History and Historiography of Science

Primer: The Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company

Click to go to an online exhibit at Cambridges Whipple Museum.
An ad for the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company. Click to see a larger version in an online exhibit at Cambridge

Although it was perhaps the most important center for the development of mathematical physics in the 19th century, Cambridge University did not develop its reputation for experimental science until after its establishment of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1874. And while the era is best known as a time of “string and sealing wax” experimentation conducted with self-fashioned apparatus, the development and production of instrumentation was also carried out by specialist inventors and manufacturers, one of the more important of whom in England was Horace Darwin (1851-1928), the youngest son of Charles Darwin.

Horace Darwin had long been interested in the development of new kinds of instrumentation when in 1881 he acquired a controlling stake in a Cambridge instrument workshop. The workshop had been started a few years earlier by the mechanic Robert Fulcher to fashion and service instruments for Cambridge’s physiology department. It was backed financially by Albert Dew-Smith (1848-1903), a friend of Darwin who had trained at Cambridge in physiology. Fulcher, whose mechanical talents were deemed limited, was apparently driven out, leaving the way open for Darwin and Dew-Smith to become co-proprietors of what they decided to call the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company. Darwin obtained sole ownership in 1891.

Under Darwin’s supervision the company grew steadily, expanding its

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Historical Insultography and Posture

All good historians know that one of the biggest pitfalls to writing good history is taking historical actors at their word.  Testimony from the past is bound to be limited by the witness’ particular perspective and colored by their own interests.  For example, a dispute of a scientific claim might be said to be motivated by “jealousy” by one party, where another party might claim the other was “narrow-minded”.  Reckless historiography simply takes actors at their word without getting the view of the other side.

Historians are thus challenged to adopt an analytically useful posture to find some way to resolve the problem.  One possible posture is to parse all the evidence to “get to the bottom of things”.  (One sees this a lot in really old-school historiography, especially out of Britain.)  Another possible posture is to see the existence of the controversy as an opportunity to examine some broader issue.  Following the epistemic imperative, one might dilute actors’ positions, to show that their position was “not universal” or “limited” or “influenced by tacit interests”.  A very common posture is a variation of this: to use controversies to triangulate out a detached position by simply acknowledging the existence of disputes: “but their actions were not without controversy”.  For some reason, it has become popular to just assume that narrating a controversy in such a way as to invert the actors’ broad claims is useful historiography regardless of the place of the particular controversy in broader history.

One gets the impression from the historiography that the history of science is nothing but conflicting and contested claims—the Great Inversion of “science’s”  claim to be the ultimate model of open and collaborative society—a

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Primer: Charles Fourier and the Gravity of the Passions in the Wake of Revolution

Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was the son of successful cloth merchant whose fortune was lost in the Revolution. Fourier himself was almost executed in the Terror. Like Maistre, his philosophy was a response to the failure of the revolutionary project as well as an inquiry into the universality of reason and the problem of the good society. Fourier’s solution to the problem of the ‘good society’ was indeed novel: the ideal state would be brought about by the supremacy of the natural passions. This was an inversion of the traditional order between the regulative capacity of reason and the sublimation of sentiment. Society was to be regulated, in Fourier’s view, not through reason, but through the harmony of natural passion and action.

In 1808, Fourier published the Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies, (Cambridge ed.) which presented his vision of the universal history of humanity, the cosmos, and the prospects for a new order. Fourier presented his study as an inquiry into “the General System of Nature.” Such an inquiry was not only prudent but necessary as true happiness was impossible without a complete understanding of the General System. Fourier believed the first branch of the theory, the material, to be “unveiled” by Newton and Leibniz (3.) Fourier cautioned his reader in the preface , “It should be borne in mind that because the discovery announced is more important than all the scientific work done since the human race began, civilized people should concern themselves with one debate only: whether or not I have really discovered the Theory of the Four Movements.” If the answer was in the affirmative then “all economic and moral theories need to be thrown away” and preparations were to begin for the transition “from social chaos to universal harmony” (4.) Fourier’s universal history had thirty-two stages, all ordained by God, which began in savagery and which led, through the phase of civilization, to the subsequent stage of ‘socialism,’ and finally, Harmony. This highest stage would last for 70,000 years, after which humanity would descend back into the savage state and the world would cease to be.

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Kjeldsen on Rheinberger via Epple

Continuing on last week’s discussion about the sufficiency of current methodology, I’d like to take a look at Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen’s piece, “Egg-Forms and Measure-Bodies: Different Mathematical Practices in the Early History of the Modern Theory of Convexity,” from the latest Science in Context (free issue!), and particularly the function of her invocation of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s array of “epistemic things”.

For those not familiar with the modern theory of convexity, fear not.  I’m mainly interested in the topic because it is central to the mathematical theory of linear programming, which is an important part of the canon of operations research techniques, and Kjeldsen, a historian of mathematics, is the top expert on the subject.  She has a long line of papers explaining how the rather discontinuous history of convexity theory can be understood in terms of its development as parts of mathematicians’ varying projects—what she has previously referred to as different “tasks”.  Her work is extremely useful to people like me who need to figure out what any of this has to do with military doctrine-building and radical British scientists—you’d be surprised—and are reluctant to spend too much time on the nitty-gritty details on the history of things like convexity theory.

The history of mathematics is a nice place to address this issue, because this history is relatively coherent from antiquity to the present in comparison to other fields of study.  As a consequence, historians of mathematics have found it to be more legitimate to address transhistorical mathematical problems as addressed across large gaps of time.  In venues such as the Archive for History of Exact Sciences, history maintains a sort of unusual

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Projects and Problems as Elements of History

One important theme in the history of science profession is that there is a perceived need for increased methodological sophistication.  “We” (as a profession, and as a society) need to “think about science”, or more broadly, “think about knowledge and practice” in different and exciting new ways in order to really get at the history of science, and the relationship between science, technology, and society, and to avoid being misled by dubious scientific or anti-scientific claims.

Methodological sophistication is important.  It has only been methodological reflection that warns us against, for example, necessarily regarding “religion” as a “constraint” on “science”, when, for example, theological issues might have been a “resource” in a natural philosophical cosmology.  Or, we can now appreciate that the world did not “resist” Einstein’s relativity for some years, but rather that different communities did not understand it as important or germane to their physical projects (following Andrew Warwick on Cambridge physicists, or Peter Galison on Poincaré).

In my opinion, though, methodologically we are generally pretty sound, and have been for at least two decades, if not longer.  To continue to act as though methodology were still our most pressing problem is to ignore the question of how we might attain and retain understanding through better historiographical craft.  In this respect, there are some areas where we are doing very well, which need to be highlighted for those not working in them, and there are areas where we seem to be actually losing knowledge (as a community, anyway).

Rather than go into specific examples in this post, I would like to lay out what I view as the essential problems of good historiographical craft—the charting of the relationship between historical projects, “problems” in those projects, and the proper handling of the nature and role of context.

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Primer: Plate Tectonics

A map showing differing magnetic polarizations in rock on the Juan de Fuca plate with colors indicating age; from the United States Geological Survey.

During the 18th century, broad theories of the earth (such as that proposed by Jean-André de Luc, which I discussed a few weeks ago), attempted to account for a wide array of phenomenona, such as the origins of mountains, the origins of different rock strata, the presence of marine fossils on land, and so forth.  By the end of that century such wide-ranging and speculative theoretical “systems” had fallen into a degree of disrepute as a useful learned activity, and a more disciplined and less narratively ambitious geology slowly gained precedence.  Nevertheless, the questions asked by 18th-century savants remained valid, and varying theories of the earth’s history remained in circulation, with answers to many key questions remaining in flux until well into the 20th century.

Following World War II, the theory of the German meteorologist and paleoclimatologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), that continents drifted over the face of the globe, had fallen largely by the wayside.  Wegener had proposed his theory early in the 20th century to account for climatic changes in the earth’s distant past, for fossil similarities across continents, and for mountainous features of the earth’s crust, which required a new explanation after the decline of the cooling earth theory circa 1900.  Wegener’s theory—the most prominent of several proposed drift theories—had its sympathizers, some very well-respected, but the theory was not widely accepted, and geologists in North America were outright hostile to it, many assuming by mid-century that it had disappeared into the realm of crank science.

In fact, continental drift was never fully given up to the cranks, and in the 1950s and 1960s, new evidence and mechanisms for it were developed, which made a convincing enough case that it not only revived the fortunes of continental drift, but swiftly overcame all competition.  “Plate tectonics” arose at the confluence of a number of different

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Claims, Authority, and Spheres of Practice, Pt. 2

On initially looking at the articles on sciences in North America that BJHS has made available for free, one possible exercise that occurred to me was to draw some links between the pieces.  Perrin Selcer’s piece on “standardizing wounds” in World War I (“the scientific management of life in the First World War”), my piece on World War II operations research, Jeff Hughes’  review of recent a-bomb literature, and Jamie Cohen-Cole’s piece on Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies could conceivably be linked fairly easily.

On a closer look, this exercise seemed to be less potentially useful than I initially imagined.  While it might conceivably be possible to connect World War I-era wound treatment standardization to OR’s contributions to military planning, or OR to cognitive science (via decision theory), or, to go down another branch, to connect the treatment standardization issue to Christer Nordlund’s piece on hormone therapies creating improved people, it might not be wise.  It would be easy to wave one’s hands around about standardization, flexibility, knowledge, and large-scale practice, but the historical picture produced would, it seems to me, be more misleading than helpful.

Though these papers might all work their way into an edited volume with a sufficiently vague theme, none of them were written with the others in mind (for obvious reasons).  Importantly, though, even if the papers were more closely related, it would still be difficult to forge connections between them, because

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Claims, Authority, and Spheres of Practice, Pt. 1

By way of Advances in the History of Psychology, I just found out that, to advertise its articles of interest to historians of North American sciences, the British Journal for the History of Science has made relevant articles available for free [ed., June 2012: these are no longer available].  Among these, it turns out, is my 2007 article, “The Heuristics of War: Scientific Method and the Founders of Operations Research”.  I had been thinking about discussing the problem of the authority of science as an issue in history of science writing, and it is actually a point I addressed in this article, so this seems like a good opportunity to talk about it.

My main point of contention in the article was that historiographical preoccupation with problems of boundary dispute and the authority of science had mischaracterized what is important and interesting about the history of wartime OR: “Whether the primary interest has been the deployment of scientific methodologies in new sorts of problems or else the cachet of scientific knowledge as key to scientists’ entry into new arenas of authority, a strong theme in the historiography is that

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Primer: Joseph Marie Maistre and the Image of the Machine

Joseph Marie Maistre (1753-1821) , underscored the irredeemable fallenness of mankind, which was rooted in original sin and visible in the seemingly endless wars, conflicts, and revolutions in human history.  The  French modernist poet Baudelaire considered Maistre an antidote against the naive optimism of the eighteenth century.  Like  Chateaubriand in his Genius of Christianity (1802), Maistre was a defender of religious sentiment and its role in politics  (Christopher John Murray, Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, pg. 707.) A staunch defender of the Catholic Church and strong governance, Maistre believed that providence was the active force behind universal history.  Maistre defined human beings in this scheme according to their lust for power.

As Isaiah Berlin notes in his introduction to Maistre’s Considerations on France, Maistre “is painted, always, as a fanatical monarchist and a still more fanatical supporter of papal authority; proud, bigoted, inflexible…brilliant…vainly seeking to arrest the current of  history….”  Maistre, in Berlin’s view, is all of these things, and all the more interesting for them,  “for although Maistre may have spoken in the language of the past, the content of what he had to say is the absolute substance of anti-democratic talk of our day” (Considerations on France, Introduction, xii, xiii.)

Like Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Schiller, Maistre was horrified by the excesses of the French Revolution and the Terror.  The experience “turned him into an implacable enemy of everything that is liberal, democratic, high-minded, everything connected with intellectuals, critics, scientists, everything to do with the forces which created the French Revolution” (xiii)  The Revolution and the Terror convinced him that the idea of progress was an illusion.  Instead, Maistre underscored the sacred past, the “virtue, and the necessity, indeed, of complete subjugation.”  In the place of scientific rationality, Maistre offered the alternative of “the primacy of instinct, superstition, and prejudice.”

More charitably, Owen Bradley notes that in Maistre’s critique of science, “his attack on the excesses of technical rationality raises the essentially modern question of the sociopolitical consequences of the scientific organization of

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John Wheeler special issue of Physics Today

For those interested in the history of recent physics, the April issue of Physics Today is dedicated to the career of John Wheeler (1911-2008), a major figure in the last 2/3 of 20th-century American physics.  He worked on problems of the nucleus and in the design of thermonuclear weapons, and at the troublesome border between quantum physics and general relativity.  The issue includes:

Ken Ford’s “John Wheeler’s work on ion particles, nuclei, and weapons” (available for free at the Physics Today website).

Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and Wojciech Zurek’s “John Wheeler, relativity, and quantum information”.

Oregon State history of science graduate student (and former Merchant Marine captain) Terry Christensen’s, “John Wheeler’s mentorship: An enduring legacy”.

There are also two articles by Wheeler himself drawn from the archives: “Mechanism of fission” (1967), a retrospective on early fission research; and “Introducing the Black Hole” (1971, with Remo Ruffini), a semi-technical introduction to the physics of black holes.

The Niels Bohr Library and Archives, incidentally, has two transcripts of interviews with Wheeler online, one from 1967, and one from 1993, which served as notes for Wheeler’s autobiography (co-written with interviewer Ford).