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Please Note: All abstracts are arranged alphabetically. If you are a participant and would like to make changes to your abstract, please e-mail the changes to the HSS Executive Office at hssexec@u.washington.edu.

As late as 1902, Nicaragua seemed the likely location for the construction of a trans-isthmian canal by the United States. Yet the overwhelming support for Nicaragua steadily eroded, and the Panama route, started and eventually abandoned by the French, became the preferred site for the canal. This paper examines the 'scientific evidence' used in catalyzing and resisting the decision to build in Panama, specifically focusing on the discourses of disease and geography and their roles in shaping the debate. Imperial and intellectual territoriality combined to shape the contours of scientific medicine, contributing to the nascence of the theories and practices of tropical medicine and disease eradication that remain in favor today. The canal route dispute provides a clear setting for the convergence of physical and intellectual boundary work as the actors, spaces, and discourses of geography and disease are embroiled in the contested decision-making of what counts as evidence.

One of the goals of the cybernetics movement was to find common elements in the functioning of animals and machines. An important line of pursuit in this endeavour was the application of mathematical logic, once restricted to electronics and communications technology, to living systems. A pivotal year in this story was 1943, when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts presented the first application of a logical calculus to a living system, resembling the electrical circuitry of a machine. They constructed a Boolean logic to describe neural events and their relations, based on the "all-or-none" character of nervous activity. The McCulloch-Pitts paper, entitled "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity," was prompted by Alan Turing's "On computable numbers" (1936-7), and figured prominently in the later work of John von Neumann (1945, 1948). As such, it represents an important event in the history of cybernetics. What is examined to a lesser degree are the more local intellectual origins of the McCulloch-Pitts paper. My goal in this essay is to examine these origins in more detail. By examining the intellectual backgrounds of McCulloch and Pitts as individuals, I hope to show that besides being an important event in the history of cybernetics proper, their collaboration was also a significant part of early twentieth-century efforts to apply mathematics to biological phenomena.

The extensive literature on the sociology of professionalization tends to ignore the continued role of amateurs in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science. In late Victorian Yorkshire, the focus of this paper, there was a vibrant and varied population of "amateur" natural historians working alongside the new professionals. This is contrary to modernist notions of the 'new' biology competing with, and subsequently eclipsing, natural history. It is on this variety of amateur practices and identities that I will concentrate in this paper. I will tease apart the multifarious groups that are legitimately encompassed by the blanket term "amateur", within which there is evident a wide spectrum of identities. The practice of natural history was carried out within many institutional agendas: literary and philosophical societies, field clubs and microscopical societies. I will discuss individual, as well as collective identities, for rubbing shoulders in Yorkshire life science were gentleman full-timers, field club élites, collectors of all ages, and readers, writers and editors of natural history magazines. I will use a number of criteria to differentiate between these groups and individuals: place, class, gender, denomination, their relationship to the newly-established academic biology and other cultural practices (including recreational pursuits). By discussing a number of different attitudes to the role and identity of the amateur (including those of Margaret Gatty, William Denison Roebuck and Henry Clifton Sorby), and tracing the changes in the use of the term, I will show that "amateur" identities and practices were contingent to place, time and social criteria.

It has been known for decades now that eugenicists supported the mental testing movement, as originally spearheaded by H.H. Goddard, Lewis M. Terman and Robert M. Yerkes. Mental tests provided the seemingly quantitative and objective measurements that eugenicists needed to make descriptions of human mental capacity precise and therefore subject to genetic analysis. What has received less attention is the strong support proponents of mental testing (hereafter, psychometricians) gave to eugenics, and the influence this support wielded in eugenicists' theory of criminality. Goddard's The Criminal Imbecile (1915) and other associated writings, along with a strong interest in formulating an hereditarian theory of criminality by eugenicists such as Charles B. Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin at Cold Spring Harbor, led to the organization of the Psychopathic Institute of the Municipal Court of Chicago. With strong support from Judge Harry Olson, himself a proponent of eugenics, the Institute promoted a strongly hereditarian theory of mental deficiency as the basis of criminality. Ironically in some ways, this association was aimed at arguing for greater leniency in sentences proffered to criminals, as well as for using biology to stem the tide of criminality at its roots. Zenderland's book delves perceptively into Goddard's work on feeblemindedness and criminality. In this paper I will discuss in some detail one of the consequences of these studies as they related to the formulation of a eugenical theory of crime.

The fundamental features of Aristotle’s matter theory–the four terrestrial elements, their respective pairs of the four primary qualities, and their cycle of reciprocal transformations–are generally familiar. However, their relation to other aspects of Aristotle's natural philosophy remains less well known and understood. Increasing controversy has also recently developed over such issues as the authenticity of "prime matter" as an Aristotelian concept the status of the elements as true substances the role the elements play as components in mixis (combination) and as constituents of homoeomere (homogeneous materials) whether mixis is a process of substantial generation or merely of qualitative alteration and even the legitimacy of any "chemical" interpretation of Aristotelian matter theory at all. These difficulties can be resolved, however, by re-examining them in light of Aristotle's metaphysics of substance, particularly his key concepts of dynamis (potentiality) and energeia (actuality). An analysis of Aristotle's matter theory in holistic terms of dynamic processes and relations, rather than reductive ones of static objects and structures, both integrates it into his broader philosophical framework and illuminates the reasons for its dominant influence upon European chemical thought down to the early nineteenth century.

Some of James Clerk Maxwell's expressed hopes in writing his "Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" were to make the ideas of Michael Faraday the "basis of a mathematical method" and to exhibit them in a "connected and mathematical form." Maxwell's particular way of mathematizing Faraday's ideas enabled him to compete with the older Continental action-at-a-distance theories, characterized by him as being highly mathematical, with theories of equal mathematical sophistication. It also enabled him to show in a subtle but powerful manner that his work flowed from a British experimental tradition of electromagnetic research. As part of this project of mathematization within the British tradition, the "Treatise" has a repeated claim that various mathematical equalities such as those relating volume and surface integrals allow the action-at-a-distance theories to be taken as mathematically identical to those maintaining action in and by means of a medium. And when, in Maxwell's words, the equalities are "interpreted physically" both approaches, he claimed, provided alternative ways to conceive of the physical action between electrified bodies. Use of mathematical expressions in this manner meant that Maxwell could associate his own theory with the well established Continental traditions, yet at the same time still argue that physical considerations privileged his own approach. I shall argue in the paper that there is an identifiable and interesting set of mathematics strategies and practices at work in Maxwell's arguments on these and similar matters that have yet to be fully explored. They include ways of ascribing physical significance to mathematical quantities, ways of relating measurement practices to the mathematical machinery of his theories, and positions on how mathematical calculations function in reasoning about nature. Exploring these strategies and practices, I claim, not only provides new ways to see resonances of Maxwell's writing with other issues of his world such as the residue of the early 19th century concerns on the interpretation of abstract algebra and themes in William Whewell writings on the nature of scientific thought, but also provide ways for understanding how the "Treatise" bequeathed to succeeding generations seeking to make sense of it a rich and complicated set of issues.

The elementary particle zoo includes three distinct kinds of neutrinos, which, because they are uncharged particles of zero or tiny mass, interact insignificantly with other matter. Since the first of these, the electron neutrino, was first suggested by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, neutrinos have occasioned exceedingly difficult and often enormous efforts aimed at their detection and the measurement of their properties. Prior studies by Charles Atchley* and by Trevor Pinch** have focused on the detection of the electron neutrino (1956) and on measurements of solar electron neutrinos, respectively. The current study focuses on two other aspects of neutrino history: (1) episodic attempts to determine the mass of the electron neutrino, especially those reported after 1956, and (2) changing standards of evidence and ease of acceptance of the discoveries of the electron, mu, and tau neutrinos. These cases contribute to understanding of the nature of scientific acceptance, for example, by providing information on the extent of interpretative flexibility that is socially acceptable and of the factors that influence this acceptance. *Atchley, Charles E., The Invention and Discovery of the Neutrino: Elusive Reality and the Nature of Scientific Acceptance (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1991). **Pinch, Trevor J., Confronting Nature: The Sociology of Solar-Neutrino Detection (Dodrecht, 1986).

My paper is concerned with the history of the studies of experimental evolution, in particular with the interpretive flexibility of experiments in evolution of aphids. Russian scientist Georgiy Shaposhnikov reared a clone of aphids on an unsuitable host-plant for several generations–rapid evolution produced a new form which he considered a new species. In my paper I will analyze this case on two levels: (1) Shaposhnikov's own changing views on the interpretation of his experiments and (2) interpretations of Shaposhinkov's life and experiments by Russian and British scientists–as we know scientists always co-interpret data and their producers (B. Latour). Shaposhinkov's experiments were conducted in the late 1950s when Lysenko was in full power and the discussion of them continued into the 1990s when modern neodarwinism and synthetic theory of evolution were again under new criticism. These experiments seemed fit well into many theoretical frameworks at different times. The paper will also discuss the role of biological object in the development of research agenda and theoretical concepts in biology. Shaposhnikov's work had an evident hard core in aphids as an object–if there was anything inflexible in his research it was a love for plant-lice, their peculiar taxonomy and evolution.

During the latter half of the sixteenth century, mathematics was used by a small but increasingly powerful group of authors as a means of abstracting and theorizing a number of complex arts, including navigation. By the end of the century, mathematics had become so central to the concept of navigational expertise that in some circles it surpassed actual experience at sea as the mark of a true master of the art. The many navigational manuals published in England after 1570 bear this out; although ostensibly intended to teach and improve upon the practice of navigation, a large percentage of them were written by men who had no real navigational experience whatsoever. This paper will examine some of the most important and popular Elizabethan navigational manuals, giving special consideration to their authors, their intended audience, and the reasons for which they were written. Far from teaching the art of navigation to those who would put it to use, the authors of navigational treatises most often sought to elevate themselves at the expense of the mere practitioner by redefining navigation in abstract mathematical terms which only the authors themselves could understand. By transforming navigation into a branch of mathematics, they came to be perceived as true experts in the field by the noble patrons for whom their works were most often intended, while unlearned practitioners of the art found the apparent value of their own skills and experience to be greatly diminished.

As economists and political science analysts do, historians of science study higher education institutions contribution to economical development through research activities. Nowadays we better understand the complex relations between universities, industries and governments since the 1970s, but historical research area upon the Canadian case before the 1970s is in fallow under many considerations. My research under way remedies in part to this situation in figured out professorial, industrial, and governmental practices which revealed the shape of contractual research in Canada between 1880 and 1980. From that point I expect to understand what consequences contractual research had upon universities‚ departments, research centers, courses, administrations structures, and laboratories. My data were extract from McGill, Toronto, and Queen's universities, and from King's College, and École Polytechnique de Monréal archives. I also include main governmental agencies and industries archives, Defense Research Board for instance. To summarize, I will argue that contractual research was a common activity into Canadian universities since the end of the nineteenth century, but that the extent of his shape varied in the historical course.

In his several articles on Kepler, Gingerich interprets Kepler's search for the laws of the planetary motion as a search for a physical cause (see, Gingerich, 93). I, however, take Kepler’s search as an attempt to balance between two conflicting desiderata, simplicity and goodness of fit. The curve-fitting problem symbolizes this conflict. The problem arises when one wants to optimize these two conflicting desiderata at the same time. I contend that Gingerich's historiography overlooks this ongoing tension that is usually found in theory choice. I argue that the idea of curve-fitting problem is a recurring theme in history of science. Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), Adrian Legendre (1752-1833), and Carl Gauss (1777-1855) exploited this theme so did Kepler. Further, Gingerich’s interpretation of Kepler's search for physical causes can be explained within this framework. Based on these arguments, I conclude that historians should be skeptical about Gingerich's interpretation.

This paper aims to show that Durkheim's philosophy of science was developed in full knowledge of and as a reaction to conventionalism in French philosophy. This current in philosophy was represented by Durkheim's former teacher, Boutroux, and by scientists such as Poincare and Tannery. Conventionalist philosophy asserted that the fundamental scientific principles are not reflections of the "real" nature of the universe but are convenient ways of describing the natural world that are valid as long as they're not contradicted by observation or experiment. Durkheim, like Duhem, wished to reject the relativism of science that seemed the logical conclusion of this point of view and, to do so, had recourse to realism. Both Durkheim and Duhem developed a conception of scientific theories and concepts as grounded in "nature"–thereby guaranteeing their objectivity. This objectivity, however, would quickly be challenged by the further destabilization of our conceptions of science by the advent of quantum physics and the theory of relativity, which opened the way for more radical interpretations of science in philosophy, such as those of Brunschvicg and, following upon him, Bachelard.

As part of a longstanding collaboration with Bernard R. Goldstein, I have connected developments in astronomy and natural philosophy culminating in Kepler's Astronomia Nova (1609). The present paper reviews some results of this research as it affects our understanding of major figures of the scientific revolution, especially Kepler and Copernicus. In four brief sections I present the decontextualized images of Copernicus and Kepler current in much historical writing draw a contrast with the image of Copernicus as it appears in Lutheran writers before Kepler show how Kepler completed the project of radical Lutherans to reintroduce causal reasoning in astronomy, and show how in doing so Kepler created the historical basis for the modern image of Copernicus.

My paper is concerned with Russian students (nobles, scholars and physicians) educated in European universities in the eighteenth century. They were the first generation of native Russians, who were enrolled in European universities and on their return, played an increasingly important role in administration, science and medicine. In particular my paper will focus on the students' body at Leyden University: grant-aided students of medicine and the sciences as well as titled students who prepared themselves for the service of the absolutist state at the time of Catherine II. In my paper I will discuss this educational process both as an identity formation (in terms of belonging) and a formation of a new self (in terms of background practices). The educational practices and the practices of control over a student were part of a mechanism by which they were becoming educated Europeans. The members of the nobility and the members of lower social strata were all bound to the process of creating new social and professional, self and national identities. Educational trips were essential part in the whole process of young men' secondary socialization, and can be seen as a pilgrimage, a required part of initiation. These educational trips and the effect they produced on Russian youth contributed greatly to the formation of new socio-cultural environment in Russia at the end of the eighteenth–the beginning of the nineteenth century.

This paper will compare science policy in post-World War II West Germany and Japan. In both cases, science policy quickly moved from being a matter of preventing future security risks, to fostering economic security and providing a bulwark against Communism. A second important theme is the introduction of democracy in both countries and the effects it had on scientists and science policy.

In 1940-41, American officials began thinking about steps necessary to meet the crisis of a world at war. Observers noted that a nation's military power depended on building up industrial output, a process increasingly keyed to the latest science and technology. Weapons designers desperately needed people with knowledge of physics, ordnance manufacturers needed people trained in the chemistry of explosives, aircraft builders needed personnel skilled in mathematics and mechanics. Fearing that a shortage of college-educated workers might cripple the nation's wartime production, the U.S. Office of Education worked with educators to establish a crash program of "Engineering, Science, and Management War Training" (ESMWT). At government expense, two hundred colleges and universities across the country created short intensive courses to upgrade workers' scientific qualifications. Between 1941 and 1945, more than 1.5 million men and women enrolled in classes in physics, chemistry, math, psychology, engineering, and other scientific/technical subjects. The ESMWT program represented a unique episode in the history of American science. That immense commitment of federal funds and professional effort to science education paved the way for postwar policy developments, a vital part of the history of twentieth century science.

In late August, 1835 the New York Sun announced to its readers that it had just received a copy of a scholarly periodical titled the Edinburgh Journal of Science from "a medical gentleman immediately from Scotland". This journal contained a special supplement describing recent telescopic observations made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. These observations were of such an extraordinary nature, the editor of The Sun declared, that he had decided to reprint the entire supplement, in serial form, on the front page of The Sun over the following week. He would omit only the "more abstruse and mathematical parts" of the text. Today we remember the publication of this text as "The Great Moon Hoax of 1835". It described, in a tone of great seriousness, the observation by Sir John Herschel of fantastic creatures living on the surface of the moon. This claim was, for a brief period, the subject of intense public discussion in America. In this paper I examine in detail the publication of this article by the New York Sun. This event, I argue, reveals much about the relationship between science and popular culture in antebellum America. It speaks to a struggle, waged with both words and weapons, to determine whose culture would become the dominant form of life for the nation as a whole. It also speaks to the question of how antebellum Americans differentiated true belief from false. What methods did they use to separate the two? And who was allowed to speak Truth, and who was not?

This paper reconstructs three different scientific personae which were presented between the 1890s and the early 1920s by the psychologists William James, G. Stanley Hall, and E. B. Titchener. These personae differ from other scientific personae in that they were explicitly theorized by individual scientists, rather than resulting from social constructions [e.g., the persona of the democratic scientist, developed by a loosely related group of American scientists, philosophers and sociologists of science in the 1940s and during the Cold War (Hollinger)], or growing out of broader, more anonymous cultural processes [e.g., the self-restrained scientific persona related to the practices and instrumentation of mechanical objectivity (Daston, Galison)]. Nevertheless, the images of the ideal scientist proposed by James, Hall, and Titchener did not spring fully armed from their speculations as Athena from Zeus' head. Rather, they were deeply rooted in cultural models which had emerged from various literary, religious, and political traditions. The paper fulfills two goals. First, it traces the sources of these scientific personae in a variety of contexts, including philosophy, Protestant theology, social reform movements, literary traditions, and scientific practices. Second, it investigates the functions that James's, Hall's and Titchener's ideals of the scientist played. We can better understand these functions by placing these ideals in the framework of American psychology between the 1890s and the early 1920s. In particular, the normative function performed by James's, Hall's, and Titchener's scientific personae becomes clear when related, first, to psychology's attempt to gain the status of a science vis-à-vis better established disciplines (e.g. physics), and, second, to the attempt of some of its practitioners to unite that divided field. This latter goal seemed to be attainable by shifting the discussion from the contested level of psychological theories and methods to the more abstract level of the ideal virtues and "character" of the psychologist-- one on which, in principle, partisans of rival psychological factions could agree. Both the reconstruction of the cultural sources of the scientific personae under consideration and the analysis of their functions are carried out through an investigation of the "ethos" that James, Hall, and Titchener associated with the scientist. The paper shows the intrinsic relationship that these three competing types of scientific ethos entertained, on the one hand, with James's, Hall's and Titchener's epistemologies, and, on the other, with their visions of the social role of the scientist.

One of the most exciting mathematical developments of late nineteenth century was in non-Euclidean geometry. For more than two thousand years the system perfected by Euclid had occupied a position of absolute authority. This sovereignty was undermined by the investigations of several mathematicians, among them Gauss, Lobachevsky, Helmholtz, and Riemann. They decided that its validity as regards actual space should be tested, not by mathematics, but by observation. This paper will discuss how this development effected Irving Fisher's particular position with respect to index numbers. Irving Fisher wrote two classics in index numbers. Between these books there is a tension which reflects the above mentioned tension between mathematics and observation. Because a large number of indices already existed at the beginning of this century, and even more could be developed, the question was how to assess them. In an appendix of his Purchasing Power of Money (1911), Fisher discussed systematically with the aid of 8 "tests" 44 indices. This approach emphasized the mathematical aspect of indices and was the first example of the so-called axiomatic approach. It was precisely this mathematical approach that Fisher wanted to take distance from in his Making of Index Numbers (1922). The difference of emphasis lead to the abandoning of the so-called Circularity Test. Namely, an undesirable consequence of fulfillment of this test is that the index formula, which is a weighted average, is independent of the weights: Such a formula would prove too much, for it would leave no room for qualitative differences. Index numbers are to some extent empirical, and the supposed inconsistency in the failure of (variably weighted) index numbers to conform to the circular test, is really a bridge to reality. (Fisher 1922, p. 274) Although the circularity test is central to most of the axiomatic accounts–it represents transitivity–it is not a necessary one. Inclusion of this test as axiom or not only determines whether the metric space is Euclidean or not. Justice to the qualitative differences in reality on the one hand and fulfillment of a priori criteria for representation on the other hand made Fisher believe that we live an a non-Euclidean space.

Thomas Moffett has been for too long a marginal, eccentric, antiquarian footnote to historians of natural history and biology, who have substantially ignored his contributions to medicine. Moffett has received more attention from historians of medicine, but these scholars have passed over his impact on the study of natural history. This paper argues that Moffett's late sixteenth-century works on medicine and natural history must be examined together as complementary parts of a complex world view–more complex than historians focusing on either his medical writing or his natural history writing have allowed, and only partly explained by his background as a Paracelsian physician. Moffet's work addresses the relationship between humans, God, and nature on two levels: first, by envisioning an essentially moral nature (that is, one which reflects Christian moral principles and which offers Christian object lessons), and second, by promoting the discovery of "vertue" in nature by studying it. In Moffet's work, the study of nature, particularly the body structures and habits of insects, reveals the outlines of God's carefully-constructed universe. Moffett's views clearly emerged from a specifically English sensibility but his recommendation of nature study as a source of moral lessons for the public and of medical lessons for the physician and the man of science, and his arguments for the importance of observational evidence in establishing the value of scientific principles, help to explain some of his broad and enduring appeal to subsequent scientists and physicians. Moffett's recommendation that natural historians examine closely the physical structure of insects both for clues to their function and as evidence of God's design for the universe, clearly resonated for early microscopists, whose work was heavily colored by religious language. Moffett effectively bridges medieval and Renaissance natural history and early modern mechanism, and foreshadows seventeenth-century Baconian emphasis on the importance of collecting accurate observation as the basis for true knowledge and what would become the "argument from design." He is thus not a remnant of an older tradition but a link to the modern world.

The modern understanding of early Greek planetary theory begins with Simplicius' interpretation of Aristotle, =Metaphysics= xii 8. Indeed, the rule in the numerous histories of astronomy published of late is to cite this text and then to offer the reader Simplicius' interpretation (with minor 'corrections'). It is striking that few historians have ever asked whether Simplicius' explanation of Aristotle's reports of the Eudoxan and Callippan homocentric theories is a proper point of departure for reconstructing early Greek planetary theory. Using principles developed in my collaboration with Bernard R. Goldstein, I will argue that Simplicius' account of early Greek planetary theory fails because it assumes a concern with phenomena unknown to the Greeks before the late 2nd century BC, and because there are other accounts of =Meta.= xii 8 more in keeping with what is known of astronomy in the 4th century BC on the basis of texts dating from that period.

The talk will sketch two models of theoretical biology as developed by European biological scientists between 1920 and 1940. From the 1920s onwards theoretical biology wanted to discover universal concepts and a theoretical framework by which the ''differentia specifica'' between the living and non-living nature could be mapped, rather than to explain specific biological processes like the permeability of membrans, the heredity mechanism, or the neural activity. Thus, one coined concepts, designed models, stated principles, generalized rules since one hoped to discover the biological laws of nature. Significant here is that many of the theoretical biologists shared an interdisciplinary educational training since they had studied physics, medicine, or even philosophy beside biology. To illustrate this program, I will discuss two approaches which tried to construe the growth and shape of an organism, e.g. the developmental field (Gurwitsch, Weiss), and the open system (Bauer, Bertalanffy). The developmental field was formulated by the Russian histologist Alexander Gurwitsch (1874-1954) and the Austrian-American biologist Paul Weiss (1898-1989). Its main task was to explain the causal mechanisms of morphogenesis. Both proposed a holistic network, i.e. the field, configuring the organic shape by random walks of the cellular components. Both, however, disagreed concerning the morphogenetic agent itself. The open system of the Hungarian pathologist Bauer (1890-1942) lives and develops by maintaining itself in a non-equilibrium. His conception tried to construe evolutionary adaptation by thermodynamical reasons. The Austrian-Canadian biophilosopher Bertalanffy (1901-1972) focused on the organism, oscillating between the moving boundaries of a macromolecular structure and the cellular functions. Contrary to Bauer, his organismic system theory, therefore, did it without any environmental concept. Finally, these two models will be compared to uncover their differences and similarities.

Recent scholarship by a number of historians of science has demonstrated that the rise of precision measurement has been inextricably bound to diverse moral and social values about the very meaning of precision, supporting systems of cultural beliefs that give broader meanings to precision work. Using a dramatic episode from the life and scientific work of Albert Michelson, this paper presents a case for attending to the personal dimension of the moral values of precision in the lives of individual scientists. Specifically, Michelson's attempt to transform the accepted limits, norms, and experimental practices of precision measurement in physics led to a questioning of his moral integrity, personality, and even his sanity by his scientific peers and his family. The complex negotiations relating Michelson's personal identity to the moral values of precision raised questions about the limits of the scientist's body and mind in the pursuit of precision, and resulted in Michelson being sequestered under the care of an alienist. This episode was significant to the history of physics in America, in that it located Michelson's style of scientific practice at the very limit of the demanding moral values of precision. Following the episode, this positioning was a resource for Michelson that he drew upon to train a generation of major American physicists in his "ruthless discipline" of precision measurement, his style of scientific practice that I call "measuring physics."

To the limited extent that historians have written about the scientific press in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they have usually brought one or more guiding assumptions to the work. The most important such assumption is that once a scientific press was established, there would be a more or less automatic tendency toward specialization of both the journals' contents and the communities of contributor/readers of those journals. Of course, it would be hard to deny that specialization of this kind has in fact occurred, and was already beginning by the end of the eighteenth century. But the reasons for this narrowing of audience and content have not been well understood. In this paper, I shall describe some of the circumstances that attended the appearance of specialized journals during the eighteenth century. The paper will begin by situating the creation of the scientific press in the evolving literary marketplace of the late seventeenth century. The growing demand for news prompted the creation of journals such as the Philosophical Transactions, the Journal des Sçavans, the Acta Eruditorum, and the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. These journals in turn fed the demand for news, producing a rapid growth in the scientific press during the eighteenth century, an expansion that included periodicals directed to a narrower audience than that addressed by the Phil Trans or the Nouvelles. The appearance of these more narrowly focused journals, I shall argue, was crucially supported by the economics of publishing and the structure of the literary marketplace. As an example of how narrowly focused journals could flourish in the literary marketplace, I will turn in the last section of the paper to the Chemisches Journal für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst und Manufacturen, begun in 1778 by chemical lecturer and journalist Lorenz Crell. The community of reader/contributors manifested in Crell's journal, which circulated to some 400 subscribers, was not a clearly delineated professional group. Nor did it represent any longer the republic of letters that had appeared in the earliest seventeenth-century periodicals. As opposed to either the republic of letters or a specialized scientific community, and drawing in part on the work of Karl Hufbauer, I shall describe how the subscribers to Crell's journal could best be described as consumers and producers of one particular kind of news. Although this group supported the pursuit of what could be labeled "chemical science" in Central Europe, it was scarcely the exclusive occupation of specialists who circulated increasingly esoteric articles to a small community of insiders.

In 1842, N.N. Zinin, professor of technical chemistry at Kazan' University in Russia, discovered a chemical reaction that would later form the basis for the synthetic coal-tar dye industry and propel the chemical industry in Germany to world domination. However, Zinin did not develop these processes, nor did he even participate in their elaboration. As is well known, German chemists took the lead in the research and development of the synthetic coal-tar dyes, using Zinin's reaction as a necessary first step in the synthesis of many different dye products. In this paper, I will examine the context of Zinin's discovery and then discuss possible reasons why he did not continue this line of investigation. Zinin was well placed to undertake such work. During 1839-1841, he conducted research in Liebig's laboratory in Giessen. There he had extensive contact with Hofmann and other German chemists. Zinin's research involved aromatic compounds, work that he continued upon his return to Russia. However, conditions in Russia forced him to change his starting compound, and while looking for a possible substitute, he discovered the reduction of nitrobenzene to aniline, the reaction that would make him famous. This discovery did not make an impression on him, however, and he did not continue studying it. On the other hand, Hofmann and his students soon began extensive research on aromatic compounds, often using Zinin's reaction as an integral part of their work. This research eventually led to the blossoming of the coal-tar dye industry. Years later, when Zinin attended the Paris International Exposition in 1867, he was astounded by all of the new dyes based on his earlier discovery.

Dr. Joseph Kahn opened his celebrated anatomical museum in London in 1851 promising the English public the chance to study human anatomy through models "copied from nature with the utmost fidelity." Dr. Kahn's Anatomical Museum, only one of many similar nineteenth-century exhibits, operated in the metropolis for over twenty years becoming part of the urban culture of nineteenth-century London. Despite the museum's apparent popularity with London audiences, Kahn's museum was harshly criticized in the medical press. Denounced by members of the profession, doctors organized to combat anatomical exhibits by classifying museums as a form of advertising. Because of their association with these museums, practitioners with medical degrees often found themselves expelled by medical societies. When proprietors could not be touched through professional censure, doctors employed anti-obscenity legislation in an attempt to define anatomical displays as an affront to public decency. Through such efforts, the medical profession succeeded in transforming the public perception of popular museums from sites of medical instruction to prime examples of 'obscene advertising.'

The story of intelligence testing has been told largely as the working out of Francis Galton's vision of the ways and means by which the mind should be standardized. In general, Galton's work of the 1860s-1880s on hereditary genius and the mathematics of correlation and his program of large-scale laboratory-based measurements of various physical and behavioral characteristics have been presented as setting the agenda for the development of modern notions of and practices around metric intelligence. Galton's initial forays into building the normal out of the normal, it is argued, were given greater theoretical sophistication in the early 1900s with Charles Spearman's invention of factor analysis and his discovery/invention of general intelligence or g, and greater practical significance with Alfred Binet's development of the intelligence scale. The story usually culminates in 1916 with Terman's creation of the Stanford-Binet and the subsequent widespread adoption of intelligence testing, especially within the United States, as the paradigmatic measuring science of the normal. In this talk, however, I will suggest that this most obvious of approaches to the standardization of the mind was not the one that actually prevailed, and that what came to be considered normal intelligence did not get constructed on the basis of the normal curve. Rather, I will build on the analyses advanced by Leila Zenderland most notably in Measuring Minds that the success of the intelligence test was intimately connected with its value as a diagnostic/classificatory tool for those categorized as socially marginal. Indeed, Zenderland's assiduous exhumation of the range of sites in which Henry H. Goddard attempted to deploy the intelligence test has gone far to suggest that a focus on the pathological was key to the successful standardization of the mind. Following Zenderland, I will argue that the importance of the contributions of Galton and his key English disciple Spearman to the project of creating a standard measure of the intellect has been overstated. Rather, it was concern with the pathological and developmental, as evidenced in the work of the creators of the first successful intelligence test, Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, and of Goddard and other early pioneers of intelligence testing in the United States that provided the orientation necessary to develop a persuasive standardization of the mind. Resort was made to pathology, I will argue, because it constituted not only the area in which a metric of intelligence could be practically applied, but also a place in which the mind was already loosely conceptualized in terms of a global notion of intelligence that the tests could capture and standardize. It was this combination of what Zenderland has pointed out was the social interest in defining and regulating those deemed pathological with the power of pathology to produce particular forms of visibility that was critical to the production of metric intelligence. With the application of the new tests to the population as a whole, the normal would not so much define the pathological as it would itself be defined by the pathological, and by the complex of instruments, practitioners, practices, and institutions through which metric intelligence became stabilized as a standardized scientific entity.

While many historians of biology have discussed the inadequacy of the pure science–applied science distinction, their case studies have rarely provided a general model for understanding the evolution of scientific disciplines in applied biology. Informed by recent findings in the historiography of technology, this communication presents the development of two agricultural scientific disciplines–economic entomology and phytopathology–as a fundamentalization process. Fundamentalization of an applied science refers to a process whereby researchers displace a standard empirical approach in favor of a research practice aimed at understanding the fundamental phenomena underlying practical problems. Researchers enlarge and systematize the cognitive basis of an applied science to guide the application of their knowledge and, in the long run, to attain the practical goals of their domain. In this communication, I analyze the process whereby agricultural scientists ceased pursuing an approach based on the experimentation of various control methods to conduct research into understanding the biochemical and ecological basis of insect and disease outbreaks, while maintaining the same research objective: crop protection. I conclude by discussing the relevance of the concept of fundamentalization to understand the nature and the dynamic of applied biology in other scientific disciplines.

The Alfonsine Tables were compiled during the second half of the 13th century in Toledo, Spain, and became the main computing tool for European astronomers for several centuries. Bernard Goldstein has offered important insights on their diffusion, which includes the "Tabulae Resolutae", a particular form of presenting the Alfonsine material which differs in many ways from that in the first printed edition of the Alfonsine Tables (Venice, 1483). This paper analyses the influence of the 15th century astronomer from Vienna, Johannes von Gmunden, on the genesis of the "Tabulae Resolutae", as well as the impact of this set of tables on European astronomy.

G.E. Stahl published his first book, "Zymotechnia Fundamentalis," in 1697. As stated on its title page, the book claimed to derive the causes and effects of fermentation from mechanico-physical principles and to introduce a "new experiment of producing true sulphur." It was indeed a thorough mechanical account of fermentation, and went as far as to completely de-spiritualize chemistry, i.e., deprive matter of any seminal, formal, or spiritual constituents--a post-Cartesian move that set Stahl against the Paracelsian-Helmontian tradition as well as his contemporary Leibniz. Even the principle of sulphur, considered by many chemists the "soul" or the motive cause of matter, was according to Stahl inert and lifeless substance. The true sulphur that he was to produce was nevertheless the mineral sulphur. It was in this discussion of the composition of mineral sulphur that Stahl's phlogiston first appeared. I argue that the "Zymotechnia Fundamentalis," long ignored by Stahl scholars, is of great importance to the formation of Stahl's phlogistic chemistry and also an integral part of his vitalistic medicine.

There is no longer any scientific doubt that Earth is warming and that the process is accelerating. The 1970s were warmer than the 1960s the 1980s were warmer than the 1970s and the 1990s have been warmer still. The question remains, why? In 1896, with the industrial revolution as his backdrop, the Nobel prize-winning chemist Svante Arrhenius was the first to argue that the mass consumption of fossil fuels is gradually pushing Earth's temperature upward. Centuries into the future humankind would become the recipient of a more benevolent climate, opening the Northern Hemisphere to agriculture and commerce as never before. Few paid much attention to Arrhenius's prediction until the advent of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, when interest in global warming was briefly stirred by the mass exodus of farmers from the southwestern United States. Then, after an unexpected period of gradual cooling amid predictions that the next ice age was at hand, global temperatures resumed their upward progression in the mid-1970s. The development triggered a flurry of scientific activity that continues unabated. The year 1998 was the warmest of the second millennium, and the capstone of a century that has seen the world's temperature increase by about one degree Fahrenheit while carbon dioxide levels have soared. Like Arrhenius, most, though not all, scientists point an accusatory finger at the record consumption of fossil fuels. Yet unlike Arrhenius, they see a quite rapid upward trend with potentially devastating consequences. This paper chronicles the transition from benevolence to menace as seen from the viewpoint of scientists during the past century and more. It is based on the author's research for the book "Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming" published in May 1999.

August Weismann (1834-1914) had presented an integrated theory of evolution, heredity and development shortly before Mendel's work was rediscovered in 1900. Weismann's theory contained some of the conceptual elements that were later incorporated into Mendelian genetics, such as the continuity of the germinal architecture, reduction in chromosome numbers during gamete production and chromosomal determiners of hereditary traits. Nevertheless, there were marked differences between Weismann's model and what soon became known as Mendelian genetics, and Weismann had perhaps the most to lose of any biologist as the new century began. This paper will explore Weismann's reactions to Mendelism between 1900 and 1913. I will draw upon both published and manuscript material to present the case.

During World War I, young women entered a new job–painting luminous numbers on watch and instrument dials. The paint contained radium, and by 1922 some of the women became ill, and some soon died, of illnesses caused by radium plated into their bones. Their employers hired industrial health experts from Columbia and Harvard Universities to investigate the women's illnesses. A Columbia physiologist lied to the women about the causes of their diseases, published research demonstrating that radium was not at fault, and covered-up cases that might have corroborated the industrial origin of the women's disease. A team of Harvard physicians, at their corporate sponsor's request, remained silent about their conclusions that radium caused the dial painters' illnesses. These incidents raise the question of whether industrial health researchers have an ethical duty to report findings that could save workers' lives, even when revealing their data may harm their sponsors by scaring away workers or supporting workers' litigation.

The Viennese physicists Erwin Schrodinger and K. W. F. Kohlrausch approached color theory as a special case of a crucial problem: how to measure an "objective" effect if the sensitivity of the detectors is variable. With the rise of research on stochastic processes like radioactive emission, physicists began to seek methods for distinguishing fluctuations in the phenomenon from fluctuations in the measuring instrument's response. Schrodinger and Kohlrausch identified an analogous problem in color theory, in disentangling the "objective" relations among colors from the variability of human color sensitivity. They thus became the first to base a physicalist theory of color on the irreducibly individual nature of perception. This approach resonated with that of the Vienna Arts and Crafts School, where Kohlrausch was an assistant teacher of color theory. The school was abandoning an earlier ambition to universalize color aesthetics in favor of a new pedagogy aimed at drawing out the individuality of the student's color aesthetic and focusing attention on the materiality of the craft object. Physicists and artisans thus reinforced each other's emphasis on the variability of color perception and the physicality of colors.

A great deal of information about Asian medicine was uncovered and conveyed to Europe by members of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC). The structure of the VOC was that of a powerful–often enough ruthless–business monopoly governed from the Netherlands and operating in the seas from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan. Yet some members of the VOC spent time and effort on gathering "matters of fact" about and examples of Asian materia medica and therapeutic practices, conveying them back to Europe, and convincing others about their credibility. In doing so, the Dutch became perhaps the most important European source of information about Asian medicine. When seeking materials and information about medicine and natural history, however, employees of the VOC cooperated with and supported the work of people outside Company channels, not only local experts but some of the most bitter opponents of the VOC, the Jesuits. This suggests that common interests could overcome institutional governance and cultural prejudice, and raises again the important issue of how local production and regional networks could be integrated into the international movement known as the scientific revolution.

It is striking how many works in early modern natural history were only published after their authors‚ deaths. On numerous occasions, compilers of natural-historical information would continue to work away at their projects until their own demise (sometimes premature, sometimes long-anticipated), leaving these projects to others–sometimes colleagues, but often family members such as sons–to complete, edit, and see to press. My paper will explore the implications of this process for the ways in which the observational data of natural history moved, through publication, from the "private" to the "public" sphere˜from the "domestic" world of the naturalist‚s household, where family members from wives to sons and daughters often assisted in the painstaking and labor-intensive tasks of collecting, describing, drawing, and recording information about natural objects, to the world of publication, where such projects would be exposed to open scrutiny. In my paper, I plan to look at examples such as those of Johann Loesel and the Breyne family in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, in order to trace the ways in which natural history as a field of inquiry coped with the problems presented by the accumulation of knowledge in quantities beyond the grasp of any single individual, requiring conscious intervention to "bring it to the light of day", as editors so often phrased their efforts. The aim of the paper will be to show what posthumous publication reveals about differing concepts of "authorship" (individual or collaborative) in the new sciences, at a time when the figure of the "author" was still under construction and to chart the differing meanings of publication itself for the naturalist.

The 'scientific revolution' has become a hotly contested term among historians of science. What once seemed the key to the origin of modern science has now been challenged on every count. This paper will argue that a transformation did occur, in method, in scientific subject and institutional organization, but that the explanation for this transformation must be sought in the socio-economic changes taking place in early modern Europe. Using Zilsel's claim that the scientific revolution was made possible by a coming together of brainwork and handwork (Gehirnarbeit and Handwerk), this paper will examine an important site for this union–navigation. The work and lives of two important English navigators and mathematicians of the sixteenth century, Edward Wright and Thomas Harriot, will be examined in order to assess their role in the creation of the 'New Science'. I will argue that both were quintessential mathematical practitioners, but that neither transcended that role to become true natural philosophers.

The mechanisms of contemporary neurobiology include entities and activities that were not countenanced in the 17th century mechanical world view. This paper explores the addition of a new activity, Long Term Potentiation, to the library of accepted activities from which neurobiological mechanisms might legitimately be constructed. LTP is a variety of synaptic plasticity in which the simultaneous activity of pre- and post-synaptic cells leads to a strengthening of the synapse. The time period under consideration includes the first 15 years of the LTP research program, from initial experimental reports of LTP in the late 1960s to its considerable (yet incomplete) acceptance by 1984. The paper focuses on three considerations relevant to the acceptance of LTP: (i) advances in experimental protocols for eliciting and characterizing the activity, (ii) the discovery of lower-level mechanisms by which LTP could be induced and maintained, and (iii) the inclusion of LTP in higher-level mechanisms, such as the mechanisms of learning and memory. This example provides insight into the conditions for accepting a new activity as a possible component in neurobiological mechanisms.

In this paper I will explore treatments of conception and fetal development in sixteenth-century German vernacular medical texts. These topics were described at length in a wide variety of sources, from midwifery manuals to books on the "secrets of nature," to more general medical and anatomical texts. In addition, hundreds of broadsides and pamphlets dealt with "monstrous" births, cases of fetal development gone awry. The sheer number and variety of such treatments, as well as the fact that many went through dozens of editions, indicate that the topics of conception and fetal development were of interest not just to medical practitioners, but to a broad lay audience, literate in German but not in Latin. In this paper, I argue that these topics were important and interesting to a lay audience not only because people were interested in the practical matters of conception and childbirth, but also because in discussing embryology, vernacular medical authors raised questions about the fundamental nature of human beings. Embryology for sixteenth-century lay readers was as much about original sin, human mortality, and the relationship between body and soul as it was about how to conceive a male child or handle a breech delivery. Discussions of fetal development in vernacular texts, for example, usually dealt with how and when the developing fetus received a soul and became a human being. Similarly, descriptions of monstrous births consistently raised the question of whether the child had received a soul, and thus was in need of baptism. In addition, many vernacular authors linked discussions of conception and birth to discussions of death and human mortality, emphasizing that every child was stained by original sin from the moment of conception and thus was doomed to die. In short, the fetus lay at the center of discussions of the relationship between our immortal souls and our frail and mortal bodies.

The transformation of the natural sciences through their intimate association with the federal government in the years after World War II has attracted much attention, and deservedly so. The postwar reformation of the social sciences, however, is still largely an untold story, despite the growing importance of the social sciences in government. In this paper, I will explore the struggles of social scientists to win a place at the federal table, looking at the debates surrounding the inclusion of the social sciences in the NSF, the NAS/NRC, and the PSAC. I will argue that social scientists sought federal patronage not only to expand their enterprise, but also to reform it. Unlike natural scientists, who sought the creation of an NSF in order to perpetuate and expand an existing relationship (redressing the balance of basic vs. applied research in the process), leading social scientists sought such patronage in order to make their disciplines more "objective," more mathematical, and more "useful." In this there was a significant generational divide, as social scientists who reached professional maturity before World War II were anxious as well as excited about the consequences of federal patronage, while a more mathematically oriented younger generation, many of whom had come of age working for the government during the war, was strongly enthusiastic about building closer ties. Despite the inherent weakness of a rhetoric that emphasized future rather than past achievements, the social sciences did win a place at the federal table. Following the path of the natural sciences, they first proved their worth through applied defense research, thereby acquiring the status and connections necessary to expand their presence in organizations like the NSF. Similarly, although they received a far smaller share of the federal dollar than the natural sciences, access to federal funds did enable both the expansion and the reformation of the social sciences that the leaders of the younger generation had envisioned–though not without suffering some of the consequences that their elders had feared.

My questions will be: when and why did historians first start thinking that there had been a Scientific Revolution in the 17th century, and what work did this concept subsequently do for them, for their discipline, and for the wider world? Whether a 'Scientific Revolution' took place in the 17th century and, if so, what it comprised, is a set of questions which I am not trying to open on this occasion. Nor am I asking whether the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century (if it indeed took place) was a success in its own time. By contrast, my concerns here are all with the 20th century, and with historians. Roy Porter tells us that the term "the Scientific Revolution" was first coined by Koyré in 1939. Since then, especially amongst anglophone historians of science, it has been the primary organizing concept in the big picture of the history of science. It provided the grand narrative for the writings of numerous scholars including Herbert Butterfield, Steven Mason, Brian Easlea, Rupert and Marie Boas Hall and Richard S. Westfall. Beyond those scholars who have used it in the title of books, the concept has underlain virtually all work in the discipline in North America and Britain, and scholars who work in periods outside the 16th and 17th centuries also use it as terminus ad quem or a terminus a quo in their accounts of the development of science. In 1981 Professors Lindberg and Westman involved several eminent scholars in making Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (published 1990). Criticism of the concept has come from many directions in the last decade or so. Nevertheless, recently further attempts to give accounts of the Scientific Revolution have been made by a third generation of historians of science, such as John Henry and Steven Shapin, and we can expect many more. It is a remarkably resilient concept, being found equally useful by positivists, Marxists, feminists and even post-modernists. As a concept of historical analysis, the Scientific Revolution has also been the one concept that scholars in other fields have borrowed from us, especially through Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with all its talk of paradigms and paradigm shifts. Why has it been so successful? That it conforms to what happened (if it indeed does so) cannot be a sufficient explanation for the success of the concept in the latter 20th century, for all historical concepts have to make their way in the world in which they are deployed. And since all periodizations of the past by historians produce as many explanatory problems as they solve, the reasons for the success of particular concepts requires more local explanation. This is what I shall be exploring.

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