The Natural Philosophy Problem February 26, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Natural Philosophy/Anthropo-cosmology.Tags: C. B. Wilde, Geoffrey Cantor, John Heilbron, P. M. Heimann, Rom Harré, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, Thomas Kuhn
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I have decided that Geoffrey Cantor’s “The Eighteenth Century Problem,” an essay review of 1980′s Ferment of Knowledge collection, is a lost masterpiece [History of Science 20 (1982): 44-63]. I don’t think it’s possible to just pick it up and enjoy it; obviously reading Ferment of Knowledge helps, and knowing a little something about various eighteenth-century sciences helps as well. But what the piece is really about is differing methods of historiographical presentation, and how they help us digest the scientific work of an era. Cantor does a lot to help us understand the crucial variations in approach that existed ca. 1980.
What I want to concentrate on is the subsidiary “problem of natural philosophy”. A common way of analyzing natural philosophy is just to say that “it’s what they used to call science”, but this not only misses the key distinctions and connections between, say, natural philosophy, natural history, mathematics, and other forms of higher learning, it also doesn’t help to explain the fact that a lot of the discussion that falls into natural philosophy comes off as just plain weird. What are we to make of this?
Cantor observes that nobody seemed entirely sure:
Schaffer on Bodies, Evidence, and Objectivity February 21, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Ian Hacking, Lorraine Daston, Martin Kusch, Peter Galison, Robert Darnton, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, Ted Porter
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Bodies of evidence: frontispiece of Nollet's Essai sur l'electricité des corps
In 1983′s “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” Simon Schaffer set himself the task of determining whether “some of the more fashionable themes in current historiography” could be made to yield real explanatory gains. Among these themes was “the notion of scientific production as performance”. The gist of that piece was that natural philosophical arguments, as illustrated through public demonstration, had trouble fostering social agreement because of the requirement that the audience be able to interpret the performance and its implications correctly. Here was a tension that, especially when connected to the social and political dangers of rationalist Jacobin politics, could help explain the nineteenth-century rise of contained scientific communities.
Much of Schaffer’s output in the 1980s and early 1990s filled out various instances where natural knowledge was linked to problems of maintaining proper behavior, and, thus, political order. He especially concentrated on the cases of pneumatics (and the related practice of eudiometry), and cometography. He also highlighted pointed criticisms of the idea that experimentally-gained knowledge could solve problems of social order, particularly those of Hobbes, Burke, and Whewell.
“Self Evidence,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 327-362 returns us to 1983′s general point—the problematic relationship between experimental evidence and its implications for knowledge—and returns to some of the same electrical experimenters. There is however a new wrinkle: the emphasis now is on self-experimentation and the difficulties of evidence produced specifically through the experimenter’s body. How could a savant or an audience trust in reports of the medical benefits of electrical therapy, for example? Accordingly, Schaffer does not point to the rise of the contained community. Instead the consequence of the identified tension is the rise of mechanical instrumentation designed to measure physiological effects. “The lesson of the story of self-evidence may … be that there is an intimate relationship between the trust placed in evidence of self-registering scientific instrumentation and the moral authority of the scientific intellectual” (362). (more…)
Hawks, Doves, and Various Avian Hybrids February 16, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, George Kistiakowsky, Harold Brown, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John Wheeler, Leo Szilard
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The earliest version of this post embarrassingly misrepresented the AEC General Advisory Committee’s 1949 position on hydrogen bomb development. Having caught out my error, I have inserted a correction below. —Will
There is an interesting post by Darin over at PACHSmörgåsbord discussing a recent PACHS colloquium given by Terry Christensen on physicists and Cold War politics, with commentary by Erik Rau (one of the few other historians who has written much about the history of operations research). I’m a little bummed not to have seen the talk. I obviously can’t comment on specific points. But I gather from Darin’s summary that it had mainly to do with why Edward Teller (1908-2003) has a bad historical reputation, where fellow Cold War hawk John Wheeler (1911-2008) (about whom Christensen has written) does not. The postwar government activities of physicists is a frequently-visited topic, but it has not been systematically addressed, and, in all but the most sophisticated accounts, it is still rather coarsely-parsed. I’ve been gathering information on it lately, and thought I would offer a few preliminary thoughts about the complex relationship between physicists and American Cold War militarism.
Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Gift of Carlo Wick
Thematic Concerns and Synopticism in the Historiography of Scientific Work February 5, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Crosbie Smith, Geoffrey Cantor, Jed Buchwald, John Pringle Nichol, Joseph Priestley, Norton Wise, Ron Numbers, Simon Schaffer, William Thomson
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Jed Buchwald began his essay review of Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise’s 1989 biography of William Thomson, Energy and Empire (British Journal for the History of Science 24 (1991) pp. 85-94) with the observation, “Post-modernism and Benoit Mandelbrot have found their way to the history of science.” He went on to identify the book as “a sort of fractal biography“, and observed, “Here we have, as it were, an attempt to force meaning, but not global order, to emerge out of chaos through guided immersion in the chaos itself.” The “ever-present aim” is “thematic unity”. Buchwald saw this as a new methodological tack, and his characterization of it is worth a lengthy quote. Rhetorically asking why one should write a massive biography of a very important, but not Very Important physicist, he surmises:
The answer Smith and Wise would give, I think, points to Thomson’s unique significance as the exemplar and the creator of a special kind of imperial science and engineering. His scientific creations both reflect and constitute a powerful amalgam of social, cultural and economic trends that shaped British physics and physics-based engineering into a form that gave it worldwide dominance during the same period, and for many of the same reasons, that Clydeside ship-builders and the British telegraph dominated. I know of no comparable biography, or history, that so directly embraces and thoroughly works the view that every aspect of an individual’s career is indissolubly bound to every other aspect of it, that the whole connects both globally and in intimate detail to tendencies that influenced populous groups of people and that have at first sight little to do with questions such as whether or not one should treat moving force as an energy gradient.
Of course, the attempt to derive unity from an individual’s intellectual output was not new. We have already seen on this blog how in 1984 Simon Schaffer had criticized the literature on Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) for portraying him as a “synoptic thinker”. Energy and Empire was part of the very same discussion. In fact, in their chapter 4 on the “changing tradition of natural philosophy”, Smith and Wise drew on Schaffer’s work on Glasgow astronomer John Pringle Nichol (1804-1859), whose commitment to social progress accorded with his support for the nebular hypothesis and the attendant implication of cosmological progress, which (apparently) implied an endorsement of the general concept of progress by nature itself. (more…)
“Bright Idea”: AIP’s New Laser History Exhibit February 2, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the laser. The American Physical Society has its own website, LaserFest, dedicated to the occasion. Spencer Weart, retired director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics (my employer) has also just completed a new web exhibit, “Bright Idea: The First Lasers”. It is directed at a general audience (and, if I may introduce a slight grumble on this note, the exhibit text does start with that pop-history chestnut that has become the bane of history professors everywhere: “Since ancient times….”), but I hope that professionals will find the use of multimedia appealing, too. The web design is by Ada Uzoma, who is also helping me with my new web resource, and she’s really done a lovely job with integrating images and sound into the exhibit. Have a look. For our older web exhibits, go here.
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
