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Things are moving slowly around here what with the book and all, but a while ago in attempting to organize “what I think I know” about sciences-related things from a prior era well outside my expertise, I put together a snazzy little sketch of relations between areas of interest to historians of science and historians of ideas and creative practices more generally.  The idea is that you could make the diagram into some computer 3-D ball-like model and rotate it around and look at various areas.  Failing having a snazzy 3-D model complete with pull-up bibliographies, pictures, biographical databases, time-lines, and the like (but, seriously, how awesomely useful would that be?) I thought it would be of interest to toss out a few areas and connections between them that I am under the impression people who work on the pre-1600 period care about.  The idea is to have a sort of first approximation of what a historiographical synthesis would look like, and then figure out how the picture is right and wrong.  So, in no real order, the following represent chains of connections, rather than homogeneous categories….

1. Astronomy-mathematics/geometry: Big area of interest, classically on account the the exalted place of astronomy in the scientific revolution, but c. 1600 is mainly a wonky area of table-making, useful for calendars, astrology.  Big specialist historiography.

2. Mathematics/geometry-mechanics-optics-music theory: The “other” mathematical fields.  I really have no idea to what extent interest in these areas overlapped with interest in professional astronomy.  Obviously some people had wide interests, but if you were to take a survey how deep would it run, I couldn’t make a good guess of what the results would be.

3–19 after the jump.

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Finishing book manuscript… no time to deal with Hump-Day History this week… must fill in footnotes…. so very many footnotes….

Here at EWP, we feel we’re turning a bit of a corner.  A good portion of our posts to this point have consisted of honing our methodological sensibilities.  We don’t really imagine that we’ve convinced anybody of much of anything they don’t already know, but it’s been very useful to us to get our heads around the mechanics of historiography, as well as to get a general sketch of the historiography’s own history.  What this does is let us start moving forward constructively.  In the spirit of practicing what we preach: rather than harp on the same things ad infinitum, it’s time to move on to the next phase of the project, though I’m sure we’ll be unable to resist returning to methodology from time to time.

First, we’ll probably be posting a little bit less.  Methodology is kind of easy, because it’s impressionistic and requires introspection rather than extensive research.  Now we’ll be doing more “Canonical”, “Oeuvre”, as well as what we hope will be a fun new series: “Ancient History”, examining stuff written

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For those who don’t check in with the Pauling Blog, the Oregon State Special Collections has launched Linus Pauling Day-by-Day.

As our regular readers have probably gathered, I’m not very keen on the “gallery of practices” mode of historical scholarship, wherein the theory-trained scholar dives into the archive and just starts pointing out all the epistemological assumptions and practices, cultural contexts, and negotiated knowledge claims they can find in there so as to add another image to the gallery.  To consolidate gains and to synthesize history, it is necessary to gain a wide empirical knowledge of the historical terrain—a point I hope to discuss much further in the future.

Pauling Day-by-Day represents an ultimate extension of empiricism.  I’ve often thought as I’ve attempted to make sense of a historical terrain that it would be very nice if I could just throw all the correspondence and memoranda and everything into chronological order to make better sense of it.  Pauling Day-by-Day does precisely this.

Scholars who work in the biography industry will be familiar with similar efforts to figure out what Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein was doing on

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Agree or disagree with him—I disagree with his appraisal of the blindness of economic theory in unusual situations—this column is a really nice piece of short popular writing combining a dash of history of science and medicine with epistemological, political, and economic philosophy.

On New Year’s Day 2008, I started Ether Wave Propaganda over at blogspot as a “thinking tool” [originally evocatively called “A History of Science Blog”].  And I think it’s worked.  Going back over the past year, I’ve learned an enormous amount about how scholarship works in the history of science, how to articulate my own sensibilities within this scholarship, and, of course, I’ve learned a lot of history.  The blog has given me a space to practice writing quickly, in short form, and outside my comfort zone.  The luxury of never having to be “final” in my thoughts has allowed me to write abundantly and without the pressure of having to be original or please referees; but being a “professional” (har har) writing critically in a public space has also forced me to be serious with my ideas.  I think most other historians of science still think it’s kind of weird, almost always distracting—and possibly dangerous—to blog, but I take heart that other quite serious academic professions are not nearly so shy.  I also take heart in the existence and excellence of the other history of science blogs listed on the blogroll, all of which have chosen their own angles and kept up the good work.

But the blog could not have been as effective as it has been without other opportunities.  First and foremost, there is my three-year postdoc at the American Institute of Physics History Center.  Spencer Weart, the director of the center since 1974, long ago insisted that the center sponsor a well-paid postdoc lasting for this span of time, and his support of this project and the freedom from immediate responsibilities has allowed this blog to grow in the way that it has.  Spencer is retiring this month and is being succeeded by Greg Good, an enormously good-natured historian of geophysics who is joining us from the University of West Virginia.  My hope is that some time this year the History Center and Niels Bohr Library and Archives (headed by Joe Anderson) will be starting a blog that draws on my experience here, and mixes elements of Hump Day History, the Pauling Blog, and Advances in the History of Psychology.  In the meantime, you, too, can become a fan of the Niels Bohr Library on Facebook!

I’d also like to thank the University of Maryland History Department for allowing me to teach its Introduction to the History of Science, which really forced me to construct a united picture across disciplines and time periods.  And I have to thank my TA and co-blogger Christopher Donohue, a prodigious reader and a sharp

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In the aftermath of the election, all us political junkies have been watching the roll call of new appointments to the Obama administration.  As a historian of science, and as someone working on a massive database of career data of major American physicists, I’ve been interested to see Steve Chu be appointed as Secretary of Energy.  And, once again, a physicist has been appointed the new Science Adviser to the President and Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (we must get our bureaucracy right), Harvard physicist John Holdren.  Holdren will replace John Marburger who had been the Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1998 to 2001, and, before that, had been president of the University of Rochester from 1980 to 1994.

[correction, 2/09. SUNY Stony Brook, not Rochester.]

Now, the Washington Post puts the spin on this as showing possible signs of a changing government attitude toward “science.”  David Baltimore, former president of Caltech is quoted, “The Bush administration has been the most remarkably anti-science administration that I’ve seen in my adult lifetime.”  There are also books devoted to this topic.  Now, when I was talking about the word “science” being a rhetorical disaster, cloaking ideas in vagueness,

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