History of Science最新文献

{"title":"The sphere and the dome: The Calouste Gulbenkian Planetarium in Lisbon and the imperial myth of the Estado Novo.","authors":"Pedro M P Raposo","doi":"10.1177/0073275318797809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275318797809","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Inaugurated in 1965, the Calouste Gulbenkian Planetarium (CGP) was the first institution of its kind in Portugal. The CGP was established in the context of the relocation of the Maritime Museum of Lisbon (Museu de Marinha) to Belém, an area of the Portuguese capital highly symbolic of Portuguese maritime and imperial history. The dictatorial regime known as Estado Novo used Belém as a ground for major events that affirmed the legitimacy of Portugal's overseas empire by celebrating the maritime deeds of erstwhile sovereigns and navigators, in a mythical narrative of a glorious imperial destiny. Given the close association between astronomy and nautical science, the CGP was certain to gain a prominent place in the tapestry of Belém's symbolic inscriptions. This paper addresses the inception of the CGP in its urban context, showing how this area of Lisbon provided an ideal backdrop for this institution, and how its foundation was promoted and steered by a naval officer and amateur astronomer who maintained an ambivalent relation with the regime: Eugénio da Conceição Silva (1903-69).</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 2","pages":"179-196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275318797809","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36537850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Seeking the \"museum of the future\": Public exhibitions of science, industry, and the social, 1910-1940.","authors":"Loïc Charles,&nbsp;Yann Giraud","doi":"10.1177/0073275317751316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275317751316","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Using as case studies the initiatives developed by two museum curators, the Belgian bibliographer Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and the Austrian social scientist Otto Neurath (1882-1945), and their subsequent collaboration with an extended network of scientists, philanthropists, artists, and social activists, this article provides a portrait of the general movement toward the creation of a new form of museum: the \"museum of the future,\" as Neurath labeled it. This museum would be able to enlighten the people by showing the nature of modern industrial civilization. The promoters of the \"museum of the future\" intended to reform museum practices by organizing exhibitions of social facts, but also by integrating several dimensions - architecture, commerce, entertainment, pedagogy, and science and technology - to create a holistic frame to address their audience. However, the effortlessly circulating museum Neurath and Otlet envisioned stood in sharp contrast to the many, often immaterial, boundaries they encountered in their attempt to implement their vision. Ever-growing nationalism, the professionalization of social science, and the increasing commercialization of scientific vulgarization are some of the factors that help explain their failure.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 2","pages":"133-154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275317751316","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36204912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The spatial inscription of science in the twentieth century.","authors":"Andrée Bergeron,&nbsp;Charlotte Bigg","doi":"10.1177/0073275320988399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320988399","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>With their landmark architectures, exhibitions and museums of science and technology partake in the spatial inscription of science in twentieth century landscapes. Unlike other beacons of progress, exhibitions and museums of science and technology double up, inside, as material arrangements of objects, visuals and texts aiming to confer meaning onto the modern world. They both embody and seek to order the spectacle of modernity while often being deployed with the aim of promoting particular visions of social and material progress. An approach sensitive to the material, spatial, and experiential dimensions of displaying science and technology suggests that exhibitions and museums were in the twentieth century crucial sites for reflecting upon and promoting particular futures.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 2","pages":"121-132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320988399","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25364402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Science in action\": The politics of hands-on display at the New York Museum of Science and Industry.","authors":"Jaume Sastre-Juan","doi":"10.1177/0073275317725239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275317725239","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article analyzes the changing politics of hands-on display at the New York Museum of Science and Industry by following its urban deambulation within Midtown Manhattan, which went hand in hand with sharp shifts in promoters, narrative, and exhibition techniques. The museum was inaugurated in 1927 as the Museum of the Peaceful Arts on the 7th and 8th floors of the Scientific American Building. It changed its name in 1930 to the New York Museum of Science and Industry while on the 4th floor of the Daily News Building, and it was close to being renamed the Science Center when it finally moved in 1936 to the ground floor of the Rockefeller Center. The analysis of how the political agenda of the different promoters of the New York Museum of Science and Industry was spatially and performatively inscribed in each of its sites suggests that the 1930s boom of visitor-operated exhibits had nothing to do with an Exploratorium-like rhetoric of democratic empowerment. The social paternalistic ideology of the vocational education movement, the ideas on innovation of the early sociology of invention, and the corporate behavioral approach to mass communications are more suitable contexts in which to understand the changing politics of hands-on display in interwar American museums of science and industry.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 2","pages":"155-178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275317725239","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36204910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Phases of physics: Building the discipline during the long nineteenth century.","authors":"Lissa L Roberts","doi":"10.1177/0073275321992612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275321992612","url":null,"abstract":"Almost forty years ago, Robert Kohler introduced his From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline with this definition: “Disciplines are political institutions that demarcate areas of academic territory, allocate the privileges and responsibilities of expertise, and structure claims on resources. They are the infrastructure of science, embodied in university departments, professional societies, and informal market relationships between the producers and consumers of knowledge.”1 Although readers of Michel Foucault have directed our attention more fundamentally toward regarding disciplines as mechanisms of power, many historians of science seem simply to accept the history of science’s division into a range of more compact disciplinary categories as a commonsensical way to help organize it as a field of study. Note, for example, how many of the organizational headings in the Isis Cumulative Bibliography refer to specific scientific disciplines. In 2016, Daniel Jon Mitchell organized a workshop (sponsored by the British Society for the History of Science and the Leverhulme Trust) that revisited the place of disciplinary history in the history of science. Focused on physics, the three articles that follow stem from that workshop. Although a more detailed exposition of the workshop’s guiding premises and outcomes awaits, a few words are in order to introduce this special section.2 The workshop was framed by a definitional distinction between “discipline” and “field,” which separated out questions of epistemological and methodological development as relevant to the study of scientific fields and pointed the study of disciplines toward two historiographical principles. First, physics (and other disciplines) should be understood “as constituted by a multitude of actors’ versions and visions of ‘physics’ that they frequently sought to extend beyond their local surroundings.” Second, “discipline” should “refer to a particular pattern of socioinstitutional knowledge and production that involved specialist periodicals, societies, institutions, positions, qualifications, and pedagogies.”3 This distinction warranted a shift in chronological orientation. In a groundbreaking essay, Thomas Kuhn drew our attention to what he described as physics’ initial formation as a modern discipline between 1780 and 1850.4 The orientation adopted by workshop participants and the three articles that follow focuses instead on the second 992612 HOS0010.1177/0073275321992612History of ScienceIntroduction editorial2021","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 1","pages":"45-46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275321992612","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25452107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"University physicists and the origins of the National Physical Laboratory, 1830-1900.","authors":"Lee T Macdonald","doi":"10.1177/0073275318811445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275318811445","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Traditionally, historians have taken it for granted that Britain's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was created as the result of demands from a \"professional\" body of university-based physicists for a state-funded scientific institution. Yet paying detailed attention to the history of the NPL's originating institution, Kew Observatory, shows that the story is not so clear-cut. Starting in the 1850s, Kew Observatory was partly a center for testing meteorological instruments and other scientific equipment in return for fees. Long after the 1850s, the observatory was run by self-funded devotees of science. Paid university physicists only assumed a dominant role on its governing committee in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, by which time instrument-testing was already the observatory's main role. This paper argues that the rise of the university physicists - together with the desire of some of these physicists for a national institution that tested electrical standards - can only partially explain the origins of the NPL, and that Kew was in some ways a national physical laboratory before there were many physics teaching posts in British universities. This paper is a case study that illustrates a need to reassess the importance of university physicists in shaping British science at the end of the nineteenth century.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 1","pages":"73-92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275318811445","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36714315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Phases of physics in J. D. Forbes' <i>Dissertation Sixth</i> for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1856).","authors":"Isobel Falconer","doi":"10.1177/0073275318811443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275318811443","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper takes James David Forbes' <i>Encyclopaedia Britannica</i> entry, <i>Dissertation Sixth</i>, as a lens to examine physics as a cognitive, practical, and social enterprise. Forbes wrote this survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mathematical and physical sciences between 1852 and 1856, when British \"physics\" was at a pivotal point in its history, situated between a field identified by its mathematical methods - originating in France - and a discipline identified by its university laboratory institutions. Contemporary encyclopedias provided a nexus for publishers, the book trade, readers, and men of science in the formation of physics as a field. Forbes was both a witness, whose account of the progress of physics or natural philosophy can be explored at face value, and an agent, who exploited the opportunity offered by the <i>Encyclopaedia Britannica</i> in the mid nineteenth century to enroll the broadly educated public and scientific collective, illuminating the connection between the definition of physics and its forms of social practice. Forbes used the terms \"physics\" and \"natural philosophy\" interchangeably. He portrayed the field as progressed by the natural genius of great men who curated it within an associational culture that engendered true intellectual spirit. Although this societal mechanism was becoming ineffective, Forbes did not see university institutions as the way forward. Instead, running counter to his friend William Whewell, he advocated inclusion of the mechanical arts (engineering), and a strictly limited role for mathematics. He revealed tensions when the widely accepted discovery-based historiography conflicted with intellectual and moral worth, reflecting a nineteenth-century concern with spirit that cuts across twentieth-century questions about discipline and field.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 1","pages":"47-72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275318811443","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36724263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sensory studies, or when physics was <i>psychophysics</i>: Ernst Mach and physics between physiology and psychology, 1860-71.","authors":"Richard Staley","doi":"10.1177/0073275318784104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275318784104","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper highlights the significance of sensory studies and psychophysical investigations of the relations between psychic and physical phenomena for our understanding of the development of the physics discipline, by examining aspects of research on sense perception, physiology, esthetics, and psychology in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and Ernst Mach between 1860 and 1871. It complements previous approaches oriented around research on vision, Fechner's psychophysics, or the founding of experimental psychology, by charting Mach's engagement with psychophysical experiments in particular. Examining Mach's study of the senses and esthetics, his changing attitudes toward the mechanical worldview and atomism, and his articulation of comparative understandings of sensual, geometrical, and physical spaces helps set Mach's emerging epistemological views in the context of his teaching and research. Mach complemented an analytic strategy focused on parallel psychic and physical dimensions of sensation, with a synthetic comparative approach - building analogies between the retina, the individual, and social life, and moving between abstract and sensual spaces. An examination of the broadly based critique that Mach articulated in his 1871 lecture on the conservation of work shows how his historical approach helped Mach cast what he now saw as a narrowly limiting emphasis on mechanics as a phase yet to be overcome.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 1","pages":"93-118"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275318784104","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36297470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Competition and coordination in Swedish botanical publication, 1820–79: Eleven editions of Hartman’s Handbook","authors":"J. Beckman","doi":"10.1177/0073275320987414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320987414","url":null,"abstract":"In 1820, a Handbook of the Flora of Scandinavia by Carl Hartman was published in Stockholm by Zacharias Haeggström. The Handbook was a successful project for both author and publisher: similar enough to textbooks and academic publications to appeal in educational settings, yet ostensibly written for the general public. The Handbook went through eleven editions, becoming the standard reference flora for Swedish botanists – academic as well as others – before being succeeded after 1879 by a range of specialized floras aimed at schoolboys, students, or academic botanists. The trajectory of Hartman’s Handbook through the nineteenth century highlights the changing conditions of Swedish botanical publication. It draws attention to authorship as a scientific career tool, and, conversely, the significance of scientific texts in the emergence of commercial publishing in the first half of the nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"24 1","pages":"211 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82546252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Iterative books: Posthumous publishing in eighteenth-century botany","authors":"Bettina Dietz","doi":"10.1177/0073275320970831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320970831","url":null,"abstract":"The growing number of known plants, and the need repeatedly to correct their names and their taxonomic attributions, demanded strategies for combining the static nature of a printed book with the fluctuating nature of the information it contained. From the second half of the seventeenth century botanists increasingly relied on publishing multiple updated editions of a book instead of attempting to correct, polish, and thus delay the appearance of a manuscript until, in the author’s opinion, it was finished. Provisional by nature, iterative books offered a solution. They were transient, open-ended and open to intervention, whether by one or multiple authors. Taking as an example the posthumous publication of orphaned material and manuscripts, a widespread phenomenon in eighteenth-century botany, this essay will focus on the sequence of iterative books that were published during the first half of the eighteenth century, based on the herbaria and papers left behind by the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646–95).","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"63 1","pages":"166 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84186250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}