Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 39 – History and Historiography of Science

Primer: Fred Terman

Click to go to the National Academy of Sciences biographical memoir of Terman. — Click to go to the National Academy of Sciences' biographical memoir of Terman, whence this photo + signature is lifted.

Frederick Terman (1900-1982) was an electrical engineer and a crucial figure in the development of Stanford University following the Second World War. Terman grew up near Stanford where his father Lewis Terman (of IQ test fame) was a professor of psychology. Fred Terman did his undergraduate work at Stanford, and then earned his PhD in electrical engineering at MIT under Vannevar Bush in 1924, before heading back to a position in Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering. There he specialized in cutting edge electronic instrumentation, wrote a key textbook on radio engineering. He became head of the department in 1937, and successfully lobbied for the creation of an industrial park on university land.

In 1942, following America’s entry into World War II, Terman left Stanford to head the Radio Research Laboratory housed at Harvard University, and thus became well-acquainted with the possibilities of federal patronage for university research constructed through the ad hoc Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was headed by Bush. Stanford, meanwhile, was largely left out of wartime military-related research, and when Terman returned toward the end of the war and was named dean of the School of Engineering, he was determined not to let further such opportunities slip away.

With the support of the new university president, Donald Tresidder, Terman became a powerful figure in the postwar development of the university. Fearing that Stanford was falling well behind the academic vanguard—not only

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Research, Design, Innovation, Knowledge

A little while ago, the University of Chicago Press kindly sent us a review copy of Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Life. It seemed to me like a good idea, given the possibilities of the blog format, to integrate a discussion of it into the overall trend of posts we’ve got going here, and to extend the discussion over several posts in our “book club” series.

The book looks primarily at how academic commentators and insiders regard industrial scientific research. Shapin frames his analysis as a “moral history of a late modern vocation,” which extends the themes from his prior work. Leviathan and the Air-Pump and The Social History of Truth looked at the social structure of “knowledge” production in the “early modern” Royal Society. Shapin begins this book by acknowledging that his previous speculations—that examining that milieu could tell us about the “way we live now”—are very speculative indeed. To make any really firm statements about the “Way We Live Now” (a phrase Shapin repeats throughout the book), we will require a much more substantial analysis, “so here I start with a sketch of some issues involved in describing aspects of how we live now, specifically how we think about the most powerful forms of knowledge and about those who make and manipulate that knowledge.”

In our next post on this book I’ll get into the details of the book, but crucial to Shapin’s approach is his extension of his prior interest in

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Schaffer’s Got Spirit!

The next three pieces in our examination of the works of Simon Schaffer are:

1) “Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy” Social Studies of Science 16 (1986): 387-420.

2) “Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy” Science in Context 1 (1987): 55-85.

3) “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit” in Science, Medicine, and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), edited by Anderson and Lawrence, 1987.

Today I’ll be looking at (2) and (3), which continue Schaffer’s studies of natural philosophy, saving (1) for a more general discussion of what it meant for “natural philosophy” to be “replaced” by “science”, which would become a going concern of Schaffer’s; as well as for a look at Schaffer’s changing strategies for presenting his work to the science studies community in the wake of Leviathan and the Air Pump.

A theme prevalent from Schaffer’s earliest work is the inextricability of political and theological issues from the practice of natural philosophy. Theories of the universe adhering to a strictly “mechanistic” portrayal (as Descartes had proposed in the 1640s, and perhaps best imagined as the “billiard ball” vision of the way things work) were philosophically dissatisfying for a number of reasons.

First, strict mechanism was widely derided as atheistic, and most natural philosophers (especially in Britain) actually wanted to maintain a place for God’s actions in the cosmos. In a universe still believed to have been designed and created, a design amenable to God’s moral order was regarded as an essential

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A Birthday Present for Newton*

As a bonus contribution to his Hump-Day History piece, Thony Christie also sent us along the following reflection on Halley’s Comet, Newton’s theory of gravitation, and December 25th.

Exactly two hundred and fifty years ago, on 25th December 1758, Johann Georg Palitzsch, a German farmer and amateur astronomer from the village of Prohlis near Dresden, observed a comet. Now astronomers have been observing comets for thousands of years, but this cometary observation was very special because it was a spectacular confirmation of one of the most significant theories in the entire history of science, Newton’s Theory of Gravity. The comet that Palitzsch had observed on Newton’s birthday was 1 P/Halley, as it is now officially known, or, more commonly, Halley’s Comet. And this observation was the first ever recovery of a comet, that is the observation of the predicted return of a comet.

Newtons birthplace. Click to see other favorite photos from the American Institute of Physics Emilio Segre Visual Archives — Newton's birthplace. Click to see other favorite photos from the American Institute of Physics' Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

In order to fully understand the significance of this moment, we have to go back to the 1680s and Newton’s attempts to grapple with the universal theory of gravity. Comets had been a hot topic of discussion amongst English astronomers since a series a spectacular ones had lit up the night skies of Europe in the 1660s. The main topic of discussion was the form taken by the flight path of comets, about which there was no general agreement. The basis for

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Primer: Paul Feyerabend and Epistemological Anarchism

Paul Feyerabend, born on January 13, 1924, died on February 11, 1994, was a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His major works included, Against Method (1975), Science in a Free Society (1978), and Farewell to Reason (1987) a collection of already published papers. Feyerabend understood the history of science to reveal “anarchism” in scientific methodology, whereby discoveries are produced not through an adherence to any scientific methodology, but through the rejection of the prevailing wisdom and any established ways of doing science. Feyerabend argued in Against Method that any recourse to “method,” such as in the Aristotelian account of motion or Galileo’s heliocentric position, was rhetorical flourish. Like Thomas Kuhn but against Karl Popper, Feyerabend emphasized the socially constructed nature of scientific theories.

Against Method articulated the position of “epistemological anarchism” underscoring that the history of science revealed no useful or consistent methodological rules or general understanding of underlying logics of the growth of knowledge. So variable was scientific inquiry that the only generality produced through a proper view of its history and the only rule useful to future scientific endeavors was that in the pursuit of science (past and present,) “anything goes.” For Feyerabend, Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism would, by mandating that all scientific theories admit validity or falsification through recourse to empirical evidence, inhibit the growth of science by placing undue and unrealistic limitations on theory. The goal of Against Method, Feyerabend later observed, was to free individuals from the philosophical “tyranny” of such concepts as “truth” and “objectivity.”

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Some People Like Science

In the aftermath of the election, all us political junkies have been watching the roll call of new appointments to the Obama administration. As a historian of science, and as someone working on a massive database of career data of major American physicists, I’ve been interested to see Steve Chu be appointed as Secretary of Energy. And, once again, a physicist has been appointed the new Science Adviser to the President and Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (we must get our bureaucracy right), Harvard physicist John Holdren. Holdren will replace John Marburger who had been the Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1998 to 2001, and, before that, had been president of the University of Rochester from 1980 to 1994.

[correction, 2/09. SUNY Stony Brook, not Rochester.]

Now, the Washington Post puts the spin on this as showing possible signs of a changing government attitude toward “science.” David Baltimore, former president of Caltech is quoted, “The Bush administration has been the most remarkably anti-science administration that I’ve seen in my adult lifetime.” There are also books devoted to this topic. Now, when I was talking about the word “science” being a rhetorical disaster, cloaking ideas in vagueness,

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Primer: The British Association

In 1830, Britain was on the cusp of one of its most famous eras of scientific activity. The year before Charles Darwin unassumingly set out aboard the Beagle, the first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology came off the printing press to wide and immediate acclaim. The experimentation of Michael Faraday and James Joule in the 1830s would help spark the development of modern electromagnetic theory and thermodynamics in the ensuing decades. The Cambridge Mathematical Tripos was already beginning to churn out rigorously prepared physical theorists.

charles-babbage-1-sized — Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

However, the future, as always, was unclear, and there were a number of people who were gloomy about the state of affairs in British science. One was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Charles Babbage, who was frustrated in his search for funding for a calculating engine he had designed (and for which he would be most remembered thanks to the folk history of computing). In 1830 he gave vent to his gloom and frustration through a book entitled Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of its Causes, which was picked up by the Edinburgh experimentalist and scientific journal editor David Brewster (best known today as the name behind Brewster’s angle), who ran extracts in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and published his own screed in the Quarterly Review.

Babbage and Brewster were concerned that British science, unsupported by the state (which had just dissolved the Admiralty’s floundering Board of Longitude in 1828), was well behind the Continent, particularly France, where post-Revolutionary governments generously supported science and

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Science, Philosophy, Ideas, and Rhetoric

Moving temporarily away from the methodological discussion on what responsibilities historical works have toward historiography, I would like to discuss some problems related to the similarities and differences between scientific knowledge, philosophy, ideas, and rhetoric in a very preliminary fashion.

The relationship between these categories varies markedly between times and subject matters. In the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no steady distinction between “science” and “natural philosophy”. The literature on “humans and nature” sits at a busy intersection between the sciences of biology and ecology, the impact of humans on their environment, the modern environmentalist movement, the history of human ideas about “nature”, and so forth. Many ideas in areas like psychology and medicine have often had a strong correlation with ideas held in society more broadly. The problem should provide good fodder for posts moving forward.

Today I’ll consider some distinctions based upon the way these things are accepted and travel. I think that we can say that “ideas” have a literary quality in that they can travel, be picked up, transformed, and deployed

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The Historical and Sociological Leviathan

Of all the works we’ll look at by Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (LATAP) is the only one that is a book, and the only one that is co-authored. It was published in 1985 with Steven Shapin, and is by far the most famous work in Schaffer’s oeuvre.

What has become clear to me from reading Schaffer’s other work around the time of LATAP is just how important it is to read the book as the two-authored work that it is. It clearly served two different projects in two different ways: Schaffer’s account of the historical development of natural philosophy, and Shapin’s project to explore the social nature of science. As such, it can be read either as a key sociological case study, or as a reinterpretation of a landmark moment in the history of science.

The majority of citations of the book (I wager) have used it as case study. Its resoundingly bold last line—“Hobbes was right”—declared that scientific knowledge was something created by people inhabiting a world where knowledge had authority because it was proclaimed by people with authority. Thomas Hobbes’ insights into the nature of modern scientific

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Primer: Newton’s Prism Experiments and Theory of Color

Today’s Hump-Day History post is written by frequent visitor Thony Christie, a dedicated amateur historian who “once had a semi-professional background”. He has approved a few editorial truncations and rephrasings.

Update: Not long after this blog post, Thony started his own blog, The Renaissance Mathematicus.

In 1672 the still relatively young and unknown Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Isaac Newton, published his first piece of experimental philosophy: “A Serie’s of Quere’s Propounded by Mr. Isaac Newton, to be Determin’d by Experiments, Positively and Directly Concluding His New Theory of Light and Colours; and Here Recommended to the Industry of the Lovers of Experimental Philosophy, as they Were Generously Imparted to the Publisher in a Letter of the Said Mr. Newtons of July 8.1672” in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The work became a touchstone in the establishment of the short report of experimental results in a serialized publication as a major means of scientific communication. The Philosophical Transactions had existed for seven years prior to Newton’s contribution, but had been dedicated primarily to reporting the Royal Society’s regular piecemeal correspondence rather than the systematic presentation of experiments and observations, which was at that time accomplished mainly in the book format.

A sketch by Newton of one of his prism experiments.

As to the content of Newton’s first publication, it reported a series of simple but elegant experiments with a beam of sunlight and a couple of glass prisms, in which Newton demonstrated that light is not homogeneous and white, but heterogeneous, and made up of different colours each of which

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