EWP Primer – Page 5 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Primer: Robert Hooke

Popular history rarely communicates the fullness of scientists’ careers, concentrating instead on key “contributions” as they are often called. In the case of Robert Hooke (1635-1703), this would be an especially unfortunate approach, because he is an unusually vibrant figure in the “Scientific Revolution” era, a cultural-intellectual force who cannot be easily boiled down to a certain discovery or insight. The casual observer may be familiar with Hooke’s Law, which states the proportionality of the force of a spring to the distance it is stretched. Others might know a few other points, such as his authorship of Micrographia (1665), which was essentially a lavishly illustrated work of popular science extolling the importance of the activities of the then-new Royal Society of London, focusing on his own observations using a microscope he designed (above). Recently, the literature seems to be encapsulating his diverse skills and interests by packaging him as a Leonardo da Vinci-type character.

Hooke initially gained a strong reputation as a designer of machinery and scientific instruments, and, beginning in 1655, he was employed by the royalist Robert Boyle in Oxford to design air pumps and air pump experiments, while the Cromwellian regime was still in place. The effects of reduced air in an evacuated chamber in various kinds of experimental set-ups quickly became emblematic of the power of

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Primer: Herman Kahn

I usually try not to ramble on here about the area in which I have the most expertise: the 20th-century policy sciences. I like to see what’s been done in other sub-fields, and what happened in various times and places, and I don’t want to harp on the same subject again and again. However, I thought I’d take the opportunity with this week’s Hump-Day History post to highlight a really fascinating and controversial character who is the subject of a book that is both lively and, in my opinion, important.

Herman Kahn (1922-1983) was trained as a physicist, achieved record scores on the Army’s mental aptitude tests, and in 1947 joined the RAND Corporation (founded in Santa Monica in 1946). The RAND Corporation, the first of many nonprofit policy think tanks of the postwar era, was initially envisioned as a place where far-sighted R&D projects could be conceptualized and tested for feasibility. Its

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Primer: Drosophila

What value do historians of science gain from locating a point of origin? Scientists, I think, like origins, because it’s customary to give credit where credit is due in scientific papers. Historians can find origins very useful, because they often reveal a certain motivation or meaning in a tradition, which was later lost even as the tradition persisted. There’s probably a certain satisfaction to be found in looking at some point in history, and finding that “before this point in time, this idea did not exist.” But there are dangers as well. Meanings change notoriously over time, so when we look for the origin of this or that belief that we hold today, though we may recognize it in the past, it would look quite different to those who “came up” with it. Origins are also slippery in other ways. We often find that when we track them down, some new “predecessor” presents itself, and we’re stuck chasing a constantly retreating mirage. Thus, when we bother to track things down, we should make sure we gain value from the act of tracking.

In the case of genetics, there’s a well-known tradition that dates the study of genetics back to the monk Gregor Mendel and his famous green and yellow peas (get out your Punnett squares, class). There’s even a historical scandal suggesting that Mendel cooked his data: statistically it’s too good. But why should we really care about Mendel? I mean, it’s good to know about him, and it’s good to know how others have viewed him and used his precedent to further their own work, but there’s not much value in worrying too much about him, specifically. His work wasn’t used or even known until 35 years after its publication in an obscure journal, when it was unearthed by Hugo DeVries and Carl Correns, who were part of a thriving botanical/laboratory-biology culture circa 1900 that was already deep in theorization about how

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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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