Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 41 – History and Historiography of Science

Primer: The Tizard Committee

Henry Tizard as Rector of Imperial College (click to go to the Official Portraits of the Imperial College Rectors) — Henry Tizard as Rector of Imperial College (click for the Official Portraits of Imperial College Rectors)

The Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence (CSSAD, a.k.a. the “Tizard Committee”) was instituted by the British Air Ministry in late 1934 to consider new technologies that the Royal Air Force might use to defend its territory against attack by bombers. The committee was initially comprised of its chair, scientist and longstanding government research administrator and Imperial College rector Sir Henry Tizard, the Air Ministry’s Director of Scientific Research Harry Wimperis, academic experimental physicist Patrick Blackett, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist A. V. Hill (who had been the head of a World War I research group responsible for improving anti-aircraft gunnery), and Wimperis’ assistant A. P. Rowe, who served as secretary. Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann was added soon thereafter on the insistence of his close friend Winston Churchill, who was at that time a backbench Conservative MP.

The formation of this committee was not unusual, as government R&D work was frequently informed by standing and ad hoc advisory bodies. Henry Tizard was already chair of the high-level Aeronautical Research Committee, of which Blackett was also a member. Lindemann’s addition was engineered by Churchill as a part of his vocal campaign

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SEE Q&A (7): Private Deliberation and Public Controversy

Thanks to Jenny (and John!) for holding down the fort while I was away at HSS. I attended some really interesting sessions, and will share some general-interest highlights presently. Today, though, we present our penultimate entry in our Q&A series with sociologists Harry Collins and Rob Evans about their “Wave 3” Sociology of Expertise and Experience program. Take note that Collins and Evans crafted their response jointly.

Will Thomas: What is the role of the public/private divide when assessing the uses of expertise, i.e. does the periodic table of expertises function differently in public versus in private? Returning to themes from questions 2 and 3, would you agree that the sociology of science literature has more of a focus on issues of public authority as opposed to private decision?

Asked to clarify what I meant, I explained:

What was tacit in my question … is the differing standards of consensus in private versus in public, which has a lot to do with the speed of science and the speed of politics … I would say that in private experts can inform policymakers about what is at stake, what possible options are, what uncertainties are involved, and what the terms of disagreement between experts are. This

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Origin and Descents by John Mathew

This post is not actually mine but belongs to a colleague here in Paris and one of Will’s former classmates, John Mathew, who is a candidate in the history of science at Harvard University. He has written a fictional novel about to be published based on Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth, and their encounter with India. Most of his material is based on historical archives. I thought this selection of his work reminds us of the quandary that many historians and indeed, many writers of historical fiction inevitably face — can historical novels be capable of good historical study, and can they do justice to their protagonists who are based on real-life scientists? Charles Gillispie in a recent issue of Isis advocated for true faithfulness to historical sources, a lively narrative, and a push for less apparatus, more readibility.

This selection is copyrighted by John Mathew through Apeejay House, Calcutta (Kolkata). Please do not quote or reproduce without permission of the author.

Chapter 1
1.1
They tell you there are stars when it happens. Never mind the intervening elements, like branches and leaves, and yes, headstones looming lofty on the hill alongside if you’re lying supine in context. But I don’t remember the stars from the outset. I do remember the leprechaun, however, pirouetting and whirling like a grinning dervish on the grave of Asa Gray, which, my mind informed me, afforded me a current locus in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Then the clouds parted and the stars appeared, braided into a necklace that

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HSS

It’s that mystical magical time of year, again: the History of Science Society Annual Meeting, this year in Pittsburgh. I hope to see some readers there, and we’ll be back Monday morning with Part 7 in our Q&A series with Harry Collins and Rob Evans.

Primer: Dmitrii Mendeleev

Today’s Hump-Day History post has been guest written by Michael Gordin of Princeton University, author of A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table, and Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. In presenting “The Multiple Biographies of D. I. Mendeleev”, Michael has taken the opportunity to explore whether or not we can biographically encapsulate an individual.

Is it possible to write a blog post on the biography of Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907)? This is not just an issue of whether one can shrink the life of any human being, let alone someone with a long life and a string of significant achievements, to under 2,000 words. Even on a broader scale (say 100,000 words), could one really do it? This might seem like a non-serious point, since I have in fact published a book in 2004 on this very same Russian chemist, the man most often credited with the formulation of the periodic system of chemical. The point, however, is serious: can one simply write a biography? Can you break down a person into one single narrative, one which builds up a picture of a story with no axe to grind, no preconceptions, no grand story? Well, you might think you can, but that only means you aren’t paying attention. Let me illustrate this with four possible “biographies” of Mendeleev, each based on documented facts from his life, and each with rather different plotlines.

The first biography focuses on the periodic table. The story begins in September 1860, at a congress of chemists gathered in Karlsruhe to discuss the fundamental issues of chemistry. Before the speech of Italian chemist Stanislao Cannizzaro (1826-1910) at that Congress, there were several different systems for correlating atomic weights, with hydrogen typically set equal to 1. Depending on how you measured, and what you considered the chemically “relevant” part of an element in a chemical reaction, you could have

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Canonical: Jungnickel and McCormmach

I wanted to consider the canonical cases for Matters of Exchange and Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach’s two-volume Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein (1986) back-to-back. Even though the two works are on starkly different topics, they make for excellent comparison simply because stylistically they are almost polar opposites. Jungnickel and McCormmach is anything but elegant, and would be almost unreadable to a popular audience. It is also an absolutely indispensable resource for anyone who plans to do any scholarly work in the history of 19th-century German physics. (“German” or “Germany” are nowhere in the title, but the book’s focus on German university physics is explicit.)

I would divide the books into three parts: chapters 1 and 2; chapters 3 to 23, and chapters 24 to 27. Unless readers have a firm background in the history of physics from the late 1700s and early 1800s, I would advocate moving very quickly through the first two chapters, because their object seems to be to set up the story to come and so they make constant references to people, ideas, experiments, and instruments with little-to-no explanation of who or what they were. This tendency continues only somewhat abated throughout the two volumes, with explanations veering well into the skeletal when dealing with the contributions of those from outside the German-speaking world. However, the narrative does slow down long enough once you hit the 1830s or so, so as to at least allow

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Canonical: Matters of Exchange

Building off of my preliminary reaction to Harold Cook’s Matters of Exchange, the key to understanding how the book works is to take notice of its lack of authorial voice. Evidence of intense and skilled scholarship is to be found everywhere in the numerous detailed and intertwined narratives that Cook presents (what I referred to as an “elegant” style). But commentary to help readers understand what the scholarship has revealed is generally not to be found. Thus, the book is not very argument-intensive. When Cook does show up to offer commentary, it is usually pretty unadventurous. Some variation on “a lot of different people had to come together to make this work happen” pops up for a couple of paragraphs at the end of most chapters. Until the end, anyway….

“Just the simple, curious, unexpected facts” ma’am

As I pointed out, the book does put forward what we can call the “commerce thesis” about facts being produced by the agreements necessary in a culture of commerce and connoisseurship. Straightforward enough. However, commenter Loïc (of the History of Economics Playground) expressed serious reservations about the elegant style allowing for an unannounced stacking of the deck in favor of the argument. I felt the book was responsible enough, but am now thinking that Loïc has a point that applies here, too. In the last chapter and conclusion of the book, Cook unfurls an aggressively old-fashioned argument about the rise of science—what he calls a “new science” or a “new philosophy” in contrast to “old ways of knowing”.

Cook is very explicit in the importance he attaches to the rise of empirical knowledge obtained via the senses and communicated through networks of trusted sources and its overtaking of a natural philosophy based upon authority and theorization that was closely connected to moral philosophy and theology. This “new science could lay claim to being a universal method of investigation, even when those participating in it hesitated or disagreed about its conceptual

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Primer: Cambridge Tripos Coaches

In the 1700s, calculus quickly became the most powerful tool for those practicing “mixed mathematics”, a diverse field of analysis dealing with the motions created by known forces. Throughout that century, it was used by a relatively narrow class of elite mathematicians, primarily to predict celestial motions, but also to analyze problems in ordinary mechanics and hydrodynamics. Increasingly, its development was centered on France, but in the 1800s it was adopted by large new groups of British and German physicists, who used it to establish the new fields of thermodynamics and electromagnetism.

The expansion in the population of calculus-users was made possible by new methods of mathematical training. At Cambridge University, the center of new physics developments in England, the mathematical “tripos” examination, taken in the Cambridge Senate House at the end of students’ course of studies, shifted from an oral examination to a written one in the late 1700s, and began adopting Continental mathematics in the early 1800s. Exam results were listed in an “order of merit” with the “wranglers” at the top (the “senior wrangler” being the highest rank), down through senior and junior “optimes” to the unranked “hoi polloi”. The competitiveness of these exams, and the sophistication of response that could be recorded on paper, allowed the exams to become unprecedentedly difficult over the course of the 19th century, often including cutting edge results.

To cope with the difficulty of these exams, students preparing for the tripos had to undertake continual study, not only to absorb the mathematics, but to train their abilities to use it appropriately. College lectures proved sorely inadequate for the task. Students instead turned to private tutors, or “coaches”.

The term coach came from the speedy horse-drawn coaches that could, in the decade or so prior to the widespread use of the train, transport wealthy students between London and Cambridge (about 60 miles) in

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SEE Q&A (6): Science, Policy, and Certainty

We continue our 8-part Q&A with Harry Collins and Rob Evans concerning their Sociology of Expertise and Experience project. Once again, we note that Collins and Evans crafted their answers jointly. This is not a spontaneous exchange.

Will Thomas: You begin the introduction to your book with the statement: “Science, if it can deliver truth, cannot deliver it at the speed of politics.” The statement implies certain things about the nature of politics and the nature of science, particularly that politics seeks action where science seeks certainty (i.e. “truth”). Yet, as Jasanoff has pointed out (say, in her “EPA” piece in the 1992 Osiris), it is politics that demands certainty of science, not science itself. Science, absent a political imperative, tends to be used for the production of more science, rather than the production of solid claims. Does science have a tolerance for uncertainty that politics does not? Can science make legitimate decisions quickly if certainty may be discarded? Does politics demand certainty (or at least the appearance of it) when taking action? If not, what constitutes the requirements of a legitimate political decision?

Harry Collins and Rob Evans: It is not correct to say that science does not demand certainty of itself. Thus Collins has spent decades immersed in the gravitational wave detection community and found it to be a community that is obsessed with the certainty of the results. Collins often finds himself arguing with members of that community because of their hostility to the publication of any finding that is tentative—an argument described more systematically in Gravity’s Shadow as a tension between evidential individualism and evidential collectivism. Most of the scientists in that field would agree that, unless something remarkable happens, even the first widely accepted published claim to have directly seen the

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Blogging as Scholarship

Ben Cohen of the University of Virginia and The World’s Fair blog writes a little bit about his experiences blogging in the latest newsletter from the History of Science Society. Ben’s perspective is largely that of blog-as-outreach, part of a larger dispersed effort to connect the world of science with the rest of the world. In this vein, he discusses the relationship between blog-as-pedagogy versus blog-as-hobby and warns against the illusion that one is reaching a large audience simply because one, in principle, has access to a large audience. From this perspective, the history of science blog is another species of the general science blog. (Which, by the way, is why it’s not on the blogroll—its focus on science studies issues is peripheral.)

There are alternatives. As Ben writes, “There are history of science blogs beyond the small corner of the scienceblogs collective, some of which are very well done, more direct in their discussions of the history of science, and good examples of creative engagement with the material and import of the work HSS members do. Some are insider blogs, looking mainly to give more space to conversations otherwise left at the seminar door rather than to spread the word to others.” And that would be us here at Ether Wave Propaganda: nobody revels in their own wonkery as tirelessly and as shamelessly as we do!

We see ourselves as a laboratory of scholarship, an experiment to create a sustainable alternative scholarly culture to the one with which we are familiar. As an alternative, it coexists with the mainstream culture, but it also boasts its own traditions from which others may draw. I thought it might be useful just to spell a few things out about what blogs can do that the usual seminar/colloquium/conference/journal axis can do less well.

1) Articulation. The “axis” identified above tends to allow for fairly one-off affairs, which means it’s harder

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