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HSS 2000 Abstracts If you would like to modify your abstract, please e-mail changes to hssexec@u.washington.edu. Sarah E. Igo Princeton University In a 1949 article in the Public Opinion Quarterly, two social scientists referred to the "traumatic November episode" casting a pall over their field. To anyone in the business of measuring attitudes, the reference was immediately clear: the spectacular failure of opinion polls to predict the outcome of the 1948 presidential election. The article went on to discuss the crucial importance of polling‚s public image. The "widespread, relatively prolonged, and intense" adverse public reaction to the inaccurate forecasts, the authors feared, would not only undermine popular acceptance of opinion research but might also "radiate" out to "the more remote field of social science" as a whole. This was especially true if the lesson the public had learned was "the intrinsic unpredictability of human behavior." The authors of this article, like many of their colleagues, worried about the status of their relatively new field of inquiry. Certain that the only way to acquire legitimacy was through approximating the rhetoric of the hard sciences, but frustrated by their own dependence on variable human subjects, pollsters worked constantly to shore up public confidence in their methods and findings. George Gallup's claims for "scientific" polling provide a case in point. In his promotional rhetoric, polls were a scientifically-perfectible means for uncovering aggregate national opinion. Even in the years before 1948, however, this characterization did not go uncontested. Popular audiences were fascinated by but also suspicious of "scientific" techniques of opinion-gathering: the intrusiveness of the doorstep interview, the privileging of quantitative over qualitative data, the possibility of public manipulation, and the vision of a systematic science of human attitudes. Drawing upon Gallup's published works and private papers as well as contemporary media accounts, this paper concentrates on public debates over opinion research between 1936--when the sample survey method triumphed over straw ballot methods--and 1948. In so doing, it hopes to illuminate the struggles behind opinion polling's bid for scientific and cultural legitimacy. Kerri A. Inglis University
of Hawaii When foreigners came into contact with the Hawaiian Islands, they brought with them many "foreign" diseases. The result of this biological exchange was the tragic decline of the Hawaiian population. One disease that not only took lives, but influenced a great deal of cultural change was leprosy, or Hansen's disease. In 1865, King Kamehameha V, signed "An Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy," through which an isolated peninsula on the island of Moloka'i was designated as a place of isolation and exile for those who had contracted the disease. The segregation law would not be terminated until 1969. In 1980, the Kalaupapa National Historical Park was established. Residents, those who suffered from leprosy and were confined to Kalaupapa prior to 1969, remain at Kalaupapa. Tourists hike down, fly in, or ride mules down to the National Park to tour the peninsula and experience the public history of Kalaupapa. This paper will explore how the history of leprosy in Hawai'i is represented by the National Park, how Hawaiians (including current residents) who suffered from the disease are represented (and/or marginalized) by the Park, and it will examine the role of the "tourist" in these representations. Kenji Ito Harvard University This paper aims to ascertain what "theoretical physics" meant in Japan from the late 1910s to the second half of the 1920s, during the time just before quantum mechanics began to be introduced there. I show that "theoretical physics" had dual meanings (a normative meaning and a "practiced meaning"), and how these meanings were rooted in the social and cultural contexts surrounding Japanese physics. By examining how "theory" and "theoretical physics" emerged in dictionaries, popular writings, and academic institutions, I show that the Japanese word for "theory" was strongly connotative of "philosophy," and that "theoretical physics" was perceived as a philosophical pursuit of "deep principles" in nature. On the other hand, examination of the works of those who were trained as "theoretical physicists" reveals that what Japanese "theoretical physicists" did was mathematical elaboration of known physical principles, rather than investigation of principles. I locate these practices of "theoretical physicists" within the "culture of calculating" that dominated Japanese physics, where physicists valued calculational skills and indulged in advanced mathematics. Physicists developed such a culture under disciplinary, social, and institutional constraints. First, physics in Japan was in a close contact with mathematics. Japanese physicists shared the same academic society with mathematicians at the universities, physics students received intensive training higher mathematics. Second, social demands also partially shaped the nature of "theoretical physics" in Japan. The technologies that were changing the modernizing Japanese life and landscape, such as electric engineering often required theoretical physicists to work out lengthy calculations. Third, the institutional inflexibility at Japanese universities, where little communication and cooperation existed between different specialties in the 1920s, did not induce young experimentalists to turn to theory nor did it encourage theorists to go beyond the domain of mathematics and to pursue physical meanings of physics. John P. Jackson University
of Colorado--Boulder Biochemist Robert E. Kuttner enjoyed academic and research posts at a number of universities and hospitals. Kuttner believed that he had a responsibility to use his scientific expertise in the service of society. Consequently he wrote dozens of articles for popular journals explaining how science could help solve vital social problems of the day. Of particular concern to Kuttner were the racial problems of the United States. Between 1950 and 1980 he wrote about little else. He was that rarest of creatures in the postwar United States a self-proclaimed racist. Kuttner's popular articles appeared in extremist journals and newspapers, many of them edited by neo-Nazi publisher Willis Carto. Kuttner was not a mere white supremacist, he was a Nordic supremacist, who proclaimed that the Northern European was the "natural leader of the white race." In his writings, Kuttner maintained that civilization was racial in nature and slavery was a beneficial institution for Negroes who were incapable of self-governance. Kuttner was convinced that the public was being mislead by pseudo-scientific propaganda of "racial equality" that was being propagated by Jews and Communists. This paper will explore how someone with Kuttner's extreme racial views could nonetheless become a scientific expert witness before the Federal Courts and Congress in the 1960s, become the chair of an Anthropology Department in a U.S. university in the 1970s, and enjoy the widespread dissemination of his racial views over a 30 year publishing career. One level of explanation is that Kuttner was part of a well-organized coterie of like-minded individuals who were very successful in advancing their ideas. Yet beyond the organizational aspects of Kuttner's career is the fact that his racial views were not far removed from views found throughout United States society. Jeremiah L. James Harvard
University In the standard account of the early development of quantum chemistry two monolitihic theory conglomerates clash over the construction of the best quantum mechanical account of chemical bonding. The account provides an oversimplified model of interdisciplinary research both by ignoring significant distinctions between the methods of theorists within each theory conglomerate and by presenting the parent disciplines, physics and chemistry, as undifferentiated wholes. The purpose of this paper is to initiate a more detailed discussion of the development of quantum chemistry through an investigation of the disparate goals and values to which early researchers in the field adhered. To this end it explores two closely related and oft overlooked aspects of some seminal works in quantum chemistry. First, it discusses the place that quantum chemical investigations played in their authors' broader research programs. Early research into quantum chemistry was rarely pursued for its own sake. Rather, it was normally one aspect of a multifaceted drive toward disciplinary expansion or unification. Second it investigates how the authors perceived the relationship between the sundry disciplines they drew upon in constructing their novel theories of the chemical bond. Early quantum chemists borrowed not only from the resources of quantum physics and laboratory chemistry but also from spectroscopy and crystallography and sundry other fields, and the ways in which they integrated these disciplines ranged from strong reductionism to near nominalism. Dale Jamieson Carleton
College The idea that global environmental change has thrust humans into the role of planetary managers began to gain currency in the late 1970s,gaining momentum throughout the 1980s. Ironically, as the collapse of communism demonstrated the inability of people to manage rationally their own societies, the attractions of planetary management seemed to become more compelling. Beginning in ecology and spreading quickly to other disciplines, global environmental management has come to be seen not just as one policy choice among others, but as an obligation. Would-be planetary managers believe that the physical and biological sciences can provide a basic understanding of the "earth system" and a diagnosis of what has gone wrong economics and conservation biology can provide solutions. It is the role of government to choose among the solutions and to put them into effect. One way into global change research for social scientists is through what are called "integrated assessments." The new demand for integrated assessment is not a request for a whole earth dialogue but rather a purchase order for a whole earth model. As it is now understood, integrated assessment is about coupling physical, biological, and economic models. In this talk I will describe and analyze these recent attempts at constructing whole earth models. Vladimir Jankovic University
of Manchester 'Leave your Home only if you Have to' was the message which the Serbian Ministry of Health issued on the day of the last August's Solar Eclipse. In the official statement -- published in the majority of daily newspapers and magazines and broadcast on TV and radio -- the Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Politics and the Hidro-Meteorological Institute asked Serbian citizens to stay away from the eclipse's twilight and take precaution if they decide to observe the phenomenon. The statement said that the atmospheric changes during the eclipse may cause hypertension, stomach pains, tachicardia, an increase in blood sugar and an intense itch. These announcements created an unusual sense of anxiety especially as their rhetoric echoed the air-raid warnings issued during that year's Nato bombardment. In the meantime, the government and opposition parties seized the opportunity to influence public opinion by manipulating medical, meteorological and astronomical information and producing a fascinating mixture of political argument and doom-mongering. In this context, I wish to examine the activities of medical and astronomical establishments and the extent to which their political affiliations affected the construction of public fear. Sarah Jansen University
of Cambridge / Max Planck Institute for the History of Science "Foreign" insects became an issue in Germany in the early 1870s, during a period of rapid industrialization and of international trade hastened by the introduction of steamboats. The first two insects seen as foreign threats to German (agri-)culture were the grapevine louse and the potato beetle, both of North American origin. These insects assumed twofold cultural positions of increasing importance in Wilhelmian Germany: the "invading alien" threatening the health of resident populations, and the "destructive machine" of industrialization associated with "America." Whereas the grapevine louse lives invisibly underground and - when unearthed and placed under the microscope - was perceived as ugly, the Colorado beetle resembles the popular "native" ladybug in its looks: roundish and "cute," easily visible, and brightly colored, it could have figured in contemporary children's story books displaying images of anthropomorphized, friendly insects. However, warnings about the beetle had been published since 1872; the first specimen were spotted and eradicated in 1877. The ensuing campaign against the Colorado beetle marks several transitions in the ways insects were perceived around 1900: from cute children's friends to dangerous foreigners, from companions in everyday life to destructive pests, and from insect collectors' items to the inaugural objects of emerging economic entomology. The campaign involved such various practices as the production and distribution of hundreds of thousands of candy models of the beetle for educational purposes, the distribution of 'wanted posters' in harbors, and the development of material practices such as the application of poisonous compounds to plants and soils. The paper will examine the roles that popular and scientific representations of the Colorado beetle, as well as material techniques directed against it, played in shaping the beetle as a scientific-technological object. Particularly, it will examine how cultural positions, social, economic and scientific practices intersected in the process of its emergence. Adrian D. Johns California
Institute of Technology Piracy is big news today. Politically, commercially, and socially, it seems set to play an important part in the definition of the global knowledge economy. As digital technologies and the World Wide Web transform the worlds of creativity and intellectual property, so allegations of the offence attain all the more importance. It is therefore not surprising that we tend to think of piracy as only the most dramatic symptom of a "communications revolution" that is radically new. Yet while its current face may be novel, the phenomenon of piracy itself is anything but. In fact, the identification of certain practices as "piratical" dates back hundreds of years, to the invention of the printing press, and it persisted through the emergence of modern forms of science and social order. Piracy and propriety have been in dynamic interaction since the beginning. The very idea of reliable large-scale communication of knowledge in print depended on how that interaction was managed. For that reason, science repeatedly found itself at the very focus of debates over piracy. In the seventeenth century, fear of piracy was an important stimulus to the articulation of common conventions of learned conduct, at places like the Royal Society of London. In the eighteenth, pirates moved to cities like Dublin, Edinburgh, and Neuchatel, and fuelled the Enlightenment by their activities. And in the nineteenth, the origins of social science occurred during debates over the significance of piracy for the very definition of society. Today, the new world of the life sciences is facing its own brand of "biopiracy"--one that is calling fundamental principles of creativity and intellectual property into question all over again. My presentation will thus seek to put our present concerns into deep historical context. I hope thereby to suggest how a historical understanding of piracy can help us make sense of some urgent questions facing today's scientific world. Matthew L. Jones Columbia
University Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Leibniz offered their calculating machines and techniques as means for augmenting and supplementing current techniques of governing in the early modern state. Both introduced their machines and calculational techniques within a detailed account of the roles of governmental knowledge and spectacle for the smooth running of the state. Both provided their techniques as means to perfect the monarch's knowledge and to justify and to help produce the faith the people ought to place in their ruler. Despite the gap separating Pascal's infamous pessimism and Leibniz's even more infamous optimism, their machines and techniques helped them to articulate their accounts of the deliberate, artificial production of the tangible and intangible elements necessary for producing and maintaining peaceful societies. Susan D. Jones University
of Colorado In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, North American veterinary scientists became heavily involved in government-sponsored research on pressing livestock disease problems. Using the cases of Pictou Cattle Disease and Texas Cattle Fever, this paper illustrates the methodologies that veterinary scientists agreed upon as legitimate for identifying the etiologies of animal diseases. Stockmen had long suspected that Pictou Cattle Disease was caused by ingestion of a poisonous plant, and Texas Cattle Fever by an infestation of ticks. As veterinary scientists went about studying these diseases, however, their epistemological loyalty to the tenets of bacteriology guided their investigations. They also continued to rely upon fieldwork, and it served as the conduit through which contingent knowledge and local context entered the realm of scientific explanation. Especially in the case of Texas Cattle Fever, this methodology yielded innovative results in the scientific understanding of disease causation. Both of these cases demonstrated that, despite reliance on a proprietary epistemology, local experience and ideas helped to shape veterinary scientists' production of knowledge about North American animal disease problems. Edward Jones-Imhotep
Harvard University Throughout much of its history, Canada has imagined itself as a northern nation. In the absence of linguistic or cultural unity to bind the country together, governments and citizens alike have historically turned their gaze northward and have seen in the Canadian geography and climate, and in the hardships they produced, a distinctive identity: an imagined community centred around the famed 'idea of North'. This paper explores how this cultural touchstone played into the more ethereal realm of post-war Canadian ionospheric research, and particularly into the analysis of its most cherished inscription - the panoramic ionogram. Following the Second World War, Canada entered a period of intense self-reflection. Tied ever more loosely to a declining Britain, bound ever more closely to an emerging U.S. superpower, Canada sought to re-imagine itself. In music and literature, in art and film, the nation attempted to fashion a distinctive post-war identity rooted in the image of Canada as a northern land. Scientific research in traditional fields like climatology and geology helped underwrite such claims to northerness, but they were crucially buttressed by less traditional allies. Ionospheric research - struggling to remedy the problems of shortwave radio in the Canadian North, resonating with the profound cultural discourse of communications in Canadian history, and attempting to establish its significance for North American defense and international cooperation during the Cold War - played a critical role in the scientific construction of the 'New Canada of the North'. Marshalling magnetic effects, auroral disturbances and the singular geophysics of northern polar regions behind them, Canadian ionospheric researchers pointed to the visual traces of the ionogram as instantiations of a 'Canadian ionosphere', and came to read in these images the distinctive characteristics and identity of a northern nation. David Kaiser MIT Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, fell out of American physicists' curricula during the 1930s and 1940s, yet it returned to some American physicists' research agendas in the mid-1950s. One of the reasons for its return can be traced to a little-known private foundation, the "Gravity Research Foundation," funded by an eccentric New England philanthropist, Roger Babson. Babson made no secret of his goals for establishing the Gravity Research Foundation: his undying passion, sparked during his turn-of-the-century undergraduate studies at MIT and fostered by his life-long friendship with Thomas Edison, was to find some means of shielding gravity. On the heels of World War II, Babson dreamed in particular that industrious American scientists could harness the powers of gravity to feed the hungry, comfort the aging -- and repel Soviet missiles. The foundation, in other words, was in the business of looking for "anti-gravity," a business which nearly all of the physicists who came to profit from the foundation's largesse considered impossible. Even as some of these physicists mocked the foundation among themselves (as surviving correspondence indicates), they dutifully submitted essays to the foundation's annual essay contest, participated in the foundation's summer conferences, and worked under the auspices of new gravity-research centers founded and funded in part by Babson's group. In the process, the topic of general relativity gained a new generation of dedicated researchers and in this process, the conceptual and calculational machinery of general relativity enjoyed renewed scrutiny. Moneyed interests, postwar paranoia, and enterprising essay-contest winners thus worked together to put general relativity back in the minds of American theoretical physicists. Evelyn Fox Keller Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Nelson Goodman famously observed, "Few terms are used in popular and scientific discourse more promiscuously than "model." Much the same might be said of the term "simulation." Yet this was not always the case. Both words have ancient histories, but until quite recently, the meaning of "simulation" was quite stable, and it invariably implied deceit. Only after WWII that the word took on the meaning that brings it into its current proximity with models. Here, the valence of the term changes decisively: now productive rather than merely deceptive, and, in particular, designating a technique for the promotion of scientific understanding. The shift reflects a crucial change not only in the perceived value of simulation, but also, as others have already noted, in the means of production of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, it is this new sense of the term that encourages its use in much of the current literature as either interchangeable with the term model, or as one part of a single composite noun (as in "models and simulations"). An obvious question arises, however, and it is this: do the actual uses of simulation in contemporary scientific practice in fact warrant such facile assimilation? Or, to pose the question somewhat differently, does the use of simulation in post WWII science add significantly new features to the range of practices that had earlier been subsumed under the term "modeling"? Jordan Kellman Louisiana
State University Jean Mattieu de Chazelles (1657-1710) created the first accurate planispheric projection of the world, created the best maps of the Mediterranean coast of France of the seventeenth century, and proposed the first scientific expedition to find the fabled Southern Continent. Though little known in the history of science or maritime history, Chazelles' career as astronomer at the Paris Observatory under J. D. Cassini (Cassini I) and as professor at the naval academy of Marseilles shows the evolution of a new relationship between science and seafaring, and between observational astronomy and the improvement of the French navy, that was fundamental to the creation of institutional science in early modern France. Using Chazelles' log-books, letters, maps and manuscript notebooks, this paper will trace his efforts to take experience he gained and techniques he learned at the Paris observatory and adapt them to the curriculum at the naval officer training program at the port of Marseilles. Here Chazelles trained a generation of naval officers in the techniques of scientific observation developed by Cassini, including the determination of longitude by the method of Jupiter's moons and the charting of coastlines using a new method of systematic sounding and precise shipboard surveying. Chazelles hoped to use these officers as traveling observers to improve the coastal maps of France and the world, as well as to transform the French navy into an efficient force buttressed by the new techniques of observation. The success of Chazelles' efforts put France at the forefront of naval cartography, and in spite of France's subsequent colonial and naval misfortunes at the hands of the English, Chazelles' work confirmed the idea that scientific research would advance the interests of the French Crown and established scientific training as an integral part of naval education. Dong-Won Kim KAIST In South Korea, popular appreciation of physics' practical role has not coincided with the popular view of physicists as primarily theoreticians. Following the end of the Korean War in 1953, successive South Korean governments paid special attention to developing an atomic bomb. The major beneficiary of this obsession for nuclear armament was the South Korean physics community. Despite South Korea's desire for atomic weaponry, South Koreans held experimental (or applied) physics in much lower regard than theoretical physics. In many South Korean universities, the proportion of theoretical physicists was, as still is true today, excessively high. For example, at South Korea's most prestigious institution of higher learning, Seoul National University, more than half the faculty positions in the department of physics are held by theoreticians. In the South Korean view, the physicist is symbolized by Einstein, the theoretician. What accounts for South Korea's preoccupation with theory over experimentation? The most obvious explanations is offered by the influence of Confucianism in the Korean culture. As a result of this influence, solely intellectual occupations enjoy much higher status than those which require some manual input. The dominance of theoretical over experimental physics began to change only after 1980, when a new military government, under pressure from the United States, finally abandoned South Korea's dream of building an atomic bomb. South Korea focused instead on expanding its electronics capacity, particularly its computer and semi-conductor industries. With the strong backing of the new government, solid-state physics suddenly flourished. Nonetheless, as a result of South Korea's firmly imbedded preference for theory versus practice, solid-state physics and other applied physics disciplines have so far managed to find their place primarily in institutions outside the physics departments of South Korea's traditional universities. Mi Gyung Kim North Carolina
State University 'A Chemical Table is in itself a specable agreeable to the mind', so declared Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, referring to Etienne-Francois Geoffroy's 'Table des rapports' of 1718. Fontenelle had been preaching for some time that chemistry could approximate the 'sublime questions of modern geometry' which were reduced to 'universal formula', if only one could predict the changes corresponding to the different chemical propositions. Geoffroy claimed in his presentation of the table to the Academie des sciences that it would allow chemists to see 'at a glance' the different 'rapports' of chemical substances, which in turn would help them predict the outcome of complicated chemical actions. He seems to have chosen the word 'rapport' instead of 'affinity', to exploit deliberately its dual meanings as relationship and as mathematical ratio. Even if Geoffroy's affinity table failed to attain mathematical certainty, it has an inherent appeal as an orderly representation of the seemingly chaotic practice of eighteenth century chemistry, particularly to the modern chemical reader accustomed to the periodic table. As Guyton de Morveau put it a half-century later, after a considerable proliferation of affinity tables, these synoptic chemical tables formed a kind of 'chemical world map, in which one would perceive at first sight the countries known & the space that remains to be discovered.' That is, the affinity table and similar devices allowed an instant recall of basic chemical actions which mapped the chemical territory as it was then known and thus served as an instrument of collective memory for the chemical community. It could function as such, however, only in so far as it could efface the technologies of production. In this paper, I would like to follow Foucault's move from archaelogy to genealogy to unearth the shifts in chemical techniques which made Geoffroy's table possible. Ock-Joo C Kim Harvard University This paper examines Harvey Cushing's production of knowledge on brain tumors from 1913 to 1932. While serving as the surgeon-in-chief at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Cushing assembled a powerful team of neurosurgeons, pathologists, and physiologists that operated on more than 2,000 patients suffering from brain tumors. Cushing knew that a deeper understanding of brain tumors would come only from his patients. While dedicated to alleviating their suffering, he freely experimented with aggressive, if not always successful, surgical techniques and post-operative care. For Cushing, the therapeutic domain functioned also as a scientific domain to produce knowledge. To systematize this knowledge, Cushing established the Brain Tumor Registry, a long-term project to compile the medical records and case histories of his patients. Using the Registry, Cushing was able to produce landmark monographs on the varieties of brain tumors and the techniques of surgical intervention. Cushing's unusual capability to interplay between the suffering patients and his expert medical group resulted in the Brain Tumor Registry, a lasting legacy in neurosurgery. His case also raises a number of significant historical and ethical questions. How did the patients' experience of diseases affect the process of collection of clinical data? Through what process was the knowledge on brain oncology created from the patient records? What agencies, other than the hospital, participated in the production of knowledge on brain tumors? How was the Brain Tumor Registry related to emerging specialization in neurosurgery and the clinical sciences such as pathology? How was Cushing able to orchestrate all this while at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, and what does his story reveal about medical care and research in the early twentieth century? Scott L. Kirsch University
of North Carolina--Chapel Hill In 1962, Harold Knapp, a mathematician working for the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine, developed a new formula for estimating, first, the relation between a single deposition of radioactive fallout on pasturage and levels of Iodine-131 in fresh milk, and second, the total dose to human thyroids resulting from a daily intake of the contaminated milk. The implications of Knapp‚s work were enormous, suggesting that infants raised in Utah during the 1950s had been exposed to internal radiation in doses dramatically above recommended guidelines. In positing a specific mathematical relationship between nuclear testing activities and the health of people living downwind, as mediated by the social and biological environments of dairy production, Knapp thus proposed a history far more radical than the most critical histories of science: rather than re-examining the social contexts in which science should be understood, Knapp re-interpreted events of the past explicitly by changing the scientific contexts through which the nature of bodies and ecosystems could be understood. Knapp also challenged conventional AEC practices by talking with people living in the vicinity of the Nevada Test Site, and exchanging letters with them. This paper examines Knapp's work and its responses, most notably, among the Livermore laboratory's "Ad Hoc Working Group on Radioiodine in the Environment" which was assembled to contest Knapp's claims on scientific grounds. By raising questions about this radioiodine controversy through a lens of "contested spaces," my study seeks to tease out the intertwined conceptual, institutional, and geographical spaces and boundaries that structured the reception of Knapp's work. Alexei B Kojevnikov
American Institute of Physics, College Park, and the University of Georgia,
Athens The crisis caused by the outbreak of World War I and the demonstrated backwardness of the Russian industry, prompted several important academics to draft proposals for a revolutionary reform in scientific research and its institutional infrastracture. These proposals included the recognition of science as a profession separate from university teaching and the radical reorientation of research towards satisfying national needs, away from the ideal of 'pure science.' The idea of a research institute as the new, most progressive form of the organization of science was subsequently endorsed and supported by the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The foundation of the Soviet system of research was essentially completed during the seven years of total war and international isolation, 1914 through 1921. Its main characteristics included state sponsorship, largesse and centralization, the symbiosis of advanced research with the production of new technology, multidisciplinarity, and the merger of science with engineering, in short, practically all the features later associated with the phenomenon of 'big science.' Brandon Konoval The University
of British Columbia The Discourses, 1589 91, of Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1530 91) have received considerable scholarly interest in recent decades. Vincenzošs investigations of consonance and dissonance have been said to articulate developments that were central to the practice and conceptual foundations of Early Modern science. In particular, Vincenzošs work has been taken to represent an early model of empirical science and a radical reformulation of the ontology of number essential to the birth of mathematical empiricism. Vincenzo is thus portrayed as exorcising the numerological ghost of Pythagoras from both the musical and scientific thought of his era. I review Vincenzošs confrontation with the traditional Pythagorean ratios of musical consonance and their Renaissance counterparts by considering the experimental, ontological and historical claims of the Discourses. Furthermore, I examine the arena of this confrontationthe debate engaged by Vincenzo with the pre-eminent music theorist, Gioseffo Zarlino (1517 90)so as to clarify the relevant issues of tuning and musical practice that motivate Vincenzošs work and thus to be able to compare Vincenzošs actual concerns with claims made on his behalf more recently by musicologists or historians of science. I highlight the difficulties encountered by Vincenzo as he attempted to rationalize divergent experimental results insofar as they reveal the fundamental ontological challenges facing mathematical empiricism. Far from liberatingš musical or scientific thought from an alleged tyranny of Pythagorean numerology, Vincenzo Galilei developed his own empirical numerologyš in an attempt to provide a coherent mathematical reading of phenomena that otherwise revealed no consistent mathematical identity to him. Thus, Vincenzošs Discourses posit a challenge, not a solution, to an empirical reading of the Book of Nature in mathematical terms. The significance of this challenge is acknowledged by Vincenzošs son Galileo in the Discourses on Two New Sciences (1638), where the problem is engaged in attempts to relate pendulum motion to the ratios of the musical consonances. Vincenzošs contribution to Early Modern science is therefore best understood as a failure to integrate mathematics with acoustic phenomena in empirical terms, a failure that convinced Galileo of the need to pursue empirical mathematics in the realm of motion. Alexey V. Kuprijanov
The S.I.Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology The present paper explores the connections between conceptual and institutional developments in the field of Natural History in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Russia. During the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, both the declared tasks of natural history and the style of books in natural history changed dramatically. An analysis of university and high school textbooks of natural history, botany, and zoology reveals a gradual change from the highly utilitarian texts of the 1780s-1820s to more theoretical ones of the 1860s. The authors of the early textbooks concentrated mainly on describing those particular species which were important from economical or medical perspectives. The authors of the 1850s -1860s were concerned mainly with universal laws of nature manifested in the higher divisions of taxonomic hierarchy while the particular species were used as "examples" of higher taxa. The complexity of structural and taxonomic information increased dramatically while utilitarian remarks disappeared. I would argue that these developments could be better understood in the context of the changes that happened in the system of the reproduction of the discipline. Based on a study of the changing structure of the St. Petersburg Academy and the universities, the career records of university professors and Academicians, and the university curricula, I would like to show how the system of reproduction of natural history transformed from the 1750s through the 1860s. In my analysis, I will show how the so-called "pure" and "applied" branches of natural history became separated by the mid 1840s, and how the universities become the sites of production of the "pure" natural history which dominated the textbooks since the 1850s. |
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