highest stage would last for 70,000 years, after which humanity would descend back into the savage state and the world would cease to be.

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Primer: Plate Tectonics

A map showing differing magnetic polarizations in rock on the Juan de Fuca plate with colors indicating age; from the United States Geological Survey.

During the 18th century, broad theories of the earth (such as that proposed by Jean-André de Luc, which I discussed a few weeks ago), attempted to account for a wide array of phenomenona, such as the origins of mountains, the origins of different rock strata, the presence of marine fossils on land, and so forth. By the end of that century such wide-ranging and speculative theoretical “systems” had fallen into a degree of disrepute as a useful learned activity, and a more disciplined and less narratively ambitious geology slowly gained precedence. Nevertheless, the questions asked by 18th-century savants remained valid, and varying theories of the earth’s history remained in circulation, with answers to many key questions remaining in flux until well into the 20th century.

Following World War II, the theory of the German meteorologist and paleoclimatologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), that continents drifted over the face of the globe, had fallen largely by the wayside. Wegener had proposed his theory early in the 20th century to account for climatic changes in the earth’s distant past, for fossil similarities across continents, and for mountainous features of the earth’s crust, which required a new explanation after the decline of the cooling earth theory circa 1900. Wegener’s theory—the most prominent of several proposed drift theories—had its sympathizers, some very well-respected, but the theory was not widely accepted, and geologists in North America were outright hostile to it, many assuming by mid-century that it had disappeared into the realm of crank science.

In fact, continental drift was never fully given up to the cranks, and in the 1950s and 1960s, new evidence and mechanisms for it were developed, which made a convincing enough case that it not only revived the fortunes of continental drift, but swiftly overcame all competition. “Plate tectonics” arose at the confluence of a number of different

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Primer: Joseph Marie Maistre and the Image of the Machine

Joseph Marie Maistre (1753-1821) , underscored the irredeemable fallenness of mankind, which was rooted in original sin and visible in the seemingly endless wars, conflicts, and revolutions in human history. The French modernist poet Baudelaire considered Maistre an antidote against the naive optimism of the eighteenth century. Like Chateaubriand in his Genius of Christianity (1802), Maistre was a defender of religious sentiment and its role in politics (Christopher John Murray, Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, pg. 707.) A staunch defender of the Catholic Church and strong governance, Maistre believed that providence was the active force behind universal history. Maistre defined human beings in this scheme according to their lust for power.

As Isaiah Berlin notes in his introduction to Maistre’s Considerations on France, Maistre “is painted, always, as a fanatical monarchist and a still more fanatical supporter of papal authority; proud, bigoted, inflexible…brilliant…vainly seeking to arrest the current of history….” Maistre, in Berlin’s view, is all of these things, and all the more interesting for them, “for although Maistre may have spoken in the language of the past, the content of what he had to say is the absolute substance of anti-democratic talk of our day” (Considerations on France, Introduction, xii, xiii.)

Like Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Schiller, Maistre was horrified by the excesses of the French Revolution and the Terror. The experience “turned him into an implacable enemy of everything that is liberal, democratic, high-minded, everything connected with intellectuals, critics, scientists, everything to do with the forces which created the French Revolution” (xiii) The Revolution and the Terror convinced him that the idea of progress was an illusion. Instead, Maistre underscored the sacred past, the “virtue, and the necessity, indeed, of complete subjugation.” In the place of scientific rationality, Maistre offered the alternative of “the primacy of instinct, superstition, and prejudice.”

More charitably, Owen Bradley notes that in Maistre’s critique of science, “his attack on the excesses of technical rationality raises the essentially modern question of the sociopolitical consequences of the scientific organization of

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Primer: Malinowski and the Problem of Culture

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (1884-1942) was the founder of the branch of Social Anthropology known as functionalism. Functionalism maintains that every aspect of the culture of a people, past or present, serves a purpose for the long-term maintenance of that society. Malinowski inaugurated a new standard for field-work, and served as an exemplar of ethnographic observation and inference for a generation of anthropologists. As a theoretician and as a individual, opinion of Malinowski remains sharply polarized.

malinowski

The British social anthropologist, Audrey I. Richards, as related in Jerry D. Moore’s Visions of Culture (2008), observed that Malinowski’s concept of culture was “one of his most stimulating contributions to the anthropological thought of his day.” Conversely, the anthropologist Edmund Leach opposed Malinowski’s contributions to ethnographic fieldwork to his dubious theoretical formulations. Leach noted that while Malinowski altered “the whole mode and purpose of ethnographic inquiry” he also made “numerous theoretical pronouncements of a general, abstract,sociological kind.” Malinowski’s conception of “Culture” amounted to a “platitudinous bore.” According to Malinowski’s former student, Raymond Firth, Malinowski the man was either loved or hated, lauded as an artist or derided as a “pretentious Messiah of the credulous.”

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Primer: Jean-André de Luc’s Christian Geology

DeLucBPU5 — Click for Hasok Chang's page on De Luc

It was nice timing that Michael Robinson happened to bring up at his blog the relationship between Biblical and physical (i.e. “biological” to be somewhat anachronistic) accounts of human history and race. I’ve just been going over Martin Rudwick’s fantastic Bursting the Limits of Time (2005), and had decided to write a post on Jean-André de Luc (1727-1817), a devoutly Christian natural philosopher of the Earth’s history, and coiner of the term “geology”.

De Luc came from a family of Genevan clock-makers, and had a background in precision engineering. He was well-known for his design of a portable barometer, and established his reputation as an authority on meteorology. In 1773 he moved to England, where he resided for the rest of his life, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a “reader” (i.e. mentor) for Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III.

In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the discipline now understood as geology was comprised of a variety of natural historical and natural philosophical fields of study: mineralogy, physical geography, geognosy (the study of the contents of the earth, related to mining), and the “physics” of the earth (which dealt with qualitative discussions of the earth’s mechanisms). An important intellectual activity in this period was the construction of vast logical “systems” that connected causal and historical explanations to account for observations, thereby establishing a potential comprehensive “theory of the Earth”. It was to describe this last activity that de Luc deployed the term “geology”, to distinguish it from more expansive cosmologies, which attempted to account for the workings of the entire universe.

As a devout Christian, de Luc felt embattled in a community of Enlightenment-era savants who embraced deistic, or

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Primer: The Soviet Bomb

Igor Vasilevich Kurchatov, Photo Credit: Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

The early history of the atomic bomb is necessarily a part of the history of physics, because in less than a decade what was an entirely novel physical phenomenon—the splitting of certain atomic nuclei when struck by neutrons—had been engineered into a military weapon with unprecedented destructive power.

The key experiments had been conducted in Germany at the end of 1938, but once the mechanism had been interpreted by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch (both of whom had fled the Nazis), its implications were appreciated across the world of nuclear physics, including in the Soviet Union.

Like the United States, the Soviet Union was not a traditional leader in physics, but, like the United States, the physics community was respected and had a burgeoning nuclear physics community. This community, like others across the world, fully recognized the implications of nuclear fission before nuclear research went secret after the war began, and members of it played a leading role in the research and development of nuclear weaponry and energy.

During the war, because the Soviet Union quickly became embroiled in an epic ground war with the Nazis, Soviet nuclear research did not receive as strong a priority as it ultimately did in the United States, though a research project was established in the winter of 1942-43 once it was learned from spies that the Germans, British, and Americans had established their own programs. The

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Primer: American Functionalist Psychology

Today’s video Hump-Day History lesson was originally posted at the Advances in the History of Psychology blog and is embedded from YouTube. The creator of the video, Chris Green, professor of psychology at York University, has given us kind permission to repost it here as part of this series.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOyuoeeV7VU]

After the jump, a mega-fast primer on ideas about the psyche from Aristotle to the 19th century (we love mega-fast primers here), plus links to longer documentaries of which these are quick recaps.

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