History and Historiography of Science

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Two Schaffer-Related Items

For fans of this blog’s Schaffer Oeuvre series, two fun bits of news.

First, by way of Advances in the History of Psychology, Simon Schaffer’s latest article, “The Astrological Roots of Mesmerism” is in preprint at Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.  I’ll not do a full write-up now, but I will say that I was surprised to find that it is in his mid-’80s vintage style, which is to say, it is basically an intellectual history of the 18th-century natural philosophical ideas surrounding animal magnetism and a predecessor concept, animal gravity.  This history is combined with searching observations about how natural philosophers began to construct their own histories of these natural philosophies so as to render some of Mesmer’s predecessors, notably Robert Fludd (1574-1637), progressive figures within their own historicized contexts, while rendering Mesmer himself a figure whose ideas were of the past.  Schaffer also demonstrates interesting parallels with current historiography, which takes Mesmer’s ideas to have progressive components, while Mesmer’s key intellectual source, physician Richard Mead’s (1673-1754) use of astrological ideas is taken to make him a figure with backward-looking tendencies.  Really a fun, informative, and unexpected piece.

I was likewise surprised to be reading an article at independent.co.uk for unrelated reasons, only to find that one of Schaffer’s most recent projects is a study of the work of the British Board of Longitude (1714-1828), which he is undertaking in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.  Framed as a way of complicating the heroic story of humble clockmaker John Harrison’s solution to the longstanding problem of finding longitude at sea, I am looking forward to results coming from this study simply as an elucidation of the work of an important technical department of the British state.  It is a direct ancestor of issues I will be studying when I move to Imperial College London this fall.

Bites of History

One thing that I think is not appreciated enough is how much history is generally available for easy consumption.  Working at the American Institute of Physics over the past few years, something that’s become increasingly clear to me is that the vast bulk of history of physics is produced by physicists.  Generally it is well-written, and the interests and subject matter tend to be much more eclectic than in writing by professional historians.  Pieces do not really communicate with each other, and so the historiography is hardly synthetic, but if new syntheses of 20th-century physics were ever to be constructed, they would do well to draw heavily on these scattered bites of history.

Letter from George Washington to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Increasingly, professional organizations are making these bites more systematically available.  This week I was contacted by the communications officer from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, who informed me that the Academy is now presenting a weekly “From the Academy Archives” feature on its home page, highlighting items from its archival collection, which dates back to the 18th century.  An archive of these posts will soon be available.  The official press release is below the jump.

The Center for History of Physics, where I work, is the history arm of the American Institute of Physics, but “member societies”, which include the American Physical Society, sometimes also undertake their own historical work, such as through the APS Forum for the History of Physics.  The APS has a similar feature to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “This Month in Physics History”, which has an archive going back to 2000.  The APS is also making the audio and slides of history presentations at APS meetings available on their website, which is another resource from which professional historians might be able to gain if they actively try and integrate this material into what they already know.

Historians need not feel that this sort of work totally fulfills their nutritional historiographical requirements in order to gain from it.  Now that this work is coming out in small, regular portions, there is no reason for historians not to take advantage of its ready availability to help round out their personal knowledge of history.

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Married Physicist Couples

Joseph and Maria Goeppert Mayer; AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

I’ve been away from the blog for some time now, which mainly has to do with the fact that I just got married.  Thus activities surrounding this event went to the top of my agenda, bumping ordinary work down into the space usually occupied by supplying content to EWP.  This post is inspired by my recent bout of marriage on the brain.

A bit of background: I nabbed some funding for putting together ACAP on my first try, but barely.  One thing that almost derailed the proposal was some anxiety that this would be yet another dead-white-male hall of fame.  That outcome is sort of inevitable: to this day, the physics profession suffers from a pronounced gender skew, albeit not so bad as in prior decades.  If one is to study physics history, one is going to end up studying a lot of white males, unless one specifically sets out to do a sociological or anthropological analysis of gender and minority relations in the profession.

I argued at the time that ACAP’s scale and reach to the present would almost certainly allow it to include women and minorities with whom professional historians rarely bother, but who have been well-known to physicists themselves.  This turned out to be correct.  On account of the historical bias of the physics profession against female and minority participation, only a small percentage of people in ACAP are women and minorities, but they are nevertheless there, and this allows the beginnings of a conversation about their history in the American physics profession—with certain important caveats, most notably that ACAP can analyze only the careers of those who have made it to the upper echelons of professional recognition.  ACAP must not be taken as a reliable sample from which to draw general conclusions about “women and minorities in physics”, since professional advancement has been one of the greatest challenges facing these groups in the profession.

One notable trend that we can look at is the prevalence of physicist married couples in the history of physics.

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William Coblentz and the Superphysical World

In developing ACAP, I’ve picked up a broad and eclectic, albeit still superficial, knowledge of the American physics community.  I now want to start filling in some parts of this general picture for refereed publication, but there are other bits and pieces that I don’t think I’ll ever publish, and I thought this might be a good forum for “tossing them out there”.  So, taking a cue from a recent post on paranormal phenomena at Heterodoxology, I’d like to talk about an unexpected run-in I had with the history of paranormal research while collecting information on a physicist who worked at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), of all places.

Coblentz, photo by Harris and Ewing for the National Bureau of Standards, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

William Coblentz (1882-1962) was a reasonably high-level figure in the pre-World War II American physics community.  Raised in rural Ohio, he went on to receive a PhD from Cornell in 1903, and, following two years of postdoctoral research there, he moved to the new NBS (est. 1901) where he would spend his career.  He was a key figure in the development of spectroscopy techniques for measuring heat, which he applied in fields ranging from astrophysics to physiology, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1930.  He quasi-retired in 1945 and published his memoirs, From the Life of a Researcher, in 1951.  Today you can become a member of the Coblentz Society, whose mission is “to foster the understanding and application of vibrational spectroscopy”.  You can even buy a Coblentz Society t-shirt declaring that “spectroscopists do it with frequency and intensity”.

A proper biographical treatment of Coblentz would have to center around his professional work, but I want to concentrate here specifically on his investigations of paranormal phenomena.  Though a side interest, Coblentz took these phenomena seriously, and maintained a lifelong study of them.

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Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine to Close

For those who don’t follow Biomedicine on Display, Thomas Söderqvist has been spreading the news there that the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine is to close down over the next couple of years.  Apparently the Centre’s history of medicine faculty are to be absorbed into University College London, and the Wellcome Library and Collection will remain largely unaffected.  Nevertheless, even for those of us who rarely cross into the history of medicine and the life sciences, the Wellcome Centre’s reputation as a center of scholarship is well-known, and one has to wonder what the scale of the implications will be.  For further information, see the recent posts and comments at Biomedicine on Display and the new Friends of the WTCHOM blog.

Update: There is now also a more definitive story at the British Medical Journal’s news site.

The Array of Contemporary American Physicists

J. Robert Oppenheimer, photo courtesy of the United States Department of Energy and the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

Ladies and gentlemen, the Array of Contemporary American Physicists (ACAP) of the AIP Center for History of Physics is now ready for public use.  I am a big believer that web-based tools can transform the way we do history, not only by making information more accessible, but also by rendering public some vital historiographical activities that typically remain private.  This blog is the arm of that belief that suggests that historiographical reflection can and should take place in open environments.  ACAP is the arm of that belief that suggests the internet can provide a place where the raw results of tedious research—which inform so much of what scholars do but are often never published in an accessible form—can reside and be accessed.

The ACAP project has occupied much of the last couple of years of my attention, and, as it is designed to be a growing and dynamic resource, it will surely be something on which I will continue to work.  On the surface, it will appear to be a highly conservative contribution to the historiography, comprised largely of names and dates and links to other resources, but I hope it will help open the way toward a more inventive and flexible historiography of the physical sciences.  It could, for example, provide a framework of the most basic contexts within which individual works can be located, but which are often neglected.  It will also help to identify people and things we know a lot about (such as everyone’s friend Oppy, pictured here), and help direct attention to, and organize thinking about, whole categories of people and things about which we know very little.  This sort of thing should be done for scholarship of all periods, but it is particularly urgent if we want to take the 20th-century problem seriously.

Finally, I just want to emphasize that this is a resource-in-progress.  We’ve tried to make it as nice and shiny as possible for its big debut (big thanks to our web designer Ada Uzoma), but there is still much that is obviously deficient.  This ranges from the superficial (the main page will be changed, disposing of the cheesy icons among other things), to the fact that our current roster of “topic guides” is severely limited.  In between is the fact that auto-searches for unpublished material and books in our AIP holdings are still only programmed in for a few scientists whose last names happen to start with “A” and “B”.  But, we’re also eager to take it for a spin and see what happens.  So without further adieu:

http://www.aip.org/history/acap

London Calling

Apologies for the slowness in wrapping up the natural philosophy/anthro-cosmology series.  My enormous project at AIP, Phase 1 of the Array of Contemporary American Physicists (ACAP) is currently getting the last few wrinkles ironed out of it.  In all likelihood, this will launch next week, and I’ll announce it here, among other places.  Further, I am getting married on May 1 here in Washington DC, and wedding preparations have started taking up more time.  Further, with ACAP and my three-year post-doc position wrapping up, it’s time to be moseying on to the next town.  I had until a couple weeks ago thought this would be a metaphorical mosey, as I took up full-time research, based at AIP, on a one-year project on geological and glaciological research in the second-half of the twentieth century (on which I’ve been working very part time).  Instead, unexpectedly, it turns out there actually is a next town, and it is called London.

Starting in October, I’ll be taking up a three-year junior research fellowship in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Imperial College London.

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Something Completely Different

I’m off to Berlin this afternoon for a small conference at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science on decision theory and some related areas of theoretical-conceptual inquiry (the conference is billing these as the “Strangelovean Sciences”, which is a nomenclature I oppose).  I’ll be back in DC on Wednesday.  I was hoping to get in Part 2 of my last post before I left, but the week has been busy, so I’ll have to get on this when I return.  In the meantime, the American Institute of Physics’ History Center and Niels Bohr Library and Archives is currently putting together its spring newsletter, which means it’s time for my biannual literature review in the history of physics.  (See my last review here).  The history of physics, especially physics proper, continues to be underrepresented in major journals, whatever its traditional reputation for journal-hogging; though Helge Kragh continues his remarkable rate of output.

Probably my favorite thing about my biannual literature review is trolling around journals that are totally outside of the things that I normally do; sometimes this means looking at what physicists are up to and interested in, such as via the CERN Courier.  But I confess to having the most fun with Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (Part A, and Part B Modern Physics).

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Need More Schaffer? Try the Tarner Lectures!

This blog’s curious fixation with all things Schaffer has not gone unnoticed at the University of Cambridge.  Thanks to Vanessa Heggie for sending along news that he is currently in the process of delivering this term’s Tarner Lectures there, which he has entitled “‘When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears’: Histories of Astronomy and Empire”.  Podcasts of these are being made available in mp3 format, and the first two are already up:

http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=243

Happy listening!