History of Science最新文献

{"title":"Scaling down the Earth's history: Visual materials for popular education by Nérée Boubée (1806-1862).","authors":"Silvia F de M Figueirôa","doi":"10.1177/00732753221089812","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221089812","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Spatial and temporal scales are essential components of geological sciences; both are almost always imbricated in complex ways, challenging geoscientific knowledge among nonspecialists and students. The present paper focuses on the efforts made by the French naturalist Simon-Suzanne Nérée Boubée (1806-62) regarding popular education on geology. Though Boubée is poorly known nowadays, he experienced some prestige during his lifetime. He worked as an independent teacher, offering private as well as free public courses. Boubée, as a nineteenth-century science popularizer, repeatedly insisted on his disposition for \"spreading science for all.\" He extensively published books and journals on geology, all aimed at popularizing geological scientific knowledge, considered to be of paramount relevance. This paper analyzes three visual examples extracted from his works: the <i>Tableau Mnémonique des Terrains Primitifs, destiné au géologue voyageur</i>, <i>avec son explication</i> (1831), the <i>Tableau de l'État du Globe à ses différents âges</i> (1832), and the <i>Tableau figuratif de la structure minérale du globe, ou résumé synoptique du Cours de géognosie de M. N. Boubée</i> (1839), supplemented with images from the travel guide <i>Deux Promenades au Mont Doré</i> (1834). Our goal is to understand Boubée's efforts to synthesize information, scaling down geologic time and space into foldable materials that made geological knowledge cognitively and materially accessible to laypeople.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"383-408"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10528740","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":"Voyages of maintenance: Exploration, infrastructure, and modernity on the Krusenstern-Lisianskii circumnavigation between Russia and Japan from 1803 to 1806.","authors":"Simon Werrett","doi":"10.1177/00732753211060186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211060186","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Against the common association of voyages of exploration with discovery and the arrival of modernity, this essay argues that maintenance and repair were essential to the success of such voyages and that maintenance and innovation are best seen as fundamentally integrated. Using the Russian circumnavigatory voyage of Adam von Krusenstern and Urey Lisianskii in 1803-7 as a case study, the essay explores the diverse forms and roles of infrastructure and repair work in enabling a voyage of exploration, and reveals the tensions and debates that considerations of maintenance evoked among ships' officers, crews, and the peoples they encountered.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"338-359"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/98/11/10.1177_00732753211060186.PMC10464720.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10212368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Heavenly spirit or material being? Science on electricity at the turn of the 19th century in Poland.","authors":"Piotr Urbanowicz","doi":"10.1177/00732753221074607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221074607","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In my paper I follow the emergence of the science of electricity in Poland. I believe that the science of electricity established in 1777 served as a new social program. Through the introduced translations, this science was intended to create a new social imaginary and social relations. I describe two interrelated processes: the social construction of the science of electricity, and negotiations between secular and religious definitions of electricity. In the first part of the article I show that both processes were related to each other and contributed to hybrid interpretations of electricity - as a \"material being\" and \"spirit of the world.\" In the second part of the paper I pay attention to the efforts made by Jan and Jędrzej Śniadecki to secularize the science of electricity in Vilnius. I follow the metaphor of 'laboratory' used in their works in order to describe the natural phenomena. I claim that Jędrzej Śniadecki established not only a new theory of electricity (a \"radiant being\"), but in fact a new understanding of social space. I point out that he did that by transferring scientific practices into the cultural space.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"360-382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10528731","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 instrumental Brahmin and the \"half-caste\" computer: Astronomy and colonial rule in Madras, 1791-1835.","authors":"S Prashant Kumar","doi":"10.1177/00732753221090435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221090435","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>What did science make possible for colonial rule? How was science in turn marked by the knowledge and practices of those under colonial rule? Here I approach these questions via the social history of Madras Observatory. Constructed in 1791 by the East India Company, the observatory was to provide local time to mariners and served as a clearinghouse for the company's survey and revenue administration. The astronomical work of Madras' Brahmin assistants relied upon their knowledge of <i>jyotiśāstra</i> [Sanskrit astronomy/astrology], and can be seen as a specialized form of the kind of South Indian scribal labor and knowledge that also staffed the company's tax offices. If at Greenwich the division of labor meant observatory work bore resemblances to the factory and the accounts office, in Madras, astronomy and accounting drew on similar labor forms because they were part of the same enterprise. But the company did not just adapt preexisting forms of labor, it also attempted to produce its own at a school built near the observatory to train \"half-caste\" orphans as apprentice surveyors and assistant computers. The school, staffed by the Brahmins, drew upon knowledge and pedagogical practice associated with the <i>tinnai</i>, the schools in which upper-caste children learned to read, write, and calculate. For a time, the observatory's social order was literally \"half-caste.\" The paper also considers how the relationship between caste, status, and instrument was reflected in the visual and material culture of the observatory, such as in Indian-language inscriptions on its central pillar. For company astronomers, the measurement of time meant reworking the relationships among the Indian past, the colonial present, and an imperial posterity. Science under colonial rule spanned multiple temporal and social registers because it was the result of negotiations between the demands of political economy and the knowledge and practices of colonized others.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"308-337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10466975/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10156059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Put a mark on the errors\": Seventeenth-century medicine and science.","authors":"Alice Leonard,&nbsp;Sarah E Parker","doi":"10.1177/00732753221135046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221135046","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Error is a neglected epistemological category in the history of science. This neglect has been driven by the commonsense idea that its elimination is a general good, which often renders it invisible or at least not worth noticing. At the end of the sixteenth century across Europe, medicine increasingly focused on \"popular errors,\" a genre where learned doctors addressed potential patients to disperse false belief about treatments. By the mid-seventeenth century, investigations into popular error informed the working methodology of natural philosophers, rather than just physicians. In 1646, Thomas Browne published <i>Pseudodoxia Epidemica</i>, a large volume on popular error. Despite Browne's formal training as a physician, this work examined only a few medical errors and instead aspired to be an encyclopedia of error. <i>Pseudodoxia Epidemica</i> was highly popular, running to six editions, and was known by the Fellows of the Royal Society. Influenced by Browne, alongside Bacon's theory of the idols, natural philosophic practice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century developed a focus on error that revised traditional attention to the discovery of knowledge. Fellows such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke proposed new ways to secure truth under the far-reaching influence of Bacon's refutations of \"natural human reason\" distorted by false idols, of syllogistic logic, and of \"theories,\" his label for traditional philosophical systems that bias thought toward falsity. In three parts, this article traces the progression in early modern scientific approaches to handling error, and especially medical error - from physicians' efforts to identify and eradicate it through collaborative effort, to the striking tension in Browne's work between seeking to eliminate error while also showing a marked tolerance for it, to the Royal Society's Baconian objective of instrumentalizing error to find truth. Error emerges as its own epistemic category that serves as a driving force toward knowledge production.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"287-307"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/cc/06/10.1177_00732753221135046.PMC10464649.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10212898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Affective geographies: Family and friendship in the production of scientific knowledge.","authors":"Dena Goodman","doi":"10.1177/00732753211059957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211059957","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Through case studies of two early nineteenth-century French geologists, this article shows how relations of family and friendship were integral to determining where science took place. Digging up the traces of what I call the \"affective geographies\" of individual scientists that are entangled with their intellectual itineraries, I show how the practice of science is embedded in such affective relations and thus in everyday life.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"236-265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9628399","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":"Current debates and emerging trends in the history of science in premodern Islamicate societies.","authors":"Nahyan Fancy,&nbsp;Justin Stearns,&nbsp;Sonja Brentjes,&nbsp;A Tunç Şen,&nbsp;Scott Trigg,&nbsp;Noah Gardiner,&nbsp;Nükhet VarlıkRutgers,&nbsp;Matthew Melvin-Koushki,&nbsp;S Nomanul Haq","doi":"10.1177/00732753231154690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753231154690","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars who work on the history of science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. The contributions reflect upon some of the challenges that have historically constrained the subfield, how they have sought to overcome them, and what they see as some of the more productive and fruitful turns the field has taken and/or should take in the future. A central trend in all contributions is how they seek to confront the combined weight of colonialism, Orientalism, and the teleological history of science that continues to haunt contemporary discussions in both academia and the general public with regards to science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. Without diminishing the pioneering achievements of the generations of historians who have preceded us, and upon whose work we continue to rely, this combined weight has tended a) to marginalize the study of occult sciences in Islamicate societies; b) to emphasize investigations of content from an etic perspective of how we got to the present, which is primarily seen as how the scientific content is connected to the rise of modern science in Europe; and c) to concomitantly marginalize the study of science in post-1200 Islamicate societies, particularly those with little to no connection to the rise of \"Western\" science. The contributions build upon conversations that took place among participants in December 2019 at a workshop at New York University (NYU), Abu Dhabi Institute in New York City, funded by a grant from NYU Abu Dhabi.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"123-178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9630978","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 lungs of a ship\": Ventilation, acclimatization, and labor in the maritime environment, 1740-1800.","authors":"Paul E Sampson","doi":"10.1177/00732753211046449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211046449","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the connection between projects for shipboard ventilation and the shifting medical discourse about acclimatization in the British Empire during the eighteenth century. I argue that the design, use, and disuse of a class of shipboard \"ventilators\" proposed by natural philosopher Stephen Hales helps us to trace changing ideas about the ability of European bodies to acclimate, or \"season,\" to tropical environments. These ventilating machines appealed to British administrators because they represented an embodiment of providential and enlightened ideas that validated the expansion of overseas empire. In addition, they promised to increase labor efficiency by reducing the mortality and misery experienced by the sailors and enslaved people during long sea voyages. As skepticism about acclimatization grew in response to stubbornly high mortality rates in the West Indies, Hales' ventilators fell out of favor - a development underscored by their dismissal as a potential solution for the appalling conditions found in the transatlantic slave trade. By examining ventilators' nearly fifty-year career in naval and slave ships, this article will show the role of technology and the shipboard environment in the transition from enlightened optimism about acclimatization toward later attitudes of racial and environmental essentialism.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"214-235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9578535","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":"Shattering crystal with crystal: Galileo's rhetoric, lenses, and the epistemology of metaphor.","authors":"Hannah Marcus,&nbsp;Crystal Hall","doi":"10.1177/00732753211041858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211041858","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The terms that Galileo's contemporaries used for lenses (<i>cristallo/i</i>, <i>lente/i</i>, and <i>vetro/i</i>) have often been treated, and even translated, interchangeably. In this article, we argue that Galileo used references to crystals as lenses to embed epistemological and cosmological arguments in the material object of the telescope. Across Galileo's correspondence and letters, the term crystal had many uses and meanings. As a substance, crystal was a form of raw material, but crystal was also a substance that was central to scholastic cosmology and an explanatory device on which scholastics relied to explain first the appearance of the new star of 1604 and then Galileo's new telescopic discoveries. When Galileo began using the word crystals as a synonym for lenses, he endowed the material of his instrument with cosmological arguments. Galileo's choice of language was deliberate and polemical, serving as a joke at the expense of scholastics and as a linguistic marker of social proximity to Galileo and his intellectual agenda, especially among the members of the Academy of the Lincei. Rhetorically and linguistically, Galileo chose to refer to his lenses as crystals both because of the material from which they were made and because in so doing he signaled the epistemological work that the lenses would perform. Ultimately, the crystal lenses in Galileo's telescope and writings shattered the crystalline spheres, replacing explanatory metaphors with a polemical emphasis on the material and empirical realities of objects.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"179-213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9572899","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 <i>Revista Ştiinţifică \"Vasile Adamachi\"</i> and its role in forming national and international scientific awareness of Greater Romania, 1910-1933.","authors":"Alexandra Chiriac","doi":"10.1177/00732753211054979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211054979","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The <i>Revista Ştiinţifică \"Vasile Adamachi\"</i> (1910-1948) had aimed since its first edition to disseminate the newest achievements of science to the interested general public with the explicit intention of building national consciousness and solidarity that would forward Romania's natural powers through science. Even though the editors of the journal had complained constantly that their efforts to promote the national scientific movement were making slow progress, they maintained their openness toward the international state of research by publishing notes and reviews of the main scientific developments worldwide. Caught between those two ideals (that of a Romanian science and of keeping up with the international scientific scene), the journal reflects the struggles, the difficulties, but also the successes of the individual researchers, acting as a two-way communication channel between science producers and consumers. It provides us with a valuable insight into the Self versus Other perception in a time when contact between the Romanian and Western European cultures was beginning to consciously evolve from mere imitation of a dominant power to the incorporation of fragmented foreign categories. It is a perfect example of 'patchwork', in which the native and foreign elements coexisted in a continuous process of redefining and reshaping the newly formed national identity.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"266-284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9574772","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}