Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 40 – History and Historiography of Science

The Consolidation of Gains

This post looks at the possibility and benefits of historiographical balance, and how that balance can best be achieved. I suggest that the “consolidation of historiographical gains” is central to this idea.

When Christopher discussed the “hierarchy of needs” he suggested that scholarly works deploy rather than describe previous literature, and that the resultant failure to describe represents an act of intellectual “atavism” (a topic I hope he’ll find time to address here further once his master’s thesis work allows). However, in our behind-the-scenes conversations, we’ve come to agree that the progression of historiography is not necessarily a story of degradation. Rather, historical works have a responsibility to the historiography to consolidate its gains and to add to those gains.

By consolidation, I mean the retention of pertinent facts and arguments, the leaving behind of details, and the use of references to indicate the existence of those details. The consolidation of gains is necessary, simply because the

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HSS Highlights, Pt. 2

Continuing part 1 of my recap of the good stuff I took away from this year’s HSS meeting in Pittsburgh….

There was a good session dedicated to “Science and Spectacle in the 18th Century” with papers by Mi Gyung Kim and Michael Lynn on ballooning, and Simon Werrett on the links between thinking on fireworks and electrical performance and philosophy. There was also very good commentary by Jan Golinski, who pointed to Simon Schaffer’s paper, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century” as the key work initiating this line of scholarship. Werrett’s paper, in particular, was right out of Schaffer’s playbook (he even sounds a lot like him). It’s interesting to see the issue of natural philosophical spectacle gain a finer texture, although it’s a little weird that we’re still puzzling out the taxonomy of practices of spectacle and philosophical demonstration a quarter of a century after the fact. In any case, I enjoyed the fact that my blog-related reading paid off for me, and am hoping

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Primer: Lawrence’s Cyclotron

In the early 1930s, the acceleration of electrons and protons was a popular project. While the spectacular theoretical developments in quantum mechanics had stolen the show in physics in the 1920s, the problem of understanding the atomic nucleus had also become a subject of renewed interest following on experiments performed by Ernest Rutherford and his coterie at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. They had shown that bombarding nuclei with the natural radiation of radioactive materials could transmute the subject nuclei into different elements. However, natural radioactive materials were expensive, and their ability to provide incident particles was uncontrolled and inefficient. It was understood that providing some artificial source of high energy (high velocity) particles would make bombardment easier, and the exploration of atomic nuclei more systematic and reliable.

Edwin McMillan and Ernest Lawrence. Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Fermi Film Collection

The obvious means of creating a source was to send particles streaming across a high electrical potential difference (high voltage). Lightning accelerated electrons in an uncontrolled way between the sky and the ground—and had, in fact, been marshaled as a source of ephemeral high voltages. The electrical industry had been vigorously seeking ways of creating high voltages so as to transmit electricity over long

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Absences + Recommendations

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday and a nasty travel/work schedule through this week (including some history of physics in industry-related interviews at 3M and Honeywell in Minneapolis-St. Paul), posting has been and will be curtailed until next week, though I am planning on working in a Hump Day History post for Wednesday.

For those who don’t regularly visit some of the sites on the blog roll, I’ll point out that the online grad student journal Hydra is up and accepting submissions. Also, it’s been a while since I’ve plugged the Pauling Blog from the Oregon State Special Collections, which continues to impress me mightily by putting out frequent and high quality multimedia content on Linus Pauling.

Finally, there’s an interesting discussion going on in the science press that’s caught my eye. It concerns what titles and office space mean for the status of science advisers in government. See this article by David Goldston from the Sep. 25th Nature (subscription required), and an article by David Kramer in the Issues and Events section of December Physics Today (not yet online), featuring reaction from current presidential science adviser John Marburger, as well as reactions from several previous advisers. It’s an interesting question with a long pedigree.

Will

Primer: Dufay and Nollet

Frontispiece of Nollet's Essai sur l'electricité des corps

Electricity and electrical phenomena presented a major conceptual problem for 18th-century experimental philosophers, who were tasked with understanding not only the nature of electricity and how it moved, but how (or, in some cases, whether) it related to light, fire, magnetism, lightning, sparks, shocks, phosphoresence, nervous phenomena, and the attractive and repulsive phenomena associated with electrically charged objects. It was unclear whether electricity and the forces it exerted (what we would think of as charged particles and their fields) were one and the same thing, or how electricity moved about, or how it moved through materials such as glass, air, or vacuum. The relationship between all of these phenomena and the differing electrical properties of different materials, not to mention electricity’s finicky response to changes in ambient humidity all made electricity an extremely complicated thing to study. On the surface, Coulomb’s ~~19th-century~~ late-18th-century law (the force of attraction or repulsion is proportional to the product of charges of bodies divided by the square of the distance between them) might seem like a logical extrapolation from Newton’s law of gravitation (the force of attraction is proportional to the product of the masses of bodies divided by the square of the distance between them). Taking into account the experimental difficulties, however, it might also seem miraculous.

Unlike astronomy, the study of electricity remained without any quantitative basis for a long time. Instead, natural philosophers attempted to develop qualitative schemes that were capable of explaining all of the various observations and

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HSS Highlights, Pt. 1

I’ve been on two trips since Pittsburgh (Ann Arbor to visit friends and see the Northwestern Wildcats manufacture a sloppy, soggy victory over Michigan–go ‘Cats!–and Maine for an oral history interview). So, doing a recap of highlights of sessions I saw seems less like “hot news” than it might have been. In fact, it seems like ancient history. But I think a recap post is actually better with a slight time delay. One, I promised some folks I wasn’t a conference insta-blogger, and, two, it reduces the ephemerality of the conference experience to come back to it a couple weeks later.

First off, while I’ve sometimes characterized conference presentations here as working along a “colloquium-journal-edited volume” axis of disconnected scholarship, this is more a general criticism of the form. I think it’s OK to pick apart Isis articles from time to time, since it is the flagship journal of the history of science, after all. But picking apart conference talks seems unfair to the tentative nature of the conference talk form, so we won’t be doing that. I will, however, just briefly mention as a lowlight the weirdly rude non-reception given to the welcoming speech by Pitt’s provost. What was up with that?

On highlights, the first thing I want to throw out there is the co-location with the Philosophy of Science Association conference. I think it’s fair to say that for the past two or three decades, the history of science has been much more closely connected to the sociology of science than the philosophy of science, and I think it’s a good project to try and bring the philosophers back in.

I dropped in on some PSA sessions. At a glance, I like the way the philosophers talk and argue: their linguistic precision and the degree to which they engage with problematic issues in a constructive fashion

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Schaffer on Temporal Evolution, Pt. 2

In “The Phoenix of Nature: Fire and Evolutionary Cosmology in Wright and Kant,” (Journal for the History of Astronomy vol. 9, 1978, pp. 180-200), Simon Schaffer continued his study of the development of temporally evolving cosmologies, in this case with the natural philosophical work of the astronomy teacher Thomas Wright and German philosopher Immanuel Kant (well prior to his famous Critiques). As I mentioned in the last post in this series, Schaffer seems to have directed his early work toward the introduction into natural philosophical thought of the idea that past and future states of the universe could be substantially different from the present state of the universe. As he puts it, “the cosmological thought of Kant and Wright can be seen as the basis for the evolutionary systems of the universe developed by Laplace and Herschel later in the century.” (As we have seen, he would turn to Herschel in his next few articles).

In his project, Schaffer tends toward the teleological. Everyone in this piece seems either striving to introduce an evolutionary perspective, or constrained from doing so.

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Hump Day History Will Return…

I’m on assignment in the far reaches of Maine at the moment, and have unfortunately not made arrangements for a Hump Day History post for this week. The feature will return next week.

SEE Q&A (8): Expertise as a “Classic Problem”

As we conclude our 8-part Q&A with Harry Collins and Rob Evans concerning their Sociology of Expertise and Experience project, I would like to thank them for taking the time to answer the questions and for participating in the blog format. As we continue to toss around and develop ideas on this site, I imagine we will have many opportunities to refer back to this series. Please note that Collins and Evans crafted their responses jointly.

Will Thomas: You mentioned back in your foundational paper in SSS (cited here) that the establishment of levels of expertise “has the feel of a classic problem”. I would tend to agree, finding in my own work on operations research that creating social arrangements where “policy science” can contribute to rather than dictate decision making was a central concern in the postwar evolution of the various policy sciences. In reading your work I am reminded of Herb Simon’s work Administrative Behavior, or even Robert Merton’s “The Role of Applied Social Science in the Formation of Policy: A Research Memorandum” Philosophy of Science 16 (1949) 161-181. Have you been finding over the last several years that SEE has had resonance in other fields?

Harry Collins and Rob Evans: It does not surprise us to find that SEE resonates with post-war work because of the fact that both maintain a divide between the technical and the political. Thus we find 1950s debates in the British Civil Service about the role of technical experts in respect of generalists and the continuing question of whether scientists should be ‘on tap or on top.’ We are undoubtedly going over much of the ground that was first traversed in Wave 1 but we are not going back to same way of thinking. The differences between Wave 3 and Wave 1, as have been remarked above, concern the nature

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The Problematics of History

Extending the general line of methodological musing I left off with in my post on “historiographical balance”, I would suggest that whether a historiography is balanced is a question that can best be addressed by considering the problematics of history. If we view a historiography as a logical system of works, then the identification of problematic areas (contradictory or missing characterizations or explanations) should provide the best means for determining in what ways the current historiography is inadequate.

The blog-related reading I’ve been doing on natural philosophical cosmologies has made me sensitive to the argumentative power of logical systems. Cosmologies are logical physical systems. Chronologies are logical temporal systems. Then there are systems of (more-or-less) causal arguments—theodicies, epistemologies, economies, social theories—that make the world intelligible. These systems set expectations of what happens when people behave in certain ways toward the world or toward each other. Cosmologies, chronologies, and argumentative systems are never distinct, but

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