Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 33 – History and Historiography of Science

Primer: Leo Szilard

Photo Credit: Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

I had another post planned for today, but got waylaid when, working on my physicist web project, I had to piece together the career of Leo Szilard. The idea behind the project is to gather skeletal information on physicists to help trace career paths, but this doesn’t work very well for Szilard, who was a sort of a physicist vagabond who seems to have cobbled his career together out of temporary and part-time positions, meager patent revenues, and a penchant for a modest existence. So, I’ve been spending my day immersed in journalist and policy analyst William Lanouette’s Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard (1992), trying to sift out what I can. Since I’m learning more than enough for a post, I thought I’d just write something up on him while I was at it.

Szilard, the son of an engineer, was born Leo Spitz in Budapest, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1898. (His family changed their name in 1900.) Out of a sense of practicality, Szilard aimed to become an engineer himself, enrolling in the Technical Institute of Budapest, but was drafted into the army during World War I. After the war, political conditions became difficult for Szilard, on account of his Jewish heritage, and he moved from Hungary to Berlin to continue his education there, first at the Technical Institute and then the University. In Berlin, Szilard decided to indulge his intellect and study physics in an environment rich in the some of the greatest talent of his day, notably Max von Laue and Albert Einstein. Submitting a manuscript detailing a new conceptualization of thermodynamics that impressed both these men (and was decades later recognized as a contribution to the integration of thermodynamics and information theory), he was granted his doctorate in 1922.

The key characteristic of Szilard’s work and career was his restless and penetrating intellect, which accepted no boundaries and precious little institutional restraint, and drove him to travel constantly. He devoted his thinking to

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Watch your language, Pt. 1

Or, a notion concerning when, how, and why to nitpick historical writing.

I know it must seem obsequious to praise one’s advisor’s work to high heaven on a blog, but I have to be honest: Peter Galison’s 1997 book Image and Logic on the history of particle detectors is, in my mind, one of the finest works of historiographical craftsmanship I can think of. The book is well-known in the theory community for the idea of the “trading zone”, and is thus attached to the whole fashion of studying “boundary objects” and things with multiple meanings to different people, etc., etc. If that’s all you take away from the book, you, like most of its readers, are a “Chapters 1 and 9 person”. I like to think of myself as a “Chapters 2 through 8 person”, which is to say, someone who is interested in the history of particle detectors, and the way Galison presents it. MIT prof Dave Kaiser (who was a Galison student in the ’90s and assisted in the assembly of the book and knows it in intimate detail) likes to kid me for citing “chapter and verse”.

(I was discussing the “trading zone” versus “history of particle detectors” issue with my boss, Greg Good, who related to me how he once went to a talk given by Thomas Kuhn, which began with him saying the word “paradigm” and then informing his massive audience that that was the last they would hear of it, and then proceeded to discuss the history of black body radiation theory in loving detail.)

In considering the book; and the relationship between philosophy, sociology, and history; I like to think of Chapters 1 and 9 as laying out useful ideas or principles for coherent historical writing. Galison joins the sociologists in their rejection of histories written as a succession of theories, or as playing out according to some dialectic between theory and experiment. However, he has been known to chide sociologists for adhering to their own theoretical

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Primer: Adolphe Quetelet, Statistics, and Social Physics

Throughout the 19th century, the nature of social changes and regularities in social activity remained an intense concern as population growth, urbanization, industrialization, and political upheaval captured the attention of scientific and political thinkers throughout Europe and America. As today, this thought necessarily spanned political, popular, philosophical, and scientific realms of thought as debates ensued concerning what could be said about societies and what could and should be done to affect how they function.

In the early 19th century, keeping and deploying statistics was already widespread, but their use as a tool of political discourse remained novel, and thus a subject of general and heated discussion. The astronomer and essayist Adolphe Quetelet proved to be one of the century’s most singular and influential thinkers concerning the use of social statistics. Born in Belgium in 1796 shortly after French annexed Austria’s Belgian provinces in the wars following the Revolution, Quetelet was educated in a French lycée, and as a youth took notice of the place accorded to the sciences in the Napoleonic empire. After Napoleon’s fall in 1815, Quetelet taught mathematics in Ghent, earned a doctorate in the subject, and, after convincing the government to build an observatory in Brussels, he departed to Paris—still the intellectual center of the world—to learn astronomy. Quetelet took up his post as director of the new Brussels Observatory in 1828, and the observatory began operation in 1832.

By no coincidence, it was in this same period that Quetelet first began writing about statistics and “social physics” (a phrase taken from contemporary “positivist” philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte). Principles of statistics and probability had been worked out by key figures in the development of the technical methods of astronomy in France who were also interested in social statistics, particularly Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). And, like many others writing

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The Organizational Synthesis and Periodization

In my last post on the organizational synthesis, I suggested that it was one possible alternative to a house style of history of science that emphasizes the use of case study to illuminate one sort of epistemological problem or another, without explicitly tying the subject of study to other related subjects. This stand-alone quality of scholarship is a situation we might think of as a “new internalism”. While the new internalism recognizes a certain old internalist or antiquarian frustration or futility in building linear histories of the progress of knowledge, it also fractures knowledge into islands of scholarship that do not cohere with each other in any obvious way, and thus are “internalist” in their own right.

By looking at the organization of scientific institutions and scientific projects (attacks on specific problems, traditions in experimentation or theorization, etc…), it is possible to transcend the inadequacies of strictly linear histories. I might also have added that an organizational approach would also be useful in tracking and characterizing overlaps or connections between institutions and projects in histories of science and histories of technology, business, politics, law, and culture.

Today I would like to suggest that studying the organization of science would also allow for more satisfactory periodizations. It can do so by helping to solve the “constituency” problem and the “scale” problem.

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The New Internalism and the Organizational Synthesis

Many electrons have been spilled on this blog concerning the epistemic imperative in history of science writing, and the accordant organization of scholarship according to epistemological rather than chronological problematics. Last year I spent some time arguing that this is unfortunate, since chronological problematics, broadly considered, consolidate historiographical gains and hold far more information than does the accumulation of what I like to call “galleries of practice”, which are dedicated to illustrating the variations on practices relating to “how we come to know”.

The epistemic imperative arises from a variety of locations: sociological “relativism” has used the problem to make deeper inquiries into how and why people agree; various lines of critique have sought to provide cogent reminders against the dangers of scientism; a few scholars have sought to chart the history of epistemological attitudes. Ultimately, I am increasingly convinced, the intellectual roots of the epistemic imperative matter less than the overarching fact that this structure of argument has simply become the “house style” of the history of science profession.

The house style, characterized by its use of case study to focus on the material and contingent, and by its concern for epistemological issues broadly construed, accommodates a highly interdisciplinary form of inquiry,

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Primer: Project Matterhorn and Early Fusion Research

At this moment, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is preparing to come online at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (see the New York Times story). The goal of NIF is to study small-scale nuclear fusion ignited by a precisely focused array of 192 high-power lasers. Reflecting a situation often seen in higher profile with America’s space program, the project is vastly over-budget, and its worth has been subjected to extensive criticism. Nuclear fusion has for decades remained a subject of intensive study and perpetually unmet promise. The “Array of Contemporary American Physicists” on which I am now at work for the AIP History Center will have fusion and related plasma research as one of its focuses, and includes information on some of those involved in the NIF as well as in prior generations of research.

Lyman Spitzer explains the stellarator at the Second Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, 1958 — Lyman Spitzer explains the “stellarator” at the Second Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, 1958

The study of nuclear fusion dates to the 1930s, when an emerging theoretical understanding of subatomic forces and particles suggested a way of accounting for the energy produced by stars and the synthesis of elements within them, as worked out by German émigré physicist Hans Bethe. During World War II, it was understood that artificial fusion could be created by using a fission bomb to ignite nuclear fuel—the idea behind the “super” or “hydrogen” bomb. This possibility was pursued during the war by Hungarian émigré physicist Edward Teller, and, following debate on whether

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Primer: The Royal Academy of Sciences

An imagined visit by King Louis XIV to the Royal Academy of Sciences, 1671.

OK, Hump-Day History got a bit lost the last couple weeks, but to restore some momentum, we present a special Friday edition. I hope American readers have a fine long Memorial Day weekend.

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The organization of scientific work and its communication necessarily involves the reconciliation of tensions between the inherent elitism of advanced inquiry and the aspirations of inquirers to produce universally valid knowledge, as well as between the individualism of personal initiative and the collectivism of rational agreement. Cultures of inquiry and invention have a wide variety of choices of how to enact such reconciliations, and their choices often create a conceptual resonance between scientific practice and the culture and politics beyond the community. This was clearly and influentially the case with the Royal Academy of Sciences, established in Paris in 1666 under the authority of absolutist monarch Louis XIV.

When the Academy was established, it represented a culmination of a decades-long proliferation of circles dedicated to the discussion of philosophical and cultural issues. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the interests of these circles crossed freely between art and rhetoric, general scholarship, the philosophical reformism of people like René Descartes (Jacques Rohault’s, 1618-1672, “Cartesian Wednesdays” in particular), and, of course, the then-recent vogue for experimental natural philosophy often associated with Francis Bacon (and exemplified by the “Academy” run by Melchisédech Thévenot, c.1620-1692).

The short-lived Accademia del Cimento in Florence (est. 1657), and the Royal Society in London (est. 1660), suggested the possibility that centralizing inquiry

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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.

The Two Cultures at Fifty

On May 7, 1959, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture on “the two cultures”. The event took on such resonance that there are now 50th-anniversary events taking place in some major institutions of science to acknowledge its significance. See the New York Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the latest Nature, and the folks from my old neighborhood.

The event is taken as an opportunity to reflect on and question the relevance of Snow’s message. But for me Snow has taken on the sort of red-flag qualities that other people in the history of science see in intelligent design or bad pop science. Why am I so exercised by Snow, of all people, and not these other things? Aside from his direct (albeit marginal) place in my research, I think it’s because Snow exists in a somewhat uncomfortable space between the uncontrollable bazaar of public ideas and the coherence of useful conversation. The bazaar will always be with us. But Snow helps experts who should know better think they’re having a good conversation, when it’s not the case at all.

The way Snow did this was through a shrewd combination of good-but-obvious advice, bad history, and issue advocacy. As UVa New York University prof Guy Ortolano details in his new (and lamentably expensive) book, The Two Cultures Controversy (2009), when Snow made his argument, he had specific

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