Uncategorized – Page 12 – Ether Wave Propaganda

A Message from the President

HSS members have just been alerted that the new e-newsletter is out. First off, I think it’s good the newsletter is only online, but their new floating table of contents is not working for me, because it obscures the text on my computer at work even when the window is fully expanded. You can shrink the screen contents by hitting Ctrl-minus, and that clears it up. Or you can just access the pdf version. This year’s HSS preliminary program is included (look for my session Saturday morning!)

What I want to post about real quick before I take off to Colorado on vacation until next week is Jane Maienschein’s message as outgoing president of HSS. First off, a tip of the hat for the following: “We have to embrace a range of scholarly products, including well-crafted blogs that have more impact and reach a larger audience than the typical academic book, public presentations, and collaborations with scientists.” Quite true, although I would emphasize the possibility for having real-time, open scholarly conversations rather than audience reach.

Second, an important and possibly controversial point: Maienschein observes that a major priority for her was getting the history of science to reconnect with…. the history of science! “I worried that the profession had become so diverse and diffuse that it lacked the energy to carry the field forward. In particular, I saw too much of a swing toward a version of the social history of science that seemed to forget the science. I imagined I might help bring back a balance of interests – science at the core, along with plenty

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Hump-Day History: Karl Alfred von Zittel and his History of Geology and Paleontology

Karl Alfred von Zittel ( September 25, 1839 – January 5, 1904) was a German paleontologist. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the geologist, zoologist, and eugenicist, who authored, in 1936 the two volume, The Proboscidea: A Monograph of the Discovery, Evolution, Migration and Extinction of the Mastodonts and Elephants of the World, as well as Man Rises to Parnassus, eulogized von Zittel as one of the most “distinguished advocates of paleontology.” It was no exaggeration, according to Osborn, to say that “he did more for the promotion and diffusion of paleontology than any other single man who lived during the nineteenth century.”

Von Zittel, “while not a genius”, nonetheless possessed “untiring industry” as well as “critical capacity” ( Science, N. S., Vol. XIX. ) What then were von Zittel’s achievements? First among them was the multi-volume Handbuch der Palaeontologie, issued between 1876 and 1890. While the progress of paleontology in the nineteenth century was “prodigious,” according to Osborn, it was nonetheless, “scattered through thousands of monographs and special papers,” a “hopeless labyrinth to the student.” Such was the state of knowledge, detail without system, that it was impossible for even the expert “to gain a perspective view of the whole subject.” Von Zittel’s Handbuch der Palaeontologie was a feat of organization and collection. Added to this textual achievement was von Zittel’s apparently fantastic collection of natural historical specimens which he assembled at Alte Akademie of Munich. This collection, assembled from all over the world, illustrated the course of the ” evolution of plants and of invertebrate and vertebrate animals.”

It was small wonder that Munich accordingly became “the Mecca of paleontologists, young and old.” Such community was fostered by von Zittel due in large part to his “exceptionally charming and magnetic personality.” He was also exceptionally generous with both his time and his natural historical specimens. Von Zittel’s legacy and fame were secure as he could count among his students “all the younger American, most of the German, and many of the younger French and Austrian paleontologists.”

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Odds and Ends

I’m off to Minnesota to visit family for a week, and will probably not be posting. I think Chris has something planned for Hump Day History, which will probably go up later.

For any readers with an interest in science policy, the blog Prometheus is being discontinued. I originally had Prometheus on the blog roll because I enjoyed David Bruggeman’s attention to a well-parsed variety of issues concerning science in the federal (and occasionally British) governments. Bruggeman’s new blog is Pasco Phronesis, which takes Prometheus’ place on the blog roll. Prometheus’s main contributor, Roger Pielke, Jr., is primarily intested in climate change issues, and he also has a new blog. His analyses of policy issues and public pronouncements are detailed, frequent, and pointed, but are a little far afield of what we do here. So no new link, but I encourage readers with any interest in the issue to check him out if they haven’t already.

Finally, I thought it might be interesting to do occasional “what am I reading?” posts. I read different books in different ways. Some books I read in detail from cover to cover. For Hump Day History I read books in enough detail to do a competent summary of the subject matter, but don’t really absorb the whole thing. A whole stack of others sit on my shelf or coffee table seemingly eternally half-read, and sometimes I actually finish them. A couple selections I plan on taking to Minnesota with me, plus short commentary, after the jump.

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Primer: Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) came from a London artisan family and as a youth became an apprentice at a bookbinding shop. There he took the opportunity to read the books passing through, including such scientific titles as Conversations on Chemistry (1805) by Jane Marcet and Antoine Lavoisier’s landmark Elements of Chemistry (translated into English in 1790). Supported in his explorations by his master and others, he attended popular scientific lectures, including some given by the celebrated chemist Humphry Davy (1778-1829) at the new Royal Institution (est. 1799). In 1813 Faraday finagled a job as Davy’s assistant, and would remain at the Royal Institution for the rest of his life.

Faraday undertook his work throughout a period when the sciences were changing rapidly, as they were yoked into distinct specialties, and as his own area, the experimental physical sciences, became dramatically more sophisticated. Under Davy’s and other Royal Institution figures’ supervision, he learned the techniques of chemistry, and undertook all his early work in that field (and is credited with the discovery of benzene). When Faraday initiated his interest in electricity and magnetism early in the 19th century, the harnessing of galvanic currents by means of voltaic piles was a recent innovation that had sparked extensive investigation into electrochemical effects (an alternative explanation is here). Davy was a leader in this new field of study, and Faraday would likewise become an expert. Faraday would eventually fall out with Davy—who would oppose his election to the Royal Society—and he came into his own at the Royal

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Self-Promotion!

Aside from blogging, I, in fact, also do research and produce academic works. Typically I try not to blog excessively about my own work, but it seems a pity not to try and bring the two together from time to time. So, I wanted to draw attention to a two-part series appearing in the latest Science in Context that I wrote with my friend and former grad school colleague Lambert Williams. Both papers have both our names on them, and were formulated largely in tandem, but (as the writing styles will evidence) we do have our respective halves of the series.

My half is a new consideration of Jay Forrester’s system dynamics simulation methodology, which he originated at MIT circa 1960. It’s best known through its role in the 1970s “Limits to Growth” affair, but rather than recapitulate the tit-for-tat of the various proponents and critics of his simulation project, I wanted to try and elucidate what made this project so appealing to him that he has remained with it through the present. To a large extent, system dynamics has meshed into the larger background of computer simulation

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Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives

OK, it’s Wednesday, but this morning’s post is going to be a quick reflection on an episode of Nova I saw last night on Hugh Everett III and his son Mark, better known as E, the leader of the band Eels. Perhaps surprisingly for a historian of physics, I’ve been aware of E much longer than I’ve been aware of Everett—back in college we used to play Eels albums a lot. Their (his) second album, 1998’s Electro-shock Blues is a particularly depressing ride through his reaction to his mother’s death from cancer and his sister’s suicide (but ending in the uplifting “P.S. You Rock My World”). I did not, however, know that E was Everett’s son. Hugh Everett died of a heart attack in 1982 at the age of 51.

Everett is best-known as the progenitor of the “Many Worlds Interpretation” of quantum mechanics, which he put out to challenge the Copenhagen Interpretation in the late 1950s as a graduate student at Princeton. As a way of circumventing the problem of the seemingly arbitrary “collapse” of wave functions when “observed”, he supposes that instead of collapsing, different possibilities propagate in different realities—in its most technical, least ontological manifestation, this is the idea of the “universal” wave function. Everett’s advisor, John Wheeler, encouraged him, even setting up a meeting with Copenhagen guru Niels Bohr, but found that most quantum physicists rejected his new perspective out-of-hand (egged on behind the scenes by Bohr).

Everett decided against a career in academic physics, going to work for the

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American Observatory History Portal

Hump-Day History will probably be a day late this week—Chris is working on something, but is also wrapping up the semester. In the meantime, I thought since we get some traffic through here that directs to other sites, it might be useful to put up a list of links to the histories of some major early American observatories. I find the first step to getting a good grip on history is to get familiar with a wide range of players and institutions. To do this, you don’t need any new fangled history—any old institutional history will do just fine, so long as you know the institutions exist. A lot of institutions have put work into making the basic outlines of their history online, so if you need to bone up on your American observatory history, here are a few key institutional histories to get you going. Remember, this is just a sketchy list of institutions with useful online histories, not a complete list of American observatories, or observatories with online histories.

Hopkins Observatory (1834, Massachusetts)

United States Naval Observatory timekeeping (1845)

Cincinnati Observatory (1843)

Detroit Observatory (1854)

Dudley Observatory (1856, Albany)

Barnard Observatory (1859, Mississippi)

Allegheny Observatory (1859)

Leander McCormick Observatory (1885, Virginia)

Lick Observatory (1888, San Jose, California)

Yerkes Observatory (1892, Wisconsin)

Mt. Wilson Observatory (1904, Pasadena)

Palomar Observatory (1936, San Diego County)

People interested might also visit Wikipedia’s List of Observatories, with links to information collected on many others from around the world—of course, it is Wikipedia, so the usual caveats apply, though astronomy and observatory history enthusiasts tend to be conscientious with details.

John Wheeler special issue of Physics Today

For those interested in the history of recent physics, the April issue of Physics Today is dedicated to the career of John Wheeler (1911-2008), a major figure in the last 2/3 of 20th-century American physics. He worked on problems of the nucleus and in the design of thermonuclear weapons, and at the troublesome border between quantum physics and general relativity. The issue includes:

Ken Ford’s “John Wheeler’s work on ion particles, nuclei, and weapons” (available for free at the Physics Today website).

Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and Wojciech Zurek’s “John Wheeler, relativity, and quantum information”.

Oregon State history of science graduate student (and former Merchant Marine captain) Terry Christensen’s, “John Wheeler’s mentorship: An enduring legacy”.

There are also two articles by Wheeler himself drawn from the archives: “Mechanism of fission” (1967), a retrospective on early fission research; and “Introducing the Black Hole” (1971, with Remo Ruffini), a semi-technical introduction to the physics of black holes.

The Niels Bohr Library and Archives, incidentally, has two transcripts of interviews with Wheeler online, one from 1967, and one from 1993, which served as notes for Wheeler’s autobiography (co-written with interviewer Ford).

Happy 1,000 Thony C!

It’s a running source of amusement between Chris Donohue and me that by far the most popular post on this site is guest contributor Thony Christie’s discussion of Newton’s prism experiments and theory of color for Hump-Day History back in December, which has just received its 1,000th page view.

By coincidence we’ve arrived at Schaffer’s well-known piece on Newton’s prism experiments in our ongoing exploration of his work, so in honor of Thony’s massive success with his piece, I’ll be doing a write-up of that piece (combined with Schaffer’s piece on astronomy’s “personal equation”) some time this week

Orchids! (And Enthusiasts)

Regular updates to continue tomorrow. Today I just thought I’d mention that on a springtime trip to the National Mall, my girlfriend and I took a quick swing through the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. This was sort of a getting-from-Constitution-Ave-to-the-Mall kind of swing-through (bless the free-of-charge Smithsonian!), but it did afford an opportunity to catch the Orchids Through Darwin’s Eyes exhibit, which is being put on by the Smithsonian’s Horticultural Services Division. (We later took a stroll through the United States Botanic Garden, which is also a a really attractive place).

I hardly ever go downtown (the crowds!), but I should, because I am spoiled with all the incredible curatorial and historical talent right here. As I weave my way through tourists, what I usually think about is the sheer amount of expertise that must go into crafting this stuff, when most people passing through must think, “Ooh, orchids!” if not, “How can we hit three more museums before dinner? C’mon kids, culture! Appreciate! Quicker!” The museum folks have always struck me as having a sort of bizarre, and slightly depressing, role to play.

But I’m probably wrong about that, because there’s also the enthusiasts, who, if nit-picky at times, are surely the most rewarding audience with whom to interact. In the future I’d like to go into a little bit more detail about history written by and for enthusiasts, as opposed to pop history. I get the impression academics who deal regularly with neither tend to conflate the groups, even though they couldn’t be more different.

One of these days we’ve got to get a curator over here to do a Q&A to talk about being spanned between the general public, enthusiasts, and academics. I know academics generally don’t like to get into the kinds of nitty-gritty issues that enthusiasts love (this would be background research, not publishable stuff), but it’s worth considering how historians might identify and serve this audience’s needs better, possibly improving scholarship in the process. I’m thinking here of something between the educational exhibit and the a-to-z reference resource, but I’ll have to come back to this thought later. Got to get home!

Less musing, more substance tomorrow. Promise!