William Coblentz and the Superphysical World April 20, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: William Coblentz, William Crookes, William Meggers
3 comments
In developing ACAP, I’ve picked up a broad and eclectic, albeit still superficial, knowledge of the American physics community. I now want to start filling in some parts of this general picture for refereed publication, but there are other bits and pieces that I don’t think I’ll ever publish, and I thought this might be a good forum for “tossing them out there”. So, taking a cue from a recent post on paranormal phenomena at Heterodoxology, I’d like to talk about an unexpected run-in I had with the history of paranormal research while collecting information on a physicist who worked at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), of all places.
Coblentz, photo by Harris and Ewing for the National Bureau of Standards, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
William Coblentz (1882-1962) was a reasonably high-level figure in the pre-World War II American physics community. Raised in rural Ohio, he went on to receive a PhD from Cornell in 1903, and, following two years of postdoctoral research there, he moved to the new NBS (est. 1901) where he would spend his career. He was a key figure in the development of spectroscopy techniques for measuring heat, which he applied in fields ranging from astrophysics to physiology, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1930. He quasi-retired in 1945 and published his memoirs, From the Life of a Researcher, in 1951. Today you can become a member of the Coblentz Society, whose mission is “to foster the understanding and application of vibrational spectroscopy”. You can even buy a Coblentz Society t-shirt declaring that “spectroscopists do it with frequency and intensity”.
A proper biographical treatment of Coblentz would have to center around his professional work, but I want to concentrate here specifically on his investigations of paranormal phenomena. Though a side interest, Coblentz took these phenomena seriously, and maintained a lifelong study of them. (more…)
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine to Close April 16, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
For those who don’t follow Biomedicine on Display, Thomas Söderqvist has been spreading the news there that the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine is to close down over the next couple of years. Apparently the Centre’s history of medicine faculty are to be absorbed into University College London, and the Wellcome Library and Collection will remain largely unaffected. Nevertheless, even for those of us who rarely cross into the history of medicine and the life sciences, the Wellcome Centre’s reputation as a center of scholarship is well-known, and one has to wonder what the scale of the implications will be. For further information, see the recent posts and comments at Biomedicine on Display and the new Friends of the WTCHOM blog.
Update: There is now also a more definitive story at the British Medical Journal’s news site.
The Array of Contemporary American Physicists April 13, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.3 comments
J. Robert Oppenheimer, photo courtesy of the United States Department of Energy and the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
Ladies and gentlemen, the Array of Contemporary American Physicists (ACAP) of the AIP Center for History of Physics is now ready for public use. I am a big believer that web-based tools can transform the way we do history, not only by making information more accessible, but also by rendering public some vital historiographical activities that typically remain private. This blog is the arm of that belief that suggests that historiographical reflection can and should take place in open environments. ACAP is the arm of that belief that suggests the internet can provide a place where the raw results of tedious research—which inform so much of what scholars do but are often never published in an accessible form—can reside and be accessed.
The ACAP project has occupied much of the last couple of years of my attention, and, as it is designed to be a growing and dynamic resource, it will surely be something on which I will continue to work. On the surface, it will appear to be a highly conservative contribution to the historiography, comprised largely of names and dates and links to other resources, but I hope it will help open the way toward a more inventive and flexible historiography of the physical sciences. It could, for example, provide a framework of the most basic contexts within which individual works can be located, but which are often neglected. It will also help to identify people and things we know a lot about (such as everyone’s friend Oppy, pictured here), and help direct attention to, and organize thinking about, whole categories of people and things about which we know very little. This sort of thing should be done for scholarship of all periods, but it is particularly urgent if we want to take the 20th-century problem seriously.
Finally, I just want to emphasize that this is a resource-in-progress. We’ve tried to make it as nice and shiny as possible for its big debut (big thanks to our web designer Ada Uzoma), but there is still much that is obviously deficient. This ranges from the superficial (the main page will be changed, disposing of the cheesy icons among other things), to the fact that our current roster of “topic guides” is severely limited. In between is the fact that auto-searches for unpublished material and books in our AIP holdings are still only programmed in for a few scientists whose last names happen to start with “A” and “B”. But, we’re also eager to take it for a spin and see what happens. So without further adieu:
The Bounds of Natural Philosophy: Temporal and Practical Frontiers, Pt. 2 April 12, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Natural Philosophy/Anthropo-cosmology.Tags: Crosbie Smith, David Gooding, Geoffrey Cantor, Jan Golinski, Jed Buchwald, Joseph Agassi, Norton Wise, Philip Mirowski, Simon Schaffer
4 comments
How do we deal with this guy Faraday?
If you wanted to pick out a transitional figure between a wide-ranging natural philosophy and a more bounded science, Michael Faraday (1791-1867) would be about as good a choice as any. On account of his experiments and conceptual developments in electromagnetism, Faraday is now most identified with the history of physics, but, as the protege of Humphry Davy (1778-1829), he established himself within the tradition of chemistry. An enterprise lacking foundational principles, chemistry fit poorly with natural philosophy, but was also not fully at home in natural history, and became an early independent field.
This was, of course, a recent development. As Jan Golinski has described in some detail, it was only circa 1800 that chemistry managed to shed an association with a wide-ranging philosophy and radical politics, and to establish itself as a much more constrained field. The heyday of natural philosophers like James Hutton (1726-1797) was, for many, still a living memory when Faraday vocally reasserted the importance of an empirical and non-speculative attitude toward science, and began to be recognized by others as an exemplar of this vision of science.
According to Geoffrey Cantor in Michael Faraday, Sandemanian and Scientist (1991), early biographies also emphasized the empirical qualities of Faraday’s work, and it was only beginning with Joseph Agassi’s Faraday as a Natural Philosopher (1971) that a portrait of Faraday “as a bold theoretical speculator in the mould of Karl Popper” began to emerge (Cantor, 208). For his part, Cantor sought to take Faraday’s empiricist rhetoric seriously while developing an understanding of the conceptual precepts underlying his work. Following the lead of David Gooding’s early-1980s analyses of Faraday’s methodology, Cantor aimed “to locate Faraday’s metaphysics in his religion and, in particular, in his views about the structure of the divinely created physical world. These views […] coloured Faraday’s highly idiosyncratic theories about matter and force” (161).
London Calling April 10, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.7 comments
Apologies for the slowness in wrapping up the natural philosophy/anthro-cosmology series. My enormous project at AIP, Phase 1 of the Array of Contemporary American Physicists (ACAP) is currently getting the last few wrinkles ironed out of it. In all likelihood, this will launch next week, and I’ll announce it here, among other places. Further, I am getting married on May 1 here in Washington DC, and wedding preparations have started taking up more time. Further, with ACAP and my three-year post-doc position wrapping up, it’s time to be moseying on to the next town. I had until a couple weeks ago thought this would be a metaphorical mosey, as I took up full-time research, based at AIP, on a one-year project on geological and glaciological research in the second-half of the twentieth century (on which I’ve been working very part time). Instead, unexpectedly, it turns out there actually is a next town, and it is called London.
Starting in October, I’ll be taking up a three-year junior research fellowship in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Imperial College London. (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 