History of Science最新文献

{"title":"Building UNESCO science from the \"dark zone\": Joseph Needham, Empire, and the wartime reorganization of international science from China, 1942-6.","authors":"Thomas Mougey","doi":"10.1177/0073275320987428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320987428","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In recent years historians have revisited the creation of the United Nations (UN) system by highlighting the enduring influence of Empire and recognizing the substantial role of cultural and scientific actors in wartime international diplomacy. The British biochemist Joseph Needham, who participated in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), was one of them. Yet, if historians have recognized his role as the leading architect of the sciences at UNESCO, they still fall short of engaging with the Chinese and imperial geography of his involvement with UNESCO. During the Second World War, Needham was stationed in war-torn China. As director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, Needham not only organized Sino-British scientific cooperation against the Japanese invasion, but his mission inspired his engagement for a reform of international science and fueled an international campaign that led him to become the director of UNESCO's Natural Science division after the war. By reconstructing his campaign in context, this article seeks to demonstrate how the imperial and transnational scientific networks of the wartime era fostered the creation of a scientific mandate for UNESCO. It situates Needham's activism and ideas in the context of the Sino-Japanese war, imperial wartime technocracy, and China's scientific nationalism. In so doing, it reveals a string of forgotten partners from China and the British Empire. Their conception of a reorganized international science and shared belief in modern science and its ideal of universality shaped Needham's vision for science at UNESCO, while their activism contributed decisively to the success of his campaign. This inquiry hence participates in recent efforts to challenge the existing Eurocentrism corseting the historiography of the UN and expands the historiography of scientific internationalism beyond Europe and North America. Importantly, it also contributes to uncovering the technocratic ties established between Empire and the UN system from its onset.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 4","pages":"461-491"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320987428","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25366853","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 princess at the conference: Science, pacifism, and Habsburg society.","authors":"Geert Somsen","doi":"10.1177/0073275320977750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320977750","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Historians are showing increasing interest in scientific internationalism, the notion that science transcends national differences and hence advances peace and cooperation. This notion became particularly popular in the decades around 1900, the heyday of the universal expositions and the so-called first era of globalization. In this article I argue that in order to properly historicize scientific internationalism, it is imperative to understand how actors <i>imagined</i> science to have pacifist effects, and to relate their technoscientific to their geopolitical imaginaries. To illustrate this, I analyze the 1911 novel <i>Der Menschheit Hochgedanken</i> (translated as <i>When Thoughts Will Soar</i>) by the famous Austrian pacifist Baroness Bertha von Suttner. It tells the story of a scientific conference whose participants, by the sheer brilliance of their thought, ward off war and preserve world peace. Relating the novel to von Suttner's own life experiences, I situate her internationalism in the social texture and international relations of the late Habsburg Empire. It appears that Von Suttner mobilized notions of the pacific effects of science with an eye to preserving both the European system of states and the position of the aristocracy.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 4","pages":"434-460"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320977750","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38754145","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":"The age of biology: When plant physiology was in the center of American life science.","authors":"David P D Munns","doi":"10.1177/0073275320954123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320954123","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>For much of the twentieth century, plant physiologists considered themselves in an ideal position to study and explain the functions and processes of plants. Much of that authority stemmed from plant physiologists' long-standing commitment to experimental control and the integration of the physical sciences into biological practice. This article places plant physiology back in the center of the story of the recent life sciences. It shows the development of parallel experimental research programs into environmental as well as genetic effects on growth and development in plant physiology and genetics, and notes that the pursuit of an experimental environment was celebrated as much as (and occasionally more than) a molecular vision of life throughout most of the twentieth century by much of the plant science community. Thus, this article concludes that the history of the recent life sciences needs new complementary narratives of plant physiology with genetics, new concepts with technological tools, and plant-sized scales with the molecular. The history of the 'Age of Biology,' as the plant scientists saw it, helps confront the issue first posed by Evelyn Fox Keller, namely that the history of genetics has overshadowed a larger history of experimental life science. My answer here is through a larger narrative of the rise of the complementary experimental sciences of genes and environments in the life sciences.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 4","pages":"492-521"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320954123","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38380936","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":"Studying \"useful plants\" from Maria Theresa to Napoleon: Continuity and invisibility in agricultural science, northern Italy, the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century.","authors":"Martino Lorenzo Fagnani","doi":"10.1177/0073275321992914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275321992914","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article analyzes Italian research and experimentation on the economic potential of certain plant species in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, also providing insight into beekeeping and honey production. It focuses on continuity of method and progress across regimes and on the invisibility of many of the actors involved in the development of agricultural science and food research. Specifically, \"continuity\" refers to the continuation of certain threads of Old-Regime experimentation by the scientific apparatus put in place during the Napoleonic era. These threads were reworked and strengthened with the new means available to Frenchified Europe. The concept of \"invisibility\" derives from an expression by Steven Shapin and refers to actors who contributed to the development of agricultural science while remaining in the shadows. These include various types of technicians and members of rural society who supported the scientific work of scholars without receiving overt recognition. Continuity and invisibility were therefore two fundamental components both in the epistemological development of agricultural science and in the improvement of food research. The article analyzes case studies mainly from northern Italy - or rather, the various geopolitical entities existing in this geographical region - during the late Old Regime and the Napoleonic era, comparing them with examples from all over Europe.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 4","pages":"373-406"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275321992914","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25399628","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":"Corrigendum to \"Defending metropolitan identity through colonial politics: The role of Portuguese naturalists (1870-91)\".","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/00732753211051476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211051476","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 4","pages":"522"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39463049","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 failed institutionalization of \"complexity science\": A focus on the Santa Fe Institute's legitimization strategy.","authors":"Fabrizio Li Vigni","doi":"10.1177/0073275320938295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320938295","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>\"Complexity sciences\" are an interdisciplinary and transnational domain of study that aims at modeling natural and social \"complex systems.\" They appeared in the 1970s in Europe and the United States, but were boosted in the mid-1980s by the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) under the formula of \"science of complexity.\" This small but famous institution is the object of the present article. According to their promissory ambitions and to the enthusiastic claims of some scientific journalists, complexity sciences were going to revolutionize all of knowledge and even private and public actors who had learned to master them. In the light of this, one would expect to observe a well-established and autonomous research and educational field, capable of reproducing itself through professional institutions. Yet this is not the case. To explain the paradox, I propose to combine different models of history and sociology of emergent and declining domains, in order to give account of the rise and failure of complexity sciences.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"59 3","pages":"344-369"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320938295","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38201877","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":"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}