Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 44 – History and Historiography of Science

The Epistemological Imperative

Extending yesterday’s post on the style employed in Matters of Exchange to a more general historiographical observation, I’d like to suggest that historians of science feel a sort of epistemological imperative in writing. That is, there is a sort of obligation to address general properties of “science” or “knowledge” by means of an analysis of whatever subject happens to be at hand. Matters of Exchange is ostensibly about the relationship between science, medicine, and trade in early modern The Netherlands; but in a sense it’s really about the emergence of science from a culture of commerce, and is set up to argue the “commerce thesis” rather than anything specific about the The Netherlands in particular.

Meanwhile, Michael Robinson reviewed Graham Burnett’s Trying Leviathan over at Time to Eat the Dogs, which is about a lawsuit that hinges on whether or not the whale is a fish, and extends out to more general arguments about what kind of knowledge about whales matters to whom (whalers, whale oil sellers, naturalists, etc.) Robinson points out, though, that the book also launches into an unwarranted and far more general discussion about whether knowledge is social, etc., etc.

The question that concerns me is whether or not the epistemological imperative actually makes a piece of writing say less by trying to say too much. Let’s take another book I brought up yesterday, William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. This book also has a broad sweeping argument spanning the “frontier thesis”, theories

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The “Elegant” History

Back in March, I suggested that some evaluation of the significance of a scientific or learned activity in society, say, in economic terms, would be very useful. That is, an analysis of “science and technology in history” as opposed to “the history of science and technology”. Commenter Daniel suggested I was being a little unfair—the connections between science and economic activities has been a frequent theme in the historiography for some time. I, in turn, explained that I wasn’t talking about connections, I was talking about science as an actual part of an economy. Nevertheless, Daniel had a good point, and had recommended a number of works, which I promised to check out. I was especially interested in Harold Cook’s Matters of Exchange, about commerce and science in the early modern Netherlands. So, I’ve finally picked up this volume and have started in.

I was excited to read this book, because I’ve long had the feeling the early modernists are more advanced than the rest of us in terms of understanding the scope and dynamics of their subject matter; because I know virtually nothing about Dutch science (except for a bit about Huygens and the fact that Descartes was there for a while); and because I think there are good insights yet to be derived about science as a formalization of practical activities. Right now I’m about 170 pages in, and I have mixed feelings. I’m inclined to really like this book,

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History and Historiography

When writing a historical work, it’s important to think about what one needs to accomplish with it, which is a two-level issue. On one level, one simply needs to check an item off a to-do list: write something publishable, get a line on the CV, secure your professional credentials, move on. So, let’s say there’s a set of “publication requirements”. But (ideally) we also hope to contribute in some way to a historiographical literature and enhance historical understanding in some way. And here is a question that needs to be seriously addressed: what is the relationship between historical work and historiography? It raises a subsidiary question: does the individual historian have a responsibility to the historiography, and, if so, what defines that responsibility?

Insofar as authors are expected to address the historiography, it seems obvious that they do have a responsibility. But is this a trivial responsibility? I ask the question this way, because the topic and argument of the individual historical work is usually left to the historian’s own “interests”. We all know the phrase, “I am interested in X, Y, and Z”. Now we get into a touchy subject: are these interests sacrosanct? Are we allowed to say: “Well, that sounds fine, but I’m quite familiar with the literature on X and

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Primer: Drosophila

What value do historians of science gain from locating a point of origin? Scientists, I think, like origins, because it’s customary to give credit where credit is due in scientific papers. Historians can find origins very useful, because they often reveal a certain motivation or meaning in a tradition, which was later lost even as the tradition persisted. There’s probably a certain satisfaction to be found in looking at some point in history, and finding that “before this point in time, this idea did not exist.” But there are dangers as well. Meanings change notoriously over time, so when we look for the origin of this or that belief that we hold today, though we may recognize it in the past, it would look quite different to those who “came up” with it. Origins are also slippery in other ways. We often find that when we track them down, some new “predecessor” presents itself, and we’re stuck chasing a constantly retreating mirage. Thus, when we bother to track things down, we should make sure we gain value from the act of tracking.

In the case of genetics, there’s a well-known tradition that dates the study of genetics back to the monk Gregor Mendel and his famous green and yellow peas (get out your Punnett squares, class). There’s even a historical scandal suggesting that Mendel cooked his data: statistically it’s too good. But why should we really care about Mendel? I mean, it’s good to know about him, and it’s good to know how others have viewed him and used his precedent to further their own work, but there’s not much value in worrying too much about him, specifically. His work wasn’t used or even known until 35 years after its publication in an obscure journal, when it was unearthed by Hugo DeVries and Carl Correns, who were part of a thriving botanical/laboratory-biology culture circa 1900 that was already deep in theorization about how

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STS Wiki Returns

A while ago, Michael Robinson (of Time to Eat the Dogs) and I were discussing possible means of online collaboration, debate, historiography, etc. I mentioned there was an STS Wiki that seemed to be down for the count. It turns out it’s now back up. I haven’t had a good look around it yet, but check it out.

Fun with Wikipedia

I mentioned a while ago that I was thinking of rewriting the Wikipedia page on the History of Physics from scratch. And I did. (Archived copy here, in case you’re reading this post from this blog’s archives). Now, there are a lot of complaints to be made about Wikipedia articles. In the history of science, they can be almost painfully Whiggish. In this case, I felt justified because the prior version of the History of Physics article was not only methodologically suspect, but, really, more or less unreadable, and it was clear that piecemeal amendment would not be a useful path and that no one else was going to undertake the project.

So, if an academically-trained historian is going to just swoop in and do this kind of thing, what ought to be taken into account? I feel Wikipedia is an opportunity not only to correct inadequate views, but to create a resource that can serve as both a primer on a topic, as well as a guide to various levels of literature (popular, scholarly overview, detailed scholarly work, etc…). This can be done, I think, with judicious use of documentation.

I don’t think my take on the history of physics required many references by academic standards, but the Wikipedians can be persnickety about this kind of thing. The Master of Physics Articles on Wikipedia, known as “Headbomb”, reverted my edit earlier this month, because I hadn’t yet put in new documentation and pictures. That’s fixed. I now have used the “Further Reading” section to suggest some general overviews for interested readers, while the “References” section basically serves as a “books about this

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Primer: Galenic Theory

I am not a historian of medicine by any stretch of the imagination, which is why it was sort of fun(ny) when the students from my intro to the history of science course this past spring seemed to take more interest in the medicine-related topics than any other. So, for today’s history lesson, we’re going to do a quick overview of Galenic medical theory, which dominated university-based medicine instruction prior to the rise of anatomy and physiology in the early modern period, and which remained influential in the medical community as well as in geography (particularly in what we would now call ethnography). Below we have a mixing of Galenic theory and physiognomy.

For reference’s sake: Galen of Pergamum was a Greek physician who lived in the 2nd century AD, and was inheritor to a large body of medical theory, which he organized, commented upon, criticized, and extended. When Classical medical theory was revived in European university medical education in the later Middle Ages, his ouevre was still considered authoritative.

Galenic theory revolved around the balances of the four “humors”: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile (don’t try to connect it too much to current understanding of bodily fluids). These humors were associated with the four elements (air, water, fire, and earth, respectively) as well as the properties of dryness, wetness, heat, and cold (blood, for example, was wet and hot). Remaining healthy was a matter of maintaining a

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Looking Further Afield

What the heck is this stuff!? — What the!?

It seems like only yesterday that it was time to do the biannual roundup of physics-related articles for the AIP Center for History of Physics newsletter. Last time I did that, I fell privy to Harry Collins’ and Rob Evans’ exciting work in the sociological problem of expertise, and we’re hopefully revisiting that in September. This time, I was prompted to take a broader perspective on things because it struck me just how foreign a lot of what I was looking at was to my historiographical sensibilities. Specifically, I started considering the real need for this blog to look further afield for new ways for it to attack its mission of finding new and better ways to write history. Christopher’s posts will be of interest in this respect, because he spends a lot of time reading intellectual history as well as European and American history, and those perspective will show up as he continues to develop his historiographical world view in this space. My philosophy is: a little bit of an unabashedly good thing demands more.

Setting an agenda for future series of posts, I’ve been thinking about how much my work here is hampered by my own really very limited perspective on science studies from the HSS mainstream. Taking a skeptical

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Schaffer on Herschel’s Cosmology

William Herschel's 40 ft. telescope at Slough. Credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Brittle Books Collection

In thinking about why I enjoy working in the history of science so much, the answer I increasingly come up with is that it gives us a sort of understanding of why arguments are structured in the way that they are, and, crucially, why they make sense to those who make them. Others seem to like to study science as a repository of accepted knowledge, or as a tool for technological development or for structuring society, or simply as a subset of museological reconstruction. But, in my mind, work like, say, Peter Dear’s, which regularly traces not just the connection between scientific work and its time and place, but the reason why arguments make sense in different times and places, is the most exciting. Looking at science in this vein, it is possible to see it as more than just “knowledge functioning in society” but as a social institution dedicated to the construction of highly sophisticated methods of arriving at “knowledge one can rely on”.

So, what does an article about theories of things like sunspots being holes in the solar atmosphere leading down to a temperate layer where intelligent beings live have to do with “knowledge one can rely on”? As I explored a little bit in my prior post on “cosmology and the problem of the problem”, the ability to connect knowledge into a coherent world system has long been a crucial method of argumentation. It is misleading to look at the scientific revolution and assume one of its major products was an argumentative restraint that refused to intuit knowledge where no reliable knowledge could be found (case-in-point, Newton’s celebrated “hypotheses non fingo”). This is because, first, speculation is always necessary to the development of new knowledge, and, second, it is incredibly problematic to determine when one does or

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Primer: Deutsche Physik

Our inaugural post in the Hump-Day History series is a subject that is a touchstone to those who have studied the history of physics, but that does not feature in the top tier of popular knowledge of the history of science. This is a short-lived but stinging moment in the history of physics in Germany from the 1930s known in English as “Aryan physics” but in German as deutsche Physik, or “German physics”. The reason “Aryan” tends to be used is because “deutsche” had a very ethnic connotation that served to distinguish this style of physics from what the proponents of deutsche Physik considered to be “Jewish” physics, by which they meant relativity and quantum mechanics, the subjects that had over the prior two decades catapulted German physics to a clear position at the forefront of the profession.

Philipp Lenard receives an honorary degree from Heidelberg University. Credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection

Deutsche Physik proponents were generally physicists who sought to benefit from the takeover of the Nazi Party in 1933. They were led by Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard (Nobel, 1905) and Johannes Stark (1919). After the Nazis took power, new civil service laws banned most Jews from government service, which included research posts in universities and important institutions like the Kaiser Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institutes. By painting the highly abstract and philosophically unintuitive nature of recent physical theory as characteristically Jewish, Lenard et al attempted to tar non-Jewish physicists who had been a part of the new wave

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