Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 26 – History and Historiography of Science

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/

Entente Cordiale: Anthropological and Natural Philosophical Cosmology

Simon Schaffer’s “Natural Philosophy” in Ferment of Knowledge (1980) is an exhilarating piece by a 25-year-old scholar. When I first looked at it on this blog, I gave my post the title “Schaffer Busts Out the Hickory”, suggesting that he had taken a wooden bat to the extant literature on the topic. In view of the scholarship of today’s grande entente cordiale, it was really refreshing to see a vigorous and pointed critique directed against other historians’ work. Sure, it was a tad violent, but it was in the service of progress! “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven” and all that.

Anyway, partially a part of the growing rebuke against viewing 18th-century science as an outgrowth of a grand tradition of “Newtonianism”, partially a rebuke against attempts to define natural philosophy in terms of what makes it distinct from science (e.g., Kuhn’s definition of “pre-paradigmatic science”), the piece ultimately moves beyond criticism and becomes a messily-articulated, but powerful and original discussion of how one might begin to construct a positively-defined historiography of natural philosophy.

Schaffer identified two possible proposals for constructively analyzing the history of natural philosophical systems:

[S]ome historians [cite: Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin] have used the ideas of Mary Douglas, Robin Horton, and other cultural anthropologies as clues to unravel the cosmologies of natural philosophers, while Michel Foucault has constructed an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ with which to analyse the structure of natural philosophy as a set of discourses. These contrasting approaches derive from two opposed epistemologies. (86)

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The Natural Philosophy Problem

I have decided that Geoffrey Cantor’s “The Eighteenth Century Problem,” an essay review of 1980’s Ferment of Knowledge collection, is a lost masterpiece [History of Science 20 (1982): 44-63]. I don’t think it’s possible to just pick it up and enjoy it; obviously reading Ferment of Knowledge helps, and knowing a little something about various eighteenth-century sciences helps as well. But what the piece is really about is differing methods of historiographical presentation, and how they help us digest the scientific work of an era. Cantor does a lot to help us understand the crucial variations in approach that existed ca. 1980.

What I want to concentrate on is the subsidiary “problem of natural philosophy”. A common way of analyzing natural philosophy is just to say that “it’s what they used to call science”, but this not only misses the key distinctions and connections between, say, natural philosophy, natural history, mathematics, and other forms of higher learning, it also doesn’t help to explain the fact that a lot of the discussion that falls into natural philosophy comes off as just plain weird. What are we to make of this?

Cantor observes that nobody seemed entirely sure:

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Schaffer on Bodies, Evidence, and Objectivity

Bodies of evidence: frontispiece of Nollet’s Essai sur l’electricité des corps

In 1983’s “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” Simon Schaffer set himself the task of determining whether “some of the more fashionable themes in current historiography” could be made to yield real explanatory gains. Among these themes was “the notion of scientific production as performance”. The gist of that piece was that natural philosophical arguments, as illustrated through public demonstration, had trouble fostering social agreement because of the requirement that the audience be able to interpret the performance and its implications correctly. Here was a tension that, especially when connected to the social and political dangers of rationalist Jacobin politics, could help explain the nineteenth-century rise of contained scientific communities.

Much of Schaffer’s output in the 1980s and early 1990s filled out various instances where natural knowledge was linked to problems of maintaining proper behavior, and, thus, political order. He especially concentrated on the cases of pneumatics (and the related practice of eudiometry), and cometography. He also highlighted pointed criticisms of the idea that experimentally-gained knowledge could solve problems of social order, particularly those of Hobbes, Burke, and Whewell.

“Self Evidence,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 327-362 returns us to 1983’s general point—the problematic relationship between experimental evidence and its implications for knowledge—and returns to some of the same electrical experimenters. There is however a new wrinkle: the emphasis now is on self-experimentation and the difficulties of evidence produced specifically through the experimenter’s body. How could a savant or an audience trust in reports of the medical benefits of electrical therapy, for example? Accordingly, Schaffer does not point to the rise of the contained community. Instead the consequence of the identified tension is the rise of mechanical instrumentation designed to measure physiological effects. “The lesson of the story of self-evidence may … be that there is an intimate relationship between the trust placed in evidence of self-registering scientific instrumentation and the moral authority of the scientific intellectual” (362).

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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.

Primer: William Thomson

William Thomson, Age 28, Well-Established

William Thomson (1824-1907) was the son of James Thomson, an Irish professor of mathematics who moved from the University of Belfast to the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1832. William was raised in a latitudinarian tradition of religious tolerance, and in a whig tradition of progressive social reform. In Glasgow, he was exposed to a scholarly environment from early on, and it was assumed he would follow in his father’s academic footsteps. In 1841 he departed to Cambridge, where he studied for the mathematical tripos, becoming a student of the coach William Hopkins his second year. He finished second wrangler in the January 1845 examination.

Before Thomson had even arrived at Cambridge, his father had begun the process of maneuvering him into position to take over the chair in natural philosophy at Glasgow. William duly obtained it in 1846 at the age of 22, and held it until his retirement in 1899. By the 1840s, natural philosophy had already begun a long process of transformation, which Thomson himself did much to mold. Traditionally, the basis of natural philosophy was the development of theories of the materials of the universe and their powers on each other, resulting in schemes for explaining various kinds of physical phenomena, as mediated by the power of experiment. And indeed, to qualify for the Glasgow chair, Thomson had been encouraged to seek out what limited experimental work was done at Cambridge, and, after completing the tripos, he had traveled to Paris where he assisted in the laboratory of Victor Regnault (1810-1878) at the Collège de France.

At Cambridge, meanwhile, the mathematical tripos had classically been considered an appropriate foundation of a liberal education, instilling in students analytical habits of mind.

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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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