EWP Primer – Page 3 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Primer: Linus Pauling

In recognition of the 108th anniversary of Linus Pauling’s birth (kind of our poor man’s response to the Darwin’s 200th hoopla!), our neighbors at the Pauling Blog have sent us over a really excellent post on their namesake, which will be appearing on their site in slightly modified form on Friday.

Linus Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon on February 28, 1901, meaning that this coming Saturday will mark the 108th anniversary of his birth. (He died on August 19, 1994 at the age of 93)

One of the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections’ annual habits has been to reflect back upon Pauling’s life around the time of his birthday anniversary, usually by highlighting his activities 100, 75, 50 and 25 years ago.

Looking back in segments of twenty-five years is admittedly rather an arbitrary observance, but it can oftentimes prove to be very revealing. By choosing to study the effectively-random dates of, in this instance, 1909, 1934, 1959 and 1984, one is compelled to sample a broad period of time in Pauling’s life and, in the process, gain a sense of his remarkably-wide variety of interests. It is our belief that, as much as anything else, these broad horizons define Pauling’s legacy.

1909: Age 8

Pauline, Linus, and Lucile Pauling, ca. 1908

The Pauling family begins this year in Condon, Oregon, a small and isolated farming community some 150 miles east of Portland. Four years previous,

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Primer: Silicon Valley Gadgetry

This post is a sequel, of sorts, to my previous post on the “100,000 garages” rhetorical device, and, more directly, to my Hump-Day History post on Fred Terman. It is also an extension of yesterday’s post on the AIP’s History of Physicists in Industry project, where I pointed out that analyses of firm behavior at the project level would be a useful thing for historians to do. Of course, there are cases where this has already been done, at least to an extent, with great success, as in the case of Silicon Valley vacuum tube and integrated circuit manufacturing firms.

Russell and Sigurd Varian with a klystron in 1951; click to go to Stanford University website — The Varian brothers, William Hansen, David Webster, and John Woodyard inspect a klystron; Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, the region around Palo Alto, California, just south of San Francisco, grew into a center for electronics innovation and manufacture, challenging the domination of the electronics industry by firms such as General Electric, RCA, Western Electric, and Westinghouse. The companies located

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Primer: Augustin Jean Fresnel

Augustin Jean Fresnel (1788-1827) was a French engineer and physicist who was a key figure in the move from an “emission” theory of light to a “wave” theory of light in the optical physics of the early-nineteenth century. Where a “ray” of light was generally taken to be a physical, if imperceptible, thing, which could (in theory) be counted, the new wave theory took a ray to be only a geometrical construct connecting a luminous source with a point on a wave front as it traveled through an ethereal medium (ether wave propagation!).

Fresnel was the son of an architect who, having a penchant for mathematics, began training at the new Ecole Polytechnique in Paris at the age of seventeen, where he received extensive instruction in methods of mathematical analysis, chemistry, and physics—an education that gave him both a background in natural philosophical conceptualizations as well as in practical technique.

Eager to make a “discovery” of any sort, he bounced between fields early on. After he left the Ecole in 1806, he worked as an engineer with the elite Corps des Ponts et Chausées (Bridges and Roadworks Corps) for three years, and in 1810 he

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Primer: Siderius Nuncius

Up until 1610, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) had made his living as a university mathematician, first at Pisa then at Padua near Venice. At that time, mathematics was a relatively low university subject, primarily studied as a path toward an education in medicine, law, or theology and philosophy (Scholastic philosophy). Subjects within the rubric of mathematics included the sciences of mechanics, optics, and astronomy. The development of geometric and mathematical theories within these sciences constituted logical arguments, but were considered descriptive of the behaviors—rather than explanatory of the natures—of things. Astronomy, for example, largely involved the deployment of geometrical methods of predicting future positions of the sun, moon, and planets, leaving their physical qualities, habits of motion, and arrangement to the philosophers.

Galileo’s work in mathematics and mechanics was wide-ranging and ambitious, challenging philosophical assumptions such as that heavier objects fall more quickly, and making use of experimental trials. He also became aware of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the universe (1543) while a mathematician. Still, as a university mathematician, however much he felt his work bore upon philosophical forms of knowledge, he was not in a

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Primer: Pierre Gassendi’s Natural Philosophy

Pierre Gassendi (b. 1592, d. 1655) was born at Digne, France, became a priest in 1617, and later a professor of philosophy at Aix while still in his mid-twenties. As Saul Fisher notes in his excellent Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy And Science: Atomism for Empiricists (Brill, 2007), “Gassendi’s career as a priest is a crucial intellectual facet of intellectual constitution: his writings reflect an unbending allegiance to Holy Scripture and Church teachings, though not necessarily in orthodox doctrinal lights” (1.) In 1624, he met Mersenne, and between 1629 to 1630, while traveling in the Low Countries, he met Isaac Beeckman. In his 1632 work, Mercurius in sole visus, he described his 1631 observation of the transit of Mercury as a confirmation of Kepler’s theories. In 1632, after returning to Digne, he began a study of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Gassendi spent the remaining twenty or so years of his life going between Provence and Paris due to his involvement with a group of philosophers who had gathered around the French philosopher Mersenne. As Fisher details, in the Mersenne circle, “debates ranged over numerous topics central to the dismantling of the Aristotelian and Scholastic world-views” (3.) Mersenne, an associate of Descartes, was instrumental in allowing Gassendi’s objection to Descartes’ Meditations to be included in the published appendix entitled Objections and Replies.

While some historians consider Gassendi’s signature achievement to be his revival of ancient atomism, a complete

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Primer: The Length of the Meter

In the late-18th century, the relationship between political thought and rational inquiry was at high tide. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson built the case for American independence as a matter of the people being impelled by causes that had their roots in “self evident truths”. We have discussed the relationship between Joseph Priestley’s radical politics and his understanding of natural philosophy on this blog. Nowhere, however, was the relationship so clear and so important as in Revolutionary France.

In the years after the first stages of the Revolution in 1789, ecclesiastical and hereditary authority was systematically erased from the French state so as to be replaced by a government founded upon reason, acting in the interests of the French people. High on the agenda was the reform of weights and measures. At the time of the Revolution, it was estimated that there were some eight hundred names for measuring units, which with local variants spun out into some 250,000 different standards.

Famously, the French invented the metric system to bring some coherence to this system, and, in the words of Condorcet, to provide measures that would be valid “for all people, for all time”. Some of the aspects of the new

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Primer: The V-2 Rocket and Atmospheric Science

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emMIM3CKGtQ]

For as long as there has been a concerted tradition of inquiry around the natural world, natural philosophers and scientists have dragged instruments up church towers and mountains and floated them aloft in balloons to ascertain how things are different at high altitudes. This tradition grew rapidly in the early decades of the 20th century as ballooning technology improved, and as physicists, astronomers, chemists, and meteorologists decided that differences in the gaseous composition of the atmosphere,

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Primer: Arthur de Gobineau and the Orient

Arthur de Gobineau (July 14, 1816 — October 13, 1882) was born into a family of lesser nobility and forced to make his living in Paris at nineteen years of age. In 1843, having some minor successes as a novelist and as a serial author, de Gobineau met Alexis de Tocqueville. In 1849, when de Tocqueville was named Minister of Foreign Affairs, de Gobineau was introduced to a diplomatic circuit from which he never departed. De Gobineau was successively posted to Persia from 1855-1858 and 1861-1863, Brazil, and finally Stockholm, from 1872-1877. De Gobineau was well known for his rightist politics and considered it a great irony that he had been born on Bastille Day. He styled himself the sole remaining descendant of an ancient Norman family.

It was fortuitous that de Gobineau traveled to Paris in the 1840s. As Arthur Herman in his fine The Idea of Decline in Western History notes, “Ever since scholars had accompanied Napoleon on his conquest of Egypt in 1798 and the linguist Jean-Francois Champollion had deciphered the Rosetta stone in

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Primer: Fred Terman

Click to go to the National Academy of Sciences biographical memoir of Terman. — Click to go to the National Academy of Sciences' biographical memoir of Terman, whence this photo + signature is lifted.

Frederick Terman (1900-1982) was an electrical engineer and a crucial figure in the development of Stanford University following the Second World War. Terman grew up near Stanford where his father Lewis Terman (of IQ test fame) was a professor of psychology. Fred Terman did his undergraduate work at Stanford, and then earned his PhD in electrical engineering at MIT under Vannevar Bush in 1924, before heading back to a position in Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering. There he specialized in cutting edge electronic instrumentation, wrote a key textbook on radio engineering. He became head of the department in 1937, and successfully lobbied for the creation of an industrial park on university land.

In 1942, following America’s entry into World War II, Terman left Stanford to head the Radio Research Laboratory housed at Harvard University, and thus became well-acquainted with the possibilities of federal patronage for university research constructed through the ad hoc Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was headed by Bush. Stanford, meanwhile, was largely left out of wartime military-related research, and when Terman returned toward the end of the war and was named dean of the School of Engineering, he was determined not to let further such opportunities slip away.

With the support of the new university president, Donald Tresidder, Terman became a powerful figure in the postwar development of the university. Fearing that Stanford was falling well behind the academic vanguard—not only

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Primer: Paul Feyerabend and Epistemological Anarchism

Paul Feyerabend, born on January 13, 1924, died on February 11, 1994, was a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His major works included, Against Method (1975), Science in a Free Society (1978), and Farewell to Reason (1987) a collection of already published papers. Feyerabend understood the history of science to reveal “anarchism” in scientific methodology, whereby discoveries are produced not through an adherence to any scientific methodology, but through the rejection of the prevailing wisdom and any established ways of doing science. Feyerabend argued in Against Method that any recourse to “method,” such as in the Aristotelian account of motion or Galileo’s heliocentric position, was rhetorical flourish. Like Thomas Kuhn but against Karl Popper, Feyerabend emphasized the socially constructed nature of scientific theories.

Against Method articulated the position of “epistemological anarchism” underscoring that the history of science revealed no useful or consistent methodological rules or general understanding of underlying logics of the growth of knowledge. So variable was scientific inquiry that the only generality produced through a proper view of its history and the only rule useful to future scientific endeavors was that in the pursuit of science (past and present,) “anything goes.” For Feyerabend, Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism would, by mandating that all scientific theories admit validity or falsification through recourse to empirical evidence, inhibit the growth of science by placing undue and unrealistic limitations on theory. The goal of Against Method, Feyerabend later observed, was to free individuals from the philosophical “tyranny” of such concepts as “truth” and “objectivity.”

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