Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 36 – History and Historiography of Science

The Scientific Revolution vs. Scientific Revolutions

I’m not really all that sure what the “history of science community” thinks these days about “The Scientific Revolution” vs. “scientific revolutions” in the sense offered in Thomas Kuhn’s landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). I know I have my own notions about the relationship between the two, but, reading Harkness’ book on Elizabethan sciences, I have to admit that I don’t know whether everyone’s on the same page—or even in the same chapter—on the question, so I thought I might want to expand on my quick gloss on the issue featured in my last post.

As I mentioned in my “pocket history” of the profession, Kuhn’s work came at a point in the history of science when some historians of the modern sciences started to see it as necessary to make sense of old ways of seeing the world, rather than just explaining their falsehoods away as superstitions or vestiges from a primeval confusion or “error”. To set up such a history, Kuhn imagined that there were periodic “revolutions” wherein one system of knowledge, or “paradigm”, was replaced by another. Kuhn’s scientific revolutions were clearly intellectual, and they occurred periodically. In the 1960s, it was still common for historians to suppose the existence of sequential “revolutions” , with a second revolution occurring in the nineteenth century, and maybe a third in the twentieth.

This Kuhnian idea of “scientific revolutions”, and particularly the first, could then hold sway over historical periodization. In particular, one might suppose that “The Scientific Revolution” represented an obvious sea change in natural inquiry. By extension, one might say that The Scientific Revolution “came late” to fields such as chemistry.

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What was the Scientific Revolution?

So, I got Deborah Harkness’ The Jewel House in the mail yesterday. The book is about “the sciences” in London circa 1600, and won last year’s Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. So far I like it a lot. Essentially, it’s kind of up the same alley as Cook’s Matters of Exchange with some key stylistic differences that I want to discuss later.

What I’d like to discuss now is a sort of uncomfortable relationship writers on early modern natural history seem to have with the idea of the Scientific Revolution. I keep getting this Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect!” vibe from the literature, which seems to be born out of this idea that the Sci Rev (as we in the biz call it) was this physics-driven shift in “the way people thought” and a rejection of Ancient authority concerning natural knowledge, or something like that.

Thus we seem to have this burgeoning literature of the “big science” of the 1500s and 1600s (again, a sort of “us too!”, this time against 20th-century

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Primer: American Functionalist Psychology

Today’s video Hump-Day History lesson was originally posted at the Advances in the History of Psychology blog and is embedded from YouTube. The creator of the video, Chris Green, professor of psychology at York University, has given us kind permission to repost it here as part of this series.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOyuoeeV7VU]

After the jump, a mega-fast primer on ideas about the psyche from Aristotle to the 19th century (we love mega-fast primers here), plus links to longer documentaries of which these are quick recaps.

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Onwards!

Here at EWP, we feel we’re turning a bit of a corner. A good portion of our posts to this point have consisted of honing our methodological sensibilities. We don’t really imagine that we’ve convinced anybody of much of anything they don’t already know, but it’s been very useful to us to get our heads around the mechanics of historiography, as well as to get a general sketch of the historiography’s own history. What this does is let us start moving forward constructively. In the spirit of practicing what we preach: rather than harp on the same things ad infinitum, it’s time to move on to the next phase of the project, though I’m sure we’ll be unable to resist returning to methodology from time to time.

First, we’ll probably be posting a little bit less. Methodology is kind of easy, because it’s impressionistic and requires introspection rather than extensive research. Now we’ll be doing more “Canonical”, “Oeuvre”, as well as what we hope will be a fun new series: “Ancient History”, examining stuff written

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Canonical: Buchwald on the Wave Theory of Light

I’m a little hesitant to include Jed Buchwald’s Rise of the Wave Theory of Light (1989) in my physics canon, not because of any flaws in the book—it very nicely accomplishes what it sets out to do—but because it’s so focused on its argument concerning the rise of the wave theory. This means it focuses tightly on people directly involved with the rise of the wave theory, notably Augustin Jean Fresnel, and leaves some other important figures, Thomas Young for example, at the margins.

Since we haven’t done the Canonical series in a while, it’ll be useful to refresh the point of the exercise. It is not to offer a “best of” in history of science writing or argumentation; rather it is books one can concentrate on to get a good, sophisticated overview of what happened in history. Thus, reading Buchwald’s book, one should be aware that one is getting an explanation for the rise of the wave theory, not a history of the wave “idea”, or a tour of early 19th-century optics, which would be most useful from the “Canonical” perspective. But, seeing as I know of no other book that covers the subject in a detailed and sophisticated way, canonical Rise of the Wave Theory of Light shall be. We can always go back and replace it, or supplement it with a journal article or two, at a later date.

The bulk of the action in the book takes place between 1810 and 1830, which, readers should be aware, stretches across a fault line in the history of physics (i.e., read Warwick and early chapters of Jungnickel & McCormmach first; and

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Primer: Linus Pauling

In recognition of the 108th anniversary of Linus Pauling’s birth (kind of our poor man’s response to the Darwin’s 200th hoopla!), our neighbors at the Pauling Blog have sent us over a really excellent post on their namesake, which will be appearing on their site in slightly modified form on Friday.

Linus Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon on February 28, 1901, meaning that this coming Saturday will mark the 108th anniversary of his birth. (He died on August 19, 1994 at the age of 93)

One of the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections’ annual habits has been to reflect back upon Pauling’s life around the time of his birthday anniversary, usually by highlighting his activities 100, 75, 50 and 25 years ago.

Looking back in segments of twenty-five years is admittedly rather an arbitrary observance, but it can oftentimes prove to be very revealing. By choosing to study the effectively-random dates of, in this instance, 1909, 1934, 1959 and 1984, one is compelled to sample a broad period of time in Pauling’s life and, in the process, gain a sense of his remarkably-wide variety of interests. It is our belief that, as much as anything else, these broad horizons define Pauling’s legacy.

1909: Age 8

Pauline, Linus, and Lucile Pauling, ca. 1908

The Pauling family begins this year in Condon, Oregon, a small and isolated farming community some 150 miles east of Portland. Four years previous,

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Philosophy and the History of Science

In my earlier “pocket history” of the relationship between philosophy, sociology, and history, I noted a few key points:

Philosophers tended to use the history of science as a way to develop the philosophy of science.
Sociologists noticed that there was much in the history of science that did not fit philosophy-based history.
Sociological theories were insufficient to explain the exact path of the history of science, leading some sociologists to develop sociological epistemologies.

What should already be clear is that the history of science cannot work without interrelated philosophical and sociological elements. You don’t really know you know anything unless you can get someone else to agree with you, but you’ll have a harder time commanding agreement unless you can demonstrate that you really do know something.

What is not, I think, entirely clear is how philosophy and sociology combine to create powerful history. Historians have responded to the sociological insights by focusing intently on day-to-day practices. Experimental instrumentation, representation of objects, public lectures all became important parts of the historical examination of

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Good Work and Good History

All of the methodological introspection that takes place on this site is done with an eye toward arriving at a sympathetic, charitable, and critical understanding of the way today’s history of science profession works, and to figure out what it does well and also what it does less well.

To this point, much of this introspection has involved intuiting a professional mentality—an understanding of what individual scholars feel they are contributing to the profession as a whole. I have noted that the way scholars frame and justify their work seems to operate according to an “epistemic imperative”, the idea that what we are saying contributes to a sociological and philosophical understanding of the nature of both elite and public knowledge (thus, the “epistemological problematic“). Exactly how work is supposed to add up into this understanding is rarely (if ever) made clear (a point also made by Peter Galison in his 10 Questions—I’m not just making this stuff up!).

Lately on this site, we have been exploring other aspects of this mentality, assuming an individualistic rather than a communitarian sensibility. Here “the “epistemic imperative” becomes less of a serious suggestion for application of the

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Primer: Silicon Valley Gadgetry

This post is a sequel, of sorts, to my previous post on the “100,000 garages” rhetorical device, and, more directly, to my Hump-Day History post on Fred Terman. It is also an extension of yesterday’s post on the AIP’s History of Physicists in Industry project, where I pointed out that analyses of firm behavior at the project level would be a useful thing for historians to do. Of course, there are cases where this has already been done, at least to an extent, with great success, as in the case of Silicon Valley vacuum tube and integrated circuit manufacturing firms.

Russell and Sigurd Varian with a klystron in 1951; click to go to Stanford University website — The Varian brothers, William Hansen, David Webster, and John Woodyard inspect a klystron; Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, the region around Palo Alto, California, just south of San Francisco, grew into a center for electronics innovation and manufacture, challenging the domination of the electronics industry by firms such as General Electric, RCA, Western Electric, and Westinghouse. The companies located

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Physicists in Industry

In light of my recent discussion of Steven Shapin’s Scientific Life (Part 1 and Part 2), I thought it might be useful to promote something rather different on pretty much the same topic: the project report just released by my employers at the AIP History Center on their multi-year “History of Physicists in Industry” project, assembled through the efforts of Joe Anderson, who runs the Niels Bohr Library and Archives, and Orville Butler, who has the office next door to mine. Some early work on the project was done by Tom Lassman, who is now at the Air and Space Museum downtown in DC. Click on the image to access the report in .pdf form.

The project’s aim was to survey industrial researchers and research administrators with the goal of finding out what historical records industries preserve, and how; as well as to undertake a preliminary survey of industrial research activities and attitudes since World War II.

I would describe the report as an empirical extraction of “trends” from interview data. Insofar as it analyzes commentary, it is actually quite similar to Shapin’s work,

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