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Science in Latin America Archive

This has apparently been up for a while, but it’s just rattled down to my desk through the pneumatic tubes. So, if, like me, you haven’t been aware of it, check out the History of Science in Latin America and the Carribean (HOSLAC) from the University of New Hampshire. Once you land, go to the archive/database, then launch the Virtual Archive, at which point you’ll be brought to a slick Flash application, which tours you through a series of artifacts, topics, and resources. The reading of “science” is broad: you’ll also find much on ancient and recent Latin American cultures, exploration, technology, medicine, and agriculture. All in all, very nicely done.

http://www.hoslac.org/

Hawks, Doves, and Various Avian Hybrids

The earliest version of this post embarrassingly misrepresented the AEC General Advisory Committee’s 1949 position on hydrogen bomb development. Having caught out my error, I have inserted a correction below. —Will

There is an interesting post by Darin over at PACHSmörgåsbord discussing a recent PACHS colloquium given by Terry Christensen on physicists and Cold War politics, with commentary by Erik Rau (one of the few other historians who has written much about the history of operations research). I’m a little bummed not to have seen the talk. I obviously can’t comment on specific points. But I gather from Darin’s summary that it had mainly to do with why Edward Teller (1908-2003) has a bad historical reputation, where fellow Cold War hawk John Wheeler (1911-2008) (about whom Christensen has written) does not. The postwar government activities of physicists is a frequently-visited topic, but it has not been systematically addressed, and, in all but the most sophisticated accounts, it is still rather coarsely-parsed. I’ve been gathering information on it lately, and thought I would offer a few preliminary thoughts about the complex relationship between physicists and American Cold War militarism.

Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Gift of Carlo Wick

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Thematic Concerns and Synopticism in the Historiography of Scientific Work

Jed Buchwald began his essay review of Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise’s 1989 biography of William Thomson, Energy and Empire (British Journal for the History of Science 24 (1991) pp. 85-94) with the observation, “Post-modernism and Benoit Mandelbrot have found their way to the history of science.” He went on to identify the book as “a sort of fractal biography“, and observed, “Here we have, as it were, an attempt to force meaning, but not global order, to emerge out of chaos through guided immersion in the chaos itself.” The “ever-present aim” is “thematic unity”. Buchwald saw this as a new methodological tack, and his characterization of it is worth a lengthy quote. Rhetorically asking why one should write a massive biography of a very important, but not Very Important physicist, he surmises:

The answer Smith and Wise would give, I think, points to Thomson’s unique significance as the exemplar and the creator of a special kind of imperial science and engineering. His scientific creations both reflect and constitute a powerful amalgam of social, cultural and economic trends that shaped British physics and physics-based engineering into a form that gave it worldwide dominance during the same period, and for many of the same reasons, that Clydeside ship-builders and the British telegraph dominated. I know of no comparable biography, or history, that so directly embraces and thoroughly works the view that every aspect of an individual’s career is indissolubly bound to every other aspect of it, that the whole connects both globally and in intimate detail to tendencies that influenced populous groups of people and that have at first sight little to do with questions such as whether or not one should treat moving force as an energy gradient.

Of course, the attempt to derive unity from an individual’s intellectual output was not new. We have already seen on this blog how in 1984 Simon Schaffer had criticized the literature on Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) for portraying him as a “synoptic thinker”. Energy and Empire was part of the very same discussion. In fact, in their chapter 4 on the “changing tradition of natural philosophy”, Smith and Wise drew on Schaffer’s work on Glasgow astronomer John Pringle Nichol (1804-1859), whose commitment to social progress accorded with his support for the nebular hypothesis and the attendant implication of cosmological progress, which (apparently) implied an endorsement of the general concept of progress by nature itself.

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“Bright Idea”: AIP’s New Laser History Exhibit

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the laser. The American Physical Society has its own website, LaserFest, dedicated to the occasion. Spencer Weart, retired director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics (my employer) has also just completed a new web exhibit, “Bright Idea: The First Lasers”. It is directed at a general audience (and, if I may introduce a slight grumble on this note, the exhibit text does start with that pop-history chestnut that has become the bane of history professors everywhere: “Since ancient times….”), but I hope that professionals will find the use of multimedia appealing, too. The web design is by Ada Uzoma, who is also helping me with my new web resource, and she’s really done a lovely job with integrating images and sound into the exhibit. Have a look. For our older web exhibits, go here.

Crease on Peirce in Physics Today

I’d meant to link to this earlier, but something was going on with the Physics Today website, and supposedly free content was getting hidden behind a paywall, but this is now resolved. In the December issue, workhorse historian of physics Robert Crease had an article on Charles Sanders Peirce’s involvement in 19th-century metrology. Peirce (pronounced “purse”) is best-known today for his involvement with American pragmatist philosophy. However, like William Thomson, and in association with Albert Michelson (as recently discussed at length by Richard Staley), Peirce was also a key figure in the development of precision instrumentation and experimentation. The article is very timely to recent posts here, and upcoming posts as well, so do have a look if you’re at all interested.

Exemplary Episodes: The N-Rays

The N-ray research program, led by respected French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot (1849-1930) and followed by many others, was of substantial significance, generating about 300 papers in the period between 1903 to 1906. N-ray researchers not only argued for the existence of N-rays, but detailed their physical properties. Their work is routinely included in the history of the new radiations of x-rays and Henri Becquerel’s radiation, and is often paired with psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon’s “black light” (here not the same as UV light) as part of the discoveries of “spurious” forms of radiation. Notably, cosmic rays, discovered around the same time, were also initially very slippery to detect, and would remain in limbo for well over a decade before being fully accepted as a phenomenon of extraterrestrial origin (never mind further disputes over their composition).

Traditionally, the N-ray research program has been of interest as an exemplary episode—an instrumental use of history that imparts a lesson or principle. Because the rays do not actually exist, the historical flourishing of a research program dedicated to studying them becomes a cautionary tale to scientists. Unless the lessons of the “affair” are heeded, you, too, could end up like Blondlot, needlessly wasting research effort on a chimera. Unlike Blondlot, your follies probably won’t become a legend that lives on long after you (and after your legitimate achievements are forgotten), but it nevertheless wouldn’t do to acquire a reputation as methodologically reckless.

As an exemplary episode, the historical context of the N-ray program is typically analyzed in order to explain how it could have been allowed to exist at all, rather than to properly characterize its place amid contemporaneous research programs.

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In Praise of Historiographical Work Horses

The consolidation of gains is methodologically progressive

Who are the work horses in your field? I’ve finished reviewing the data on my big web project at AIP, which at the moment consists of basic career data on over 800 physicists working in America at any point after 1945. Where the information is actually available, this tells you things like where they were and when, what special posts they held (department chairs, professional society presidencies…), and what major committees they were on. But you can also turn this around: the resource will also tell you, for certain institutions, who was there and when. But, to make the resource complete and useful, you need to have a third dimension that links people intellectually rather than institutionally, which will be done via topic guides, on which I am now working.

Unlike gathering all the basic biographical information, which mainly requires tenacity in data mongering, this last task vastly benefits from the guidance of other historians. And in the history of physics, when you want to find out the basics, it’s remarkable how the same names keep coming up again and again. Should a chronological problematic ever re-emerge as an organizational principle in historiography, I think these individuals’ methodological importance will be better appreciated.

University of Illinois professor Lillian Hoddeson is everywhere, and constantly in collaboration with physicists and other historians. She, Adrienne Kolb, and Catherine Westfall have just come out with an early history of Fermilab (2008).

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Instrumental Uses of History

Coming off the second part of my review of Richard Staley’s Einstein’s Generation, and also to try and set a tone for this year’s blogging, I’d like to consider the question of the instrumental uses of history. I want to start with the idea that history is an inevitable component of argumentation. Some other term might prove more convenient later on, but for the moment I want to say that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to open a discussion without invoking history in some way.

The point might be made by reference to comments in a recent discussion at the History of Economics Playground blog. There one question is whether or not economists can get away with shoddy history when they start out with the claim that they “are not historians of economic thought”. Yann takes the case to an extreme by pointing out that you could say, “Well, I’m not a physicist, but here’s some thoughts about physics for my fellow economists,” and physicists would have every right to call them on their errors. However, physics is not an inevitable component of economic argumentation (as it might be for engineering argumentation), whereas it might be convenient to refer to the history of economics in making an economic argument without assuring the audience of the quality of the history.

I think this point is generalizable. Since the past provides us with the experience from example necessary to understanding the present, the past necessarily becomes a topic of conversation. In this instance, history becomes a sort of shadow philosophy, a set of exemplary episodes that demonstrate certain principles, which then can be invoked to discuss current situations.

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Looking Backward, Moving Forward

This blog launched on New Year’s Day 2008, so for the first post of the new year it seems like a good time to try and figure out and consolidate what has been learned in the last year. Given the still-rather-uncertain place of blogs in the realm of professional history, any decision to continue on has to revolve around whether or not I am getting anything out of it personally. The answer, I think, is a resounding “yes”.

Over the past two years, Ether Wave Propaganda has made a point of exploring in a continuous and semi-systematic way the concerns, methods, and history of current historiography. While there is surely a long way to go, enormous progress has been made, which (in my opinion) puts this blog well ahead of most other commentators in trying to figure out what the sensibilities are that inform contemporary historiography. A year ago the main insight was to make a distinction between socio-epistemic and chronological problematics, and to note that the bulk of historiography of science was dedicated to the former, and that this had something to do with the public mission of historiography. I can now present a concordant, but clearer and more detailed picture.

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CBC Radio Interviews

Sparse posting these days. Regular readers may have noticed I took down the tabs for the Canon page and the Web Lab. The former is because I haven’t been working on the canon project for a while, and until I find some way to reconstitute it, I thought it was better to bring it in from the cold rather than let it stand as testimony to a half-pursued project. The second is because my “Array of Contemporary American Physicists” is nearly done and will soon be ready for public viewing. It is in much nicer shape than the Web Lab version; but we’re still putting in pictures and polishing the content up.

The Array is taking up most of my time now, but in spare moments I’m working my way through Richard Staley’s well-crafted Einstein’s Generation, which I’ll profile here as soon as I’m finished. In the meantime, some big-name science studies people (Schaffer, Shapin, Galison, Daston, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, Andy Pickering, Brian Wynne, Evelyn Fox Keller) plus scientists and other thinkers, were interviewed by CBC’s David Cayley at some point in the not-too-distant past as part of CBC’s Ideas program. I just recently ran across it. It’s called “How to Think about Science”. As I’ve mentioned before, especially here, I’m not a fan of this framing of science studies, because it tends to set up some simplistic straw-man “public image” of science, and then say, “but, actually, science is complex“, and then present some case demonstrating how very cultural science is. Whether this program takes that approach or not, I don’t know for sure. Based on the abstracts, I’m not getting my hopes up. But because I don’t have RealPlayer at work, and haven’t set aside time at home to listen, I can’t fairly speak about it. I’ll get around to it soon. In the meantime, have a listen and judge for yourself.