Hump-Day History: Karl Alfred von Zittel and his History of Geology and Paleontology June 27, 2009
Posted by Christopher Donohue in Uncategorized.Tags: EWP Primer, Karl Alfred von Zittel
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Karl Alfred von Zittel ( September 25, 1839 – January 5, 1904) was a German paleontologist. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the geologist, zoologist, and eugenicist, who authored, in 1936 the two volume, The Proboscidea: A Monograph of the Discovery, Evolution, Migration and Extinction of the Mastodonts and Elephants of the World, as well as Man Rises to Parnassus, eulogized von Zittel as one of the most “distinguished advocates of paleontology.” It was no exaggeration, according to Osborn, to say that “he did more for the promotion and diffusion of paleontology than any other single man who lived during the nineteenth century.”
Von Zittel, “while not a genius”, nonetheless possessed “untiring industry” as well as “critical capacity” ( Science, N. S., Vol. XIX. ) What then were von Zittel’s achievements? First among them was the multi-volume Handbuch der Palaeontologie, issued between 1876 and 1890. While the progress of paleontology in the nineteenth century was “prodigious,” according to Osborn, it was nonetheless, “scattered through thousands of monographs and special papers,” a “hopeless labyrinth to the student.” Such was the state of knowledge, detail without system, that it was impossible for even the expert “to gain a perspective view of the whole subject.” Von Zittel’s Handbuch der Palaeontologie was a feat of organization and collection. Added to this textual achievement was von Zittel’s apparently fantastic collection of natural historical specimens which he assembled at Alte Akademie of Munich. This collection, assembled from all over the world, illustrated the course of the ” evolution of plants and of invertebrate and vertebrate animals.”
It was small wonder that Munich accordingly became “the Mecca of paleontologists, young and old.” Such community was fostered by von Zittel due in large part to his “exceptionally charming and magnetic personality.” He was also exceptionally generous with both his time and his natural historical specimens. Von Zittel’s legacy and fame were secure as he could count among his students “all the younger American, most of the German, and many of the younger French and Austrian paleontologists.” (more…)
Odds and Ends June 24, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
I’m off to Minnesota to visit family for a week, and will probably not be posting. I think Chris has something planned for Hump Day History, which will probably go up later.
For any readers with an interest in science policy, the blog Prometheus is being discontinued. I originally had Prometheus on the blog roll because I enjoyed David Bruggeman’s attention to a well-parsed variety of issues concerning science in the federal (and occasionally British) governments. Bruggeman’s new blog is Pasco Phronesis, which takes Prometheus’ place on the blog roll. Prometheus’s main contributor, Roger Pielke, Jr., is primarily intested in climate change issues, and he also has a new blog. His analyses of policy issues and public pronouncements are detailed, frequent, and pointed, but are a little far afield of what we do here. So no new link, but I encourage readers with any interest in the issue to check him out if they haven’t already.
Finally, I thought it might be interesting to do occasional “what am I reading?” posts. I read different books in different ways. Some books I read in detail from cover to cover. For Hump Day History I read books in enough detail to do a competent summary of the subject matter, but don’t really absorb the whole thing. A whole stack of others sit on my shelf or coffee table seemingly eternally half-read, and sometimes I actually finish them. A couple selections I plan on taking to Minnesota with me, plus short commentary, after the jump. (more…)
Methodological Unity, Revisited June 20, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.Tags: Allan Franklin, Imre Lakatos, Jed Buchwald, Kent Staley, Peter Galison, Steven Shapin
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Buchwald and Franklin, eds., Wrong for the Right Reasons.
In my recent look at historiographical language, I discussed Kent Staley’s 1999 critique of Peter Galison’s division of particle detector history pre-1970 into epistemologically discontinuous “image” and “logic” traditions. I noted that Staley might have made his point less palatable through an appeal to the methodological “unity” of science (rather than contiguousness), which Galison jumped on as contrary to the construction of coherent history. For Galison, it is the methodological divisions in science that keep it nimble, intellectually diverse, and heuristically powerful, and it is an appreciation of this disunity that allows us to make any sense of its history consistent with a detailed reading of the historical record. What, then, is the appeal of philosophical “unity”, and do historians have anything to gain by letting philosophers espousing it in the door?
If, indeed, philosophers believed philosophy could be used to reconstruct an algorithmic history of science, then surely they should be kept out at all costs, but this does not appear to be the case. Staley, for one, appears to seek conceptual clarity rather than to follow Imre Lakatos’ notion of the “rational reconstruction” of history—science may be epistemologically diverse, but underlying epistemological connections may be revealing of the sources of the strength of certain kinds of knowledge-making acts: “We might entertain the following version of the ‘unity of methods’ thesis: there are a small number of forms of argument that are shared among otherwise diverse areas of investigation, or that are employed in common during (more…)
Primer: Michael Faraday June 17, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: David Gooding, EWP Primer, Geoffrey Cantor, Hans Ørsted, Humphry Davy, James Prescott Joule, Jane Marcet, L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday, William Whewell
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Michael Faraday (1791-1867) came from a London artisan family and as a youth became an apprentice at a bookbinding shop. There he took the opportunity to read the books passing through, including such scientific titles as Conversations on Chemistry (1805) by Jane Marcet and Antoine Lavoisier’s landmark Elements of Chemistry (translated into English in 1790). Supported in his explorations by his master and others, he attended popular scientific lectures, including some given by the celebrated chemist Humphry Davy (1778-1829) at the new Royal Institution (est. 1799). In 1813 Faraday finagled a job as Davy’s assistant, and would remain at the Royal Institution for the rest of his life.
Faraday undertook his work throughout a period when the sciences were changing rapidly, as they were yoked into distinct specialties, and as his own area, the experimental physical sciences, became dramatically more sophisticated. Under Davy’s and other Royal Institution figures’ supervision, he learned the techniques of chemistry, and undertook all his early work in that field (and is credited with the discovery of benzene). When Faraday initiated his interest in electricity and magnetism early in the 19th century, the harnessing of galvanic currents by means of voltaic piles was a recent innovation that had sparked extensive investigation into electrochemical effects (an alternative explanation is here). Davy was a leader in this new field of study, and Faraday would likewise become an expert. Faraday would eventually fall out with Davy—who would oppose his election to the Royal Society—and he came into his own at the Royal (more…)
Self-Promotion! June 16, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Dynamical Systems Collective, Jay Forrester, Lambert Williams
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Aside from blogging, I, in fact, also do research and produce academic works. Typically I try not to blog excessively about my own work, but it seems a pity not to try and bring the two together from time to time. So, I wanted to draw attention to a two-part series appearing in the latest Science in Context that I wrote with my friend and former grad school colleague Lambert Williams. Both papers have both our names on them, and were formulated largely in tandem, but (as the writing styles will evidence) we do have our respective halves of the series.
My half is a new consideration of Jay Forrester’s system dynamics simulation methodology, which he originated at MIT circa 1960. It’s best known through its role in the 1970s “Limits to Growth” affair, but rather than recapitulate the tit-for-tat of the various proponents and critics of his simulation project, I wanted to try and elucidate what made this project so appealing to him that he has remained with it through the present. To a large extent, system dynamics has meshed into the larger background of computer simulation (more…)
Watch your language, Pt. 2: Galison vs. Staley June 14, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in History as Anti-Philosophy, Methods.Tags: Andrew Pickering, Imre Lakatos, Kent Staley, Patrick Blackett, Peter Galison
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In Pt. 1, I discussed the historiographical problem of under what circumstances it is useful to criticize someone else’s characterization of history, highlighting Peter Galison’s rebuke in Image and Logic to Andy Pickering’s account of the discovery of the J/ψ particle from Constructing Quarks. I noted that Galison took exception to Pickering’s idea of “tuning” experiment to theory on the count of its adherence to an antipositivist understanding of the history of experiment as proceeding in some sort of theoretical relationship to theory rather than on its own terms. This independence of experimental tradition from theoretical concerns is part of a useful view of history Galison calls “intercalation”. I noted that the issue of theory-dependence can have political overtones, but that the issue is also important to understanding how knowledge-production works, and to constructing coherent and accurately-worded historical accounts.
But just how important is accuracy in wording? When is one making a point and when is one just nitpicking? To address this question I want to skip ahead a couple of years to a special issue of Perspectives on Science dedicated to Image and Logic in which philosopher of science Kent Staley disputed Galison’s division of modern particle detection into epistemologically distinct “image” and “logic” traditions. Galison responded in the same issue entirely confident that he was being visited by some easily vanquished ghost out of the historiographical past. Yet, to my mind, this is a dispute that Staley won. I’ll explain why, and then get on to the ultimate question of whether it matters.
First off, I should say that I’m predisposed to Staley’s argument. When I first thoroughly read Image and Logic in (more…)
Primer: Leo Szilard June 11, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Frederick Lindemann, Jonas Salk, Leo Szilard, Max von Laue, Michael Polanyi, William Lanouette
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Photo Credit: Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives
I had another post planned for today, but got waylaid when, working on my physicist web project, I had to piece together the career of Leo Szilard. The idea behind the project is to gather skeletal information on physicists to help trace career paths, but this doesn’t work very well for Szilard, who was a sort of a physicist vagabond who seems to have cobbled his career together out of temporary and part-time positions, meager patent revenues, and a penchant for a modest existence. So, I’ve been spending my day immersed in journalist and policy analyst William Lanouette’s Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard (1992), trying to sift out what I can. Since I’m learning more than enough for a post, I thought I’d just write something up on him while I was at it.
Szilard, the son of an engineer, was born Leo Spitz in Budapest, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1898. (His family changed their name in 1900.) Out of a sense of practicality, Szilard aimed to become an engineer himself, enrolling in the Technical Institute of Budapest, but was drafted into the army during World War I. After the war, political conditions became difficult for Szilard, on account of his Jewish heritage, and he moved from Hungary to Berlin to continue his education there, first at the Technical Institute and then the University. In Berlin, Szilard decided to indulge his intellect and study physics in an environment rich in the some of the greatest talent of his day, notably Max von Laue and Albert Einstein. Submitting a manuscript detailing a new conceptualization of thermodynamics that impressed both these men (and was decades later recognized as a contribution to the integration of thermodynamics and information theory), he was granted his doctorate in 1922.
The key characteristic of Szilard’s work and career was his restless and penetrating intellect, which accepted no boundaries and precious little institutional restraint, and drove him to travel constantly. He devoted his thinking to (more…)
Watch your language, Pt. 1 June 8, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in History as Anti-Philosophy, Methods.Tags: Andrew Pickering, Peter Galison, Thomas Kuhn
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Or, a notion concerning when, how, and why to nitpick historical writing.
I know it must seem obsequious to praise one’s advisor’s work to high heaven on a blog, but I have to be honest: Peter Galison’s 1997 book Image and Logic on the history of particle detectors is, in my mind, one of the finest works of historiographical craftsmanship I can think of. The book is well-known in the theory community for the idea of the “trading zone”, and is thus attached to the whole fashion of studying “boundary objects” and things with multiple meanings to different people, etc., etc. If that’s all you take away from the book, you, like most of its readers, are a “Chapters 1 and 9 person”. I like to think of myself as a “Chapters 2 through 8 person”, which is to say, someone who is interested in the history of particle detectors, and the way Galison presents it. MIT prof Dave Kaiser (who was a Galison student in the ’90s and assisted in the assembly of the book and knows it in intimate detail) likes to kid me for citing “chapter and verse”.
(I was discussing the “trading zone” versus “history of particle detectors” issue with my boss, Greg Good, who related to me how he once went to a talk given by Thomas Kuhn, which began with him saying the word “paradigm” and then informing his massive audience that that was the last they would hear of it, and then proceeded to discuss the history of black body radiation theory in loving detail.)
In considering the book; and the relationship between philosophy, sociology, and history; I like to think of Chapters 1 and 9 as laying out useful ideas or principles for coherent historical writing. Galison joins the sociologists in their rejection of histories written as a succession of theories, or as playing out according to some dialectic between theory and experiment. However, he has been known to chide sociologists for adhering to their own theoretical (more…)
Primer: Adolphe Quetelet, Statistics, and Social Physics June 4, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Adolphe Quetelet, Auguste Comte, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ted Porter
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Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874)
Throughout the 19th century, the nature of social changes and regularities in social activity remained an intense concern as population growth, urbanization, industrialization, and political upheaval captured the attention of scientific and political thinkers throughout Europe and America. As today, this thought necessarily spanned political, popular, philosophical, and scientific realms of thought as debates ensued concerning what could be said about societies and what could and should be done to affect how they function.
In the early 19th century, keeping and deploying statistics was already widespread, but their use as a tool of political discourse remained novel, and thus a subject of general and heated discussion. The astronomer and essayist Adolphe Quetelet proved to be one of the century’s most singular and influential thinkers concerning the use of social statistics. Born in Belgium in 1796 shortly after French annexed Austria’s Belgian provinces in the wars following the Revolution, Quetelet was educated in a French lycée, and as a youth took notice of the place accorded to the sciences in the Napoleonic empire. After Napoleon’s fall in 1815, Quetelet taught mathematics in Ghent, earned a doctorate in the subject, and, after convincing the government to build an observatory in Brussels, he departed to Paris—still the intellectual center of the world—to learn astronomy. Quetelet took up his post as director of the new Brussels Observatory in 1828, and the observatory began operation in 1832.
By no coincidence, it was in this same period that Quetelet first began writing about statistics and “social physics” (a phrase taken from contemporary “positivist” philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte). Principles of statistics and probability had been worked out by key figures in the development of the technical methods of astronomy in France who were also interested in social statistics, particularly Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). And, like many others writing (more…)
The Organizational Synthesis and Periodization June 1, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.5 comments
In my last post on the organizational synthesis, I suggested that it was one possible alternative to a house style of history of science that emphasizes the use of case study to illuminate one sort of epistemological problem or another, without explicitly tying the subject of study to other related subjects. This stand-alone quality of scholarship is a situation we might think of as a “new internalism”. While the new internalism recognizes a certain old internalist or antiquarian frustration or futility in building linear histories of the progress of knowledge, it also fractures knowledge into islands of scholarship that do not cohere with each other in any obvious way, and thus are “internalist” in their own right.
By looking at the organization of scientific institutions and scientific projects (attacks on specific problems, traditions in experimentation or theorization, etc…), it is possible to transcend the inadequacies of strictly linear histories. I might also have added that an organizational approach would also be useful in tracking and characterizing overlaps or connections between institutions and projects in histories of science and histories of technology, business, politics, law, and culture.
Today I would like to suggest that studying the organization of science would also allow for more satisfactory periodizations. It can do so by helping to solve the “constituency” problem and the “scale” problem. (more…)
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