History and Historiography of Science

Category: History 174

Cosmology and the Problem of the Problem

My plate is full of writing at the moment, but I really am more in a mood for research. Fortunately, the batteries on my laptop have been burned out for a couple of years now, so my recent transatlantic plane rides prevented me from doing much productive writing, but afforded me the opportunity to do some work on reading over the Schaffer oeuvre.

I should have done this years ago. I’ll post more when I come to the issue formally; for now suffice it to say that Schaffer’s pre-Leviathan work deals a lot with the reconstruction of natural philosophical cosmologies. I get the sense a lot of this early work is aimed at demonstrating that the term “natural philosophy” was more than just an antique word for “science”. We got into this a bit in my class last spring when we had the students read Leibniz’s Monadology and tried to explain what the deal with it was, but I’m beginning to see the topic for all its richness.

Basically, natural philosophy, unlike a modern scientific speciality, demanded fairly comprehensive views of the universe, meaning that conjecture relating to the natural world had to be consistent with an understanding of pretty much everything else: problems of God, mind, soul, life, comets, nebulae, the age of the universe, the origins of the earth, the nature of forces, the nature of light, etc…. By making a conjecture about any one thing, it created “problems” everywhere else, and a true philosophical mind had to reconcile their explanations with all these various problems. So, you end up creating or contributing to a cosmology.

The need to create elaborate cosmologies seems to taper off in the 19th century as specialization and professionalization start to be on the rise. After this point, you still have problem-oriented science, but these problems tend to be more practical, or at least more pointed, than the big “OK,if you believe that, then how do you explain X?” problems of the natural philosophy era. This is more of a multi-disciplinary sort of thing where it’s important to develop specific explanations that are consistent with more general principles in a variety of fields. I’ve been doing some work on the study of Antarctic ice flow and climatology recently, and the “problem of Antarctic ice” has a lot to do with jibing paleoclimatological evidence, physical principles, and field research.

The ability to reconcile various points-of-view points to a standard of robust explanation that I was trying to discuss earlier. What is interesting is a shifting standard of robustness from consistency with a possible cosmology to a robustness as measured from multiple expert perspectives. Interestingly, the ability to cleave off problems and to address them from a limited set of perspectives seems to have coincided with the rise of new physical laws leading to more satisfactorily reductive world pictures, but that’s not a connection I’m prepared to explore.

Contrite Post #1: Final Exams

I’m off to the always enjoyable Princeton-Harvard Physics History PhunDay tomorrow–a real model for what a workshop should be. Today’s post, however, comes amid correcting final exams for History 174, and my realization that, while my course’s design seems to have produced some good, improved writing (big thanks to my TA for working with students, reading drafts, revisions, etc.), it seems to have primarily been an exercise in self-education. Indeed, I learned a lot! I wish I’d have had a chance to have taken my course at some point, taught by someone with a better established knowledge of the subject matter than myself.

However, it’s painfully clear that I torpedoed my undergrad students. Everything coming back to me on the exam IDs is all about what so-and-so discovered, or what they’re famous for, or how something changed the world, or something, without picking up on trends and narratives and the like. In other words, what I wanted them to learn registered, but got echoed back cloaked in the language of pop-history. It’s pretty clear there’s not much in the way of “superlunary” ideas about how science works; in fact, I’d say they don’t think about it much at all. It’s more just trying to figure out who the “notables” are.

Even more disappointing are the essays, which, except for some good answers on my Bacon vs. Descartes question, are almost all BS. It’s clear the readings weren’t touched too much. All-in-all no one paid much attention. I attribute this to students having other priorities–if they’d paid attention more than intermittently, they’d have surely done better. But, at the same time, I could have focused more tightly on certain ideas, and repeated them, and hammered them home to get students interested.

So, lessons definitely learned. I structured the course in such a way that students were exposed to all kinds of historical threads from which they could choose what they were most interested in. Several who kept up really, really liked this approach. I’m glad that they were so drawn in. But most just seem to have gotten lost. Who’s to say they would have gotten more out of the course had I used another approach, since many are just science majors fulfilling a requirement? Still, you just can’t teach a course of 77 kids for the benefit of 5.

R&D, please

A couple of weeks ago, in my Intro to History of Science course, I gave a lecture on the rise of research and development as perhaps the most socially significant arm of the scientific enterprise. It was one of my favorite lectures of the semester. In some ways it extended off the “culture of invention” lecture that I gave with my industrial revolution lecture, but emphasized how tightly intertwined laboratory/workshop work had become with the invention/development culture.

The invention lecture emphasized loose connections, and was given in the same week as the 19th century physics lecture–the non-textbook readings of the week were from Smith and Wise’s Lord Kelvin biography on William Thomson and the telegraph. The R&D lecture started off with the fairly familiar story of BASF and the German chemical industry and the emphasis at places like the KWG on more applied kinds of research. I also brought in Dave Kaiser’s recent work on the growth and “suburbanization” of physics in the postwar period as being specifically oriented around R&D-type activities (which he doesn’t devote much attention to, emphasizing the pedagogical angle instead).

However, I began the lecture by emphasizing the complexity of the relationship between “basic science” and “applied science”–where a “simple narrative” tells you basic leads to applied, the “complex narrative” has more to do with basic science facilitating the leap from technology to improved technology, than with unveiled secrets of nature leading to fabulous new technologies. I emphasized that the complex narrative was well-understood by anyone with real knowledge of R&D activities. David Edgerton’s “The Linear Model Did Not Exist” was the reading for the week (along with a 1928 article in United Empire called “Scientific and Industrial Research” by British science administration luminary, Henry Tizard).

I was especially satisfied with the lecture, because I don’t think it would appear in too many courses or historical overviews, and yet is both simple to understand and extremely important. I pointed out that even though R&D dominated scientific culture, and to a remarkable degree in the postwar era, Bowler and Morus devote pretty much zero attention to it. Their “Science and Technology” chapter ends just when the story is getting interesting! Beyond the scope of the class, I don’t think we’ve come to terms with R&D as a part of scientific culture, which is a part of our continuing historiographical difficulty in really understanding and describing science in the 20th century in general. Edgerton’s article is not a bad place to start thinking about the issue–a draft of it can be found here (see #41 under articles).

Housekeeping

Only three lectures left to go! After History 174 comes to a close (today was “Science and the Computer: Computation, Automation, Simulation, Information”), I think it will be about time to rejigger the blog a little bit, maybe harp on some people again to sign on as contributors, so we can get a more diverse dialogue going here.

One thing I’d like to see happen is a wider community of commentary and speculation. I think people take the blogging thing altogether too seriously and get intimidated, like you have to have some profound insight to blog. But I think it’s more of a place for unserious thinking, since we have to do so much serious thinking for publications. The most interesting and vital thinking seems to go on behind the scenes, so it seems like a good idea to open those conversations up a little to the public.

Anyway, to try and create a sense of there being an active blog community (no slackers!), I’ve decided to weed out a few defunct sites on the blog roll to the left. Phil Mirowski seems to have come to the end of his book promo blog, so he’s gone; it’s too bad, because I think if he ever had a real blog it would be seriously, seriously entertaining. Paul Edwards has apparently bored of writing about Infrastructuration, too, with no immediate hopes of return. However, Robert Vienneau’s “Thoughts on Economics” is updated regularly, and is usually historical in character and is also really thought-provoking–I recommend looking at it even though (especially because?) it’s not within The Biz. Similarly, the Copenhagen Medical Museion blog, Biomedicine on Display, kept up primarily by Thomas Soderqvist, is also frequently updated, and often asks really good questions.

Advances in the History of Psychology (celebrating 340 days on the web) is a little bit more newsletter-like with only occasional scholarly commentary. It is very professionally done–a model for all who want to try and reach out in this direction. Similarly, Michael Barton’s “The Dispersal of Darwin” is also usually in the newsletter vein. He’s done a great job of keeping the blog up, and his ClustrMap shows he has a wide audience. I might try and figure out some criteria for figuring out which of the (many) other popular blogs should get links.

The institutional blogs (except the Medical Museion) seems to be growing in fits and starts. The Penn Logan Lounge seems to have become a semesterly-updated seminar list, so I’m going to axe it. The University of Minnesota department blog is not updated a lot, but looks like it could become a place for reviews and thoughts–plus it’s Minnesota, and Minnesota is awesome. I’m really interested to see what the University of Oklahoma gang does with their Hydra online grad student journal/website.

I’ll be on the lookout foor more sites to put up, and will see if any of the hibernating ones spring back to life. If any readers have suggestions, please leave a comment. We’re looking for blogs dealing with the history of science, or any particular science, in at least a somewhat probing way, but the audience doesn’t have to be academic.

Enlightenment in 50 Mins. or Less!

Going back to History 174, in my chemistry lecture, I basically just claimed that, despite efforts to incorporate chemistry within physical philosophy, the basic methodologies were never radically altered from the alchemical period up to (and really beyond) Dalton; new kinds of experiments were done, and new conceptual schemes emerged, but, in practice, the sort of “natural history” methodology of chemistry remained fairly constant. Special thanks to Jan Golinksi’s “Chemistry” entry in the Cambridge History of Science Vol. 4.

But today was the Enlightenment. Since entire courses are dedicated to the Enlightenment, how does one cope? Well, first, you keep your eye on what all this has to do with the scientific enterprise rather than drift off into a summary of the Enlightenment. Thus, science is a template for the overthrow of authority and the building up of new knowledge. Pit stops at salon culture, the Encyclopedia, deism/atheism. Then, you address the new political economy as a quasi-Newtonian theorization based on the actions of individual actors: Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Smith (yes, it was that fast, basically project sumamries rather than discussions of individual philosophy). Then, you sum up with different governmental interpretations of Enlightenment thought: enlightened despotism, Jefferson’s rationale for independence, Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s differing ideas about government, and the rationalized populism of the French Revolution/metric system (thanks Ken Alder)/Napoleonic code. Then you end up with some hand-waving about the role of rationality in governance, with a comparison of the sensibilities underlying Tinker v. Des Moines and the French ban on religious dress in schools as the cherry on top.

Presto! Thematic Enlightenment Pie. It’s an old family recipe!

Cambridge Histories

I’d just like to say, as I prepare my lecture on alchemy/chemistry, that the Cambridge History of Science is invaluable, and I wish there were a way that the set could be made available cheaply so that historians could buy them. I see in Volume 4 that Craig Fraser’s article on 18th century mathematics would have been helpful to me as well, had I had my head screwed on straight enough to pick the volume up before that lecture.

What I did with mathematics

I want to come back to yesterday’s post soon, because I have a few crackpot theories I’d like to share about the relationship between naive positions and the continued preponderance of arcane and disconnected case studies in the history of science, but, before the moment is past, I’d like first to come back to my problem with mathematics in the history of science.

Eventually, I did come across a pretty helpful book, Roger Hahn’s recent biography of Pierre Simon Laplace, which did a very nice job of lucidly placing Laplace within his cultural, institutional, and intellectual context. What more could a historian ask? It leads me to suspect that there is actually a pretty decent French-language literature out there on this (Hahn’s book was originally in French; maybe a post on what areas of the non-English literature need to be read is forthcoming?). I also have my curiosity piqued about a translated book by Johan Christiaan Boudri called What Was Mechanical About Mechanics? The Concept of Force Between Metaphysics and Mechanics from Newton to Lagrange, although I have no idea if it’s any good.

Lamentably, my own approach largely centered on the old W. W. Rouse Ball model of presenting a series of biographies. But I spiced it up with quite a bit of exposition on the growth of methods of approximation, the development of theoretical aids to calculation (Euler’s formula, the Euler-Lagrange equations, etc…), methods of data analysis, all with an eye toward representing physical phenomena in an acceptable mathematical model, which clearly departs from Cartesian/Leibnizian ideas about the justification of mathematics in direct mechanical explanation. Instead, the ability to predict and verify becomes the gold standard of what constitutes knowledge in physics.

More concretely, the development of analyses consistent with each other and with fundamental principles like Newton’s laws becomes the heart of what it means to be a theoretical physicist in the 1700s and after. This shift was made possible through the analytical versatility of the growing mathematical toolkit to support the burden (say, of demonstrating the stability of the solar system), and an agreement to abandon the requirement of clear philosophical interpretation in mathematical formulation (how can you, when you’re doing things like cutting off higher order terms of Taylor series?).

I really tried to drive home the centrality of an analytical toolkit to physics practice and self-identity; and also tried to give some sense of changing institutional venues; from isolated chairs at universities like Cambridge and Basel (the Bernoullis), to dedicated positions in scientific academies (Euler, d’Alembert, etc…), to the proliferation of posts in state-sponsored institutions (Ecole Militaire, Ecole Polytechnique), especially in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

I’m pretty sure it was boring and flew mostly over their heads, but I learned a lot trying to come up with a coherent story to tell about what happened to mathematics and physics in the 1700s.

Bowler and Morus/Naive Positions

In History 174 we’ve now come to the end of Peter Dear’s Revolutionizing the Sciences, a textbook which I like a great deal (and the students seemed to like it, too). For the rest of the course, the textbook is Peter Bowler and Iwan Rhys-Morus’ Making Modern Science, which I generally like, but I have one major criticism that applies both to it, and to history of science writing in general, and that is its insistence on arguing against naive positions.

We’re starting out with their chapter on “The Chemical Revolution”, which they frame around the question of whether the chemical revolution was delayed by a century from the rest of the scientific revolution (and, of course, whether it was a revolution at all). They mount a sustained attack on the notion. This general strategy is employed throughout the book. Various historians, like Kuhn, are constantly making an appearance. I can’t help but think that this is distracting to students. I would be willing to bet they have no a priori notions abut the “chemical revolution”, so why burden the text by structuring it around a refutation of such notions? I believe the point of a textbook is to tell the best, most informative history we can, not to lay bare the neuroses of our profession induced in us by our battles with our forebears [edit; rereading Bowler and Morus this morning, this last clause is too extreme a description for what they clearly have intentionally deployed as an interesting framing device–but I think the statement is valid for why it might seem like a good idea to insert the “history of science profession” so prominently into a “history of science textbook”].

Really, the strategy isn’t surprising, because it is, in general, a habit ingrained in our desire to elevate our own analyses by arguing against the naive positions of certain prior thinkers about science, or against the “science textbook presentation”, or against “pop science”, or against the notion that the progress of science is independent of its context, as if these represented a living and threatening school of historical thought. My historiography guru David Edgerton has publicly and privately criticized technology historians’ habit of taking on straw men like the “linear model” (my students will read his piece against this straw man) and technological determinism. I tend to glorify mainline historians, but they, too, tend to rail against viewing developments as inevitable, and insist on looking at how events are “contingent”. If we’re going to improve our art, we need to avoid intellectual crutches like arguing against long-comatose naive positions.

Beyond the Scientific Revolution

In “Intro to the History of Science” (Jenny asked the name of my class–it’s highly original!) I just did the Experimental Program (i.e. Leviathan and the Air Pump) lecture/Newton vs. Leibniz lecture, to show that the Royal Society’s ideas about what constituted knowledge and how one goes about getting it were heavily contested. I’ve been feeding them the notion that although Newton, Boyle, and so forth had their philosophical defenders, increasingly, this program became so well accepted among a certain group of “natural philosophers”, and among patrons (for whom the production of spectacle, and better technologies and techniques was a sufficient indication of knowledge) that philosophical defense was not necessary. From this point I want to steer this course toward trends in practice, rather than trends in philosophical ideas. (No Kant on my watch!–well, maybe a little, for old time’s sake…)

So, where do we go next? Tuesday’s lecture is on History of Mathematics in the 1700s into the early 1800s. Bernoulli! Euler! Lagrange! Laplace! Fourier! Poisson! This is sort of a masochistic move, since to the best of my knowledge there is no real precedent for fitting the history of mathematics into the history of science. (In my education, at least, the 1700s as a whole tended to get skipped over, except for maybe the Enlightenment, which is two weeks from now). Plus, the material is so technical, that I have to figure out some digestible things to say about it.

Those historians of mathematics are sort of a breed apart, aren’t they? So, question of the day: how should the history of mathematics fit into the history of science as anything other than a series of discoveries. I’ll be damned if I’m going to project an image of Brook Taylor, and say, “This is Brook Taylor. He invented the Taylor series” and then, God forbid, define the Taylor series mathematically. I have two strategies in mind. First, emphasize mathematics as a theory-generating tool (I’m thinking Dave Kaiser and Andy Warwick here), and, second, do something about the shifting occupations of mathematicians. So, looks like I need to know more about the pre-Revolutionary Ecole Militaire.

More on the Scientific Revolution

Again, the folks at the Advances in the History of Psychology blog have a discussion going that pertains to what we have here. In this case, it’s about Copernicus and his relationship to the scientific revolution, and thus the creation of science. It’s centered on a pop history claim that “a scientific psychology rests on the assumptions generated by the Copernican revolution,” namely, the “promoting [of] objectivity in the study of human affairs.” Obviously, the idea that Copernicus had much to do with the use of “objectivity” in the study of “human affairs” (astronomy??) is daft. Still, worth taking a look at.

Actually, this also pertains to the intellectual tensions between me, the consummate historian, and my TA, who is much more into philosophy. We figured out last week that we can use our disagreements about what needs to be emphasized (ideas vs. institutions, etc.) to enliven discussion sections. Apparently the students were amazed that the two of us had vehement and legitimate disagreements about class material. (We actually figured out how to use this tension to our advantage while discussing [i.e. arguing bitterly about] what he was talking about in section re: Copernicus!) More soon!