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Primer: Newton’s Prism Experiments and Theory of Color

Today’s Hump-Day History post is written by frequent visitor Thony Christie, a dedicated amateur historian who “once had a semi-professional background”. He has approved a few editorial truncations and rephrasings.

Update: Not long after this blog post, Thony started his own blog, The Renaissance Mathematicus.

In 1672 the still relatively young and unknown Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Isaac Newton, published his first piece of experimental philosophy: “A Serie’s of Quere’s Propounded by Mr. Isaac Newton, to be Determin’d by Experiments, Positively and Directly Concluding His New Theory of Light and Colours; and Here Recommended to the Industry of the Lovers of Experimental Philosophy, as they Were Generously Imparted to the Publisher in a Letter of the Said Mr. Newtons of July 8.1672” in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The work became a touchstone in the establishment of the short report of experimental results in a serialized publication as a major means of scientific communication. The Philosophical Transactions had existed for seven years prior to Newton’s contribution, but had been dedicated primarily to reporting the Royal Society’s regular piecemeal correspondence rather than the systematic presentation of experiments and observations, which was at that time accomplished mainly in the book format.

A sketch by Newton of one of his prism experiments.

As to the content of Newton’s first publication, it reported a series of simple but elegant experiments with a beam of sunlight and a couple of glass prisms, in which Newton demonstrated that light is not homogeneous and white, but heterogeneous, and made up of different colours each of which

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HSS Highlights, Pt. 2

Continuing part 1 of my recap of the good stuff I took away from this year’s HSS meeting in Pittsburgh….

There was a good session dedicated to “Science and Spectacle in the 18th Century” with papers by Mi Gyung Kim and Michael Lynn on ballooning, and Simon Werrett on the links between thinking on fireworks and electrical performance and philosophy. There was also very good commentary by Jan Golinski, who pointed to Simon Schaffer’s paper, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century” as the key work initiating this line of scholarship. Werrett’s paper, in particular, was right out of Schaffer’s playbook (he even sounds a lot like him). It’s interesting to see the issue of natural philosophical spectacle gain a finer texture, although it’s a little weird that we’re still puzzling out the taxonomy of practices of spectacle and philosophical demonstration a quarter of a century after the fact. In any case, I enjoyed the fact that my blog-related reading paid off for me, and am hoping

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Absences + Recommendations

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday and a nasty travel/work schedule through this week (including some history of physics in industry-related interviews at 3M and Honeywell in Minneapolis-St. Paul), posting has been and will be curtailed until next week, though I am planning on working in a Hump Day History post for Wednesday.

For those who don’t regularly visit some of the sites on the blog roll, I’ll point out that the online grad student journal Hydra is up and accepting submissions. Also, it’s been a while since I’ve plugged the Pauling Blog from the Oregon State Special Collections, which continues to impress me mightily by putting out frequent and high quality multimedia content on Linus Pauling.

Finally, there’s an interesting discussion going on in the science press that’s caught my eye. It concerns what titles and office space mean for the status of science advisers in government. See this article by David Goldston from the Sep. 25th Nature (subscription required), and an article by David Kramer in the Issues and Events section of December Physics Today (not yet online), featuring reaction from current presidential science adviser John Marburger, as well as reactions from several previous advisers. It’s an interesting question with a long pedigree.

Will

HSS Highlights, Pt. 1

I’ve been on two trips since Pittsburgh (Ann Arbor to visit friends and see the Northwestern Wildcats manufacture a sloppy, soggy victory over Michigan–go ‘Cats!–and Maine for an oral history interview). So, doing a recap of highlights of sessions I saw seems less like “hot news” than it might have been. In fact, it seems like ancient history. But I think a recap post is actually better with a slight time delay. One, I promised some folks I wasn’t a conference insta-blogger, and, two, it reduces the ephemerality of the conference experience to come back to it a couple weeks later.

First off, while I’ve sometimes characterized conference presentations here as working along a “colloquium-journal-edited volume” axis of disconnected scholarship, this is more a general criticism of the form. I think it’s OK to pick apart Isis articles from time to time, since it is the flagship journal of the history of science, after all. But picking apart conference talks seems unfair to the tentative nature of the conference talk form, so we won’t be doing that. I will, however, just briefly mention as a lowlight the weirdly rude non-reception given to the welcoming speech by Pitt’s provost. What was up with that?

On highlights, the first thing I want to throw out there is the co-location with the Philosophy of Science Association conference. I think it’s fair to say that for the past two or three decades, the history of science has been much more closely connected to the sociology of science than the philosophy of science, and I think it’s a good project to try and bring the philosophers back in.

I dropped in on some PSA sessions. At a glance, I like the way the philosophers talk and argue: their linguistic precision and the degree to which they engage with problematic issues in a constructive fashion

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Hump Day History Will Return…

I’m on assignment in the far reaches of Maine at the moment, and have unfortunately not made arrangements for a Hump Day History post for this week. The feature will return next week.

HSS

It’s that mystical magical time of year, again: the History of Science Society Annual Meeting, this year in Pittsburgh. I hope to see some readers there, and we’ll be back Monday morning with Part 7 in our Q&A series with Harry Collins and Rob Evans.

Blogging as Scholarship

Ben Cohen of the University of Virginia and The World’s Fair blog writes a little bit about his experiences blogging in the latest newsletter from the History of Science Society. Ben’s perspective is largely that of blog-as-outreach, part of a larger dispersed effort to connect the world of science with the rest of the world. In this vein, he discusses the relationship between blog-as-pedagogy versus blog-as-hobby and warns against the illusion that one is reaching a large audience simply because one, in principle, has access to a large audience. From this perspective, the history of science blog is another species of the general science blog. (Which, by the way, is why it’s not on the blogroll—its focus on science studies issues is peripheral.)

There are alternatives. As Ben writes, “There are history of science blogs beyond the small corner of the scienceblogs collective, some of which are very well done, more direct in their discussions of the history of science, and good examples of creative engagement with the material and import of the work HSS members do. Some are insider blogs, looking mainly to give more space to conversations otherwise left at the seminar door rather than to spread the word to others.” And that would be us here at Ether Wave Propaganda: nobody revels in their own wonkery as tirelessly and as shamelessly as we do!

We see ourselves as a laboratory of scholarship, an experiment to create a sustainable alternative scholarly culture to the one with which we are familiar. As an alternative, it coexists with the mainstream culture, but it also boasts its own traditions from which others may draw. I thought it might be useful just to spell a few things out about what blogs can do that the usual seminar/colloquium/conference/journal axis can do less well.

1) Articulation. The “axis” identified above tends to allow for fairly one-off affairs, which means it’s harder

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Los Alamos vs. 100,000 garages

During this past Tuesday’s presidential debate , I was interested to hear moderator Tom Brokaw ask in a follow-up to John McCain whether America should adopt a “Manhattan-like project” to address the problem of developing alternative energies, “or should we fund 100,000 garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?” (“100,000” garages is apparently yet another Tom Friedman catchphrase; see here).

McCain replied with some boilerplate science policy: “I think pure research and development investment on the part of the United States government is certainly appropriate. I think once it gets into productive stages, that we ought to, obviously, turn it over to the private sector. By the way, my friends [here McCain began to ramble on about pork-barrel ‘goodies’ being attached to energy bills].” Obama was not given a chance to reply. (CNN has the debate transcript).

The historian’s instinct here might be to find the question, and certainly the response, unnuanced. My response would be, yes, but, for a public discussion, I think it’s all right, and I would not expect anything more substantial, especially in a question demanding a 1-minute response. It’s worth reflecting, though, on just what implied policy choices Brokaw packed into his question.

The two models at work here are these: the concentrated attack that includes the nation’s “best brains”, and

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The Epistemological Imperative

Extending yesterday’s post on the style employed in Matters of Exchange to a more general historiographical observation, I’d like to suggest that historians of science feel a sort of epistemological imperative in writing. That is, there is a sort of obligation to address general properties of “science” or “knowledge” by means of an analysis of whatever subject happens to be at hand. Matters of Exchange is ostensibly about the relationship between science, medicine, and trade in early modern The Netherlands; but in a sense it’s really about the emergence of science from a culture of commerce, and is set up to argue the “commerce thesis” rather than anything specific about the The Netherlands in particular.

Meanwhile, Michael Robinson reviewed Graham Burnett’s Trying Leviathan over at Time to Eat the Dogs, which is about a lawsuit that hinges on whether or not the whale is a fish, and extends out to more general arguments about what kind of knowledge about whales matters to whom (whalers, whale oil sellers, naturalists, etc.) Robinson points out, though, that the book also launches into an unwarranted and far more general discussion about whether knowledge is social, etc., etc.

The question that concerns me is whether or not the epistemological imperative actually makes a piece of writing say less by trying to say too much. Let’s take another book I brought up yesterday, William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. This book also has a broad sweeping argument spanning the “frontier thesis”, theories

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STS Wiki Returns

A while ago, Michael Robinson (of Time to Eat the Dogs) and I were discussing possible means of online collaboration, debate, historiography, etc. I mentioned there was an STS Wiki that seemed to be down for the count. It turns out it’s now back up. I haven’t had a good look around it yet, but check it out.