Available Now in Centaurus: My Review of Helge Kragh’s Higher Speculations October 28, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Helge Kragh
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I don’t believe I have permission to republish here, but my review of Helge Kragh’s book, Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology is available in Centaurus 53 (2011): 342-343, or online here (paywall, but if your library, like mine, doesn’t subscribe, you can see a scan of about 1/3 of the review for free).
I was very happy to get the chance to review the book, because Kragh’s industriousness, his technical understanding, and his interest in a wide array of subjects make him one of the most exciting historians of physics working today. My review makes quite a bit of the fact that the volume feels like more of an outline of a future history than a filled-out history along the lines of Kragh’s Cosmology and Controversy (1996). So it contains a lot of discussion of how these sketches could be pulled together into a more synthetic account. I would like to repeat a point I make at the end of the review, which is that this is intended more in the vein of engagement than criticism. If you’re interested in putting the latest multi-verse scenarios into the context of the longstanding history of physical speculation, this is your book.
Live at Leeds: Maximum HPS October 8, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
Thanks to everyone from Leeds — and Manchester! — for coming out, and for the fine hospitality. Good night, and see you next time!
Apologies for the lack of substantive posts lately. My new introduction to the history of science course is starting on Monday, and I’m now in the final stages of overhauling my book manuscript. Priorities, you know. Also, I’m heading up to the University of Leeds on Wednesday to kick off the seminar season with a talk entitled “Perspectives on the Possibility for a Science of Policy after World War II”, 3:15pm in the Department of Philosophy, Baines Wing G36 (alas, I don’t think I could fill the Refectory!). Do come around if you happen to be in the neighborhood.
My book (present title: Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960) is on a topic that has received a decent amount of attention. But, to my mind, this attention seems mainly hung up on the idea that the history being told must hinge on some variation on the standard “what happens when you try to apply science to policy?” question. This was a point I originally made in a BJHS article back in 2007. My talk will boil down the central point of my book, which is that we need to distinguish different scientific activities from each other, and start to understand how they were built around different tasks, different methods, different notions of what gave knowledge integrity as “science”, how that integrity related to practical decision-making, and what implications that had (or, more often, did not have) for polity in general. Most significantly, these differing ideas complemented not only each other but traditional decision-making methods, probably more often than they were in competition.
Book Review: Leo Beranek’s Riding the Waves, and George Cowan’s Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute October 1, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: Dick Bolt, George Cowan, J. C. R. Licklider, Leo Beranek
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The following book review appears in Isis 102 (September 2011): 581-582.
© 2011 by The History of Science Society, and reprinted here according to the guidelines of the University of Chicago Press.
Leo Beranek. Riding the Waves: A Life in Sound, Science, and Industry. x + 230 pp., figs. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2008. $24.95 (paper). George A. Cowan. Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute: The Memoirs of George A. Cowan. 175 pp., illus., index. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. $18.50 (cloth)
William Thomas
Leo Beranek and George Cowan are both important figures within the history of the twentieth-century physical sciences. However, neither was so important that his memoirs will be of widespread historiographical interest. Therefore, rather than gauge how the standard caveats regarding the autobiographical genre may apply to these books as works of history, it is better to consider their usefulness as resources that historians can draw on to suit their own purposes.
Beranek is an acoustician who earned a doctorate in engineering at Harvard before World War II. During the war he became the head of the electro-acoustic laboratory based at Harvard. Afterward he served as the technical director of the acoustics laboratory at MIT, before steadily diverting his efforts, in the 1950s, into his highly successful engineering consulting firm, Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN). In the 1970s, as president of the investment group Boston Broadcasters, Incorporated (BBI), he helped develop an ambitious programming strategy for Boston’s WCVB Channel 5 TV station.
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
