A Message from the President July 21, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Bernard Lightman, George Smith, Graeme Gooday, Jane Maienschein, Jed Buchwald, John Lynch, Steve Fuller, Steven Shapin
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HSS members have just been alerted that the new e-newsletter is out. First off, I think it’s good the newsletter is only online, but their new floating table of contents is not working for me, because it obscures the text on my computer at work even when the window is fully expanded. You can shrink the screen contents by hitting Ctrl-minus, and that clears it up. Or you can just access the pdf version. This year’s HSS preliminary program is included (look for my session Saturday morning!)
Jane Maienschein
What I want to post about real quick before I take off to Colorado on vacation until next week is Jane Maienschein’s message as outgoing president of HSS. First off, a tip of the hat for the following: “We have to embrace a range of scholarly products, including well-crafted blogs that have more impact and reach a larger audience than the typical academic book, public presentations, and collaborations with scientists.” Quite true, although I would emphasize the possibility for having real-time, open scholarly conversations rather than audience reach.
Second, an important and possibly controversial point: Maienschein observes that a major priority for her was getting the history of science to reconnect with…. the history of science! “I worried that the profession had become so diverse and diffuse that it lacked the energy to carry the field forward. In particular, I saw too much of a swing toward a version of the social history of science that seemed to forget the science. I imagined I might help bring back a balance of interests – science at the core, along with plenty
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History and Science Education (Isis Pt. 2) July 23, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Charles Darwin, David Kaiser, Graeme Gooday, John Lynch, Nick Hopwood, Stephen Brush
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Continuing on with the new Isis focus section, let’s start at the beginning, with Graeme Gooday, John Lynch, physicist Kenneth Wilson, and Constance Barsky’s article, “Does Science Education Need the History of Science?” This article is divided into two more-or-less separate points: 1) What role could history of science play amid a science curriculum, and 2) couldn’t we be doing more to debunk popular misconceptions of the history of science, with intelligent design proponents’ arguments as a case-in-point?
The authors start out by addressing the possibility that history of science could actually be seen corruptive because of its relativistic leanings, citing an old Stephen Brush article “Should the History of Science Be Rated X?” A couple of superficial points here: first, the old X rating is now NC-17, so ostensibly college kids are old enough to endure our corrupting forces!; and second, I am amused that I indirectly inherited my History 174 course at Maryland from Brush (AIP postdocs have been teaching it for a while now). Anyway, the authors (and I) assume this is a non-issue these days, so we move on.
More to the point, the article portrays history as a potential force of enculturation while science courses portray a more “static” and stripped-down picture of what science is. We can show how scientific communities (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 