History of Science最新文献

{"title":"Brokering science, blaming culture: The US-South Korea ecological survey in the Demilitarized Zone, 1963-8.","authors":"Jaehwan Hyun","doi":"10.1177/0073275320974209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320974209","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines the planning, execution, and closure of the US-Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar organizations in developing countries along the line of the developmental turn of U.S. foreign assistance. Working closely with the NAS, U.S. conservationists used this scheme to introduce nature conservation practices and the discipline of ecosystem ecology to developing countries. In this context, by way of the NAS's Pacific Science Board, two countries' biologists initiated the preliminary cooperative project in the DMZ in 1966. Korean and U.S. scientists soon began to realize that their collaboration was marked by dissonance. The U.S. side attributed the cooperation failure to Korean culture while the Korean side criticized the unequal structure of their cooperation. Joining the global historiography of Cold War scientific collaboration, this paper pays particular attention to the intermediaries of the collaborative project and their rivalry. It argues that political struggles revolving around the position of go-betweens - as what I call knowledge brokers - on the recipient side provoked contestation between American and Korean scientists. The contention between the two sides played out in the collaboration coming to an end, albeit partially. Throughout this analysis, this study suggests paying more serious attention to the politics of scientific exchange among actors on the recipient side as an outset from which to analyze the heterogeneity of the Korean side without losing sight of their active role in the building process of American hegemony.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 3","pages":"315-343"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320974209","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38683129","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":"Public science in the private garden: Noblewomen horticulturalists and the making of British botany c. 1785-1810.","authors":"Nicole LaBouff","doi":"10.1177/0073275320961908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320961908","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study considers three noblewomen - Lady Amelia Hume (1751-1809), Jane Barrington (1733-1807), and Mary Watson-Wentworth, Marchioness of Rockingham (c. 1735-1804) - whose contributions to plant studies were so important that Linnean Society President James Edward Smith dedicated three books to them. Their skills in cultivating newly imported exotic plants rivaled those of elite nurserymen, and taxonomists of the highest caliber came to depend on them to unlock information encoded within flowers to enable classification and publication. Eventually, the women played strategic roles within national scientific studies of the world's plants orchestrated by Smith, Joseph Banks, and William Roxburgh. The stories of Hume, Barrington, and Rockingham complicate our understandings of the gendered, professional, and disciplinary hierarchies of knowledge that constituted British science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They also resituate the domestic hothouse as a publicly engaged laboratory and museum.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 3","pages":"223-255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320961908","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38481127","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":"Whittaker, Einstein, and the <i>History of the Aether</i>: Alternative interpretation, blunder, or bigotry?","authors":"Jaume Navarro","doi":"10.1177/0073275320968408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320968408","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Edmund T. Whittaker's second edition of his <i>A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity</i> is famous for his treatment of Einstein as an almost irrelevant character in the emergence of what he called \"the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz.\" Historians of science have given a number of explanations, which include Whittaker's scientific conservatism as an old classical physicist, his commitment to the ether, the pre-eminent role he attributed to mathematics over physics, and foundational philosophical disagreements, to name a few. And in the background, often more implicit than forthright, the accusation of antisemitism looms over Whittaker. In this paper I intend to shed new light on this controversy by taking into consideration the abundant correspondence between Whittaker and his son preserved in the archives of the Fisher Library, University of Toronto. With it, we will get a more complex and personal view of the context in which his attempt at dethroning Einstein took place. Together with the abovementioned reasons, this correspondence shows that the problematic status quo of general relativity in the early 1950s, a period that has been described as the low-mark of general relativity, was very influential in the historical treatment he gave to Einstein. This is an aspect hardly mentioned in the historical work on this controversy and, from this correspondence, it appears to be central to understanding Whittaker at the time of drafting the new <i>History</i>. His possible antisemitic bias will also be addressed, though with the insufficient information on this subject the matter cannot be settled.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 3","pages":"287-314"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320968408","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38565418","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 uses of useful knowledge and the languages of vernacular science: Perspectives from southwest India.","authors":"Eric Moses Gurevitch","doi":"10.1177/0073275320931976","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320931976","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the first half of the eleventh century, a group of scholars in southwest India did something new. They began composing systematic texts about everyday life in a register of language sometimes called New Kannada. While looking back toward earlier texts composed in Sanskrit - and even translating portions of them - these scholars centered their poetic ability and their personal experiences as opposed to prior authoritative texts. They described themselves as authoring \"worldly sciences\" that were \"useful to the people of the world,\" and they provided extensive reflections on the systematics of knowledge. Epistemic, linguistic, and political concerns were significantly renegotiated in this moment as local context was turned into a virtue for the production of technical treatises. This article uses this moment to interrogate recent discussions of useful knowledge and vernacular science. Usefulness can mean different things at different times and vernacular sciences change according to their language. This article argues for a usage of both terms that is more attuned to historical particulars. A history of useful knowledge from a place that now appears under the double effacement of the non-modern and non-West offers an opportunity to think through central concepts of the history of science without relying on economic or utilitarian discourses. This paper presents one possible example of what a more global history of useful knowledge might look like.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 3","pages":"256-286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320931976","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38153970","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 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}