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At the beginning of the sixteenth century the King of Spain decided that navigation to the West Indies would be safer if the charts used by the pilots were regulated. He ordered that a central pattern map be constructed, to be copied at need for the pilots to use when navigating. This began an extended debate over what a sea chart should be, and whether this decision should rest with pilots and their practical knowledge (and practical requirements), or with cosmographers and their theoretical understanding. No one disputed that pattern maps should be made by cosmographers, experts in astronomy and geography who often worked as cartographers. And no one disputed that in the absence of deliberate surveying expeditions the basic geographic information had to come from pilots, since they were the ones who had actually been to the places in question, though some of the cosmographers did question their reliability as reporters. What no one could agree upon was what to do when the two disagreed, either about specific information or about how it could best be represented. In this paper I will examine the construction and use of the pattern map of 1536, which was made by a committee of cosmographers. This map was controversial from the beginning because the cosmographers could not agree even among themselves, citing contradictory information and the lack of clear criteria for deciding who to trust. To break the deadlock they were eventually ordered to decide every point by majority vote, a solution that pleased no one and sent one cosmographer off to court to complain to higher authorities. Even after the map was eventually finished, and reluctantly approved by the remainder of the cosmographers, many pilots refused to use it, saying that it was false and dangerous. Instead they used maps surreptitiously supplied by one of the cosmographers. This dispute illuminates profound disagreements between the pilots and the cosmographers both about the information to be used in constructing maps, and about the ways in which the maps were to be used. The cosmographers believed in the primacy of theoretical knowledge, and argued that even eye-witness experience could not be trusted unless the witness truly understood what he saw. Since the pilots often lacked such understanding, their reports, said the cosmographers, should not be believed. Similarly, the cosmographers believed that the purpose of the pattern map was to correctly portray the lands in question in relation to one another˜ to make a mirror of the world. For the pilots, however, the maps were not mirrors but tools, to be used in getting from one place to another. If, as they argued, this could be best done by distorting the maps, the literal untruth of the resulting map should not diminish its utility. In this paper I will use the debates surrounding the pattern map to explore these deep disagreements between the practitioners of navigation and the theoreticians.

Michael Barfoot and James Force, among others, have argued that David Hume was well acquainted with the scientific culture of his time. I will point to additional evidence in support of this interpretation and, in particular, highlight Hume's interests in experimental science. More significantly, I will suggest areas where these interests seeped into Hume's writings on economics, particularly his thought experiments in monetary economics and his general conception of the monetary fluid. Hume's ability to climb up several rungs on the ladder of monetary abstraction is also partly attributed to his strong commitment to the analogies with fluids. I will propose that recent experiments on the electrical fluid, and not just hydrostatics, may have prompted Hume to be so inventive in his economic theories.

George John Romanes, a major figure in the history of biology for his discoveries in animal physiology and intelligence, was a strong advocate of Darwinian evolution at a time when Darwin's work was under attack by not only by anti-evolutionists but by naturalists who questioned its key idea, natural selection. In becoming Darwin's staunchest supporter, he gained entry to the British scientific establishment. With this enhanced status, he felt encourage to contribute articles on evolution and animal physiology to Nineteenth Century, Contemporary Review, Fortnightly Review as well as other popular journals. Much of his popular writing took on a Darwinian theme as he used the opportunity to present Darwin's concept of evolution before the general public. Romanes published his work in the same forum that Thomas Henry Huxley and other scientific writers' work appeared, but his writing did not have strong appeal. Although he had strong opinions about such popular movements as spiritualism and anti-vivisection, he did not actively write on these subjects. His correspondence with Darwin reveals that he and his fellow animal physiologist believed that the best way of dealing with the anti-vivisectionists was to ignore them. When this tactic failed, Romanes organized support for animal research, serving as one of the founders of the Physiological Society. The significance of Romanes's popular work is that it took place during a period when science was becoming increasingly professionalized, and Romanes helped inform the public about these issues during this critical time.

The field of high-energy physics saw early applications of the computer as a scientific instrument, both for data analysis and as a controller of the accelerator and other detectors. The transfer of this technology from wartime military laboratories to peacetime high-energy physics laboratories shows how Enrico Fermi, Luis Alvarez, Richard Feynmann and John von Neumann conceived of the computer as a scientific instrument in high-energy physics, and how the computer became part of a technical complex characteristic of high-energy physics laboratories.

This paper explores some of the relations between physics and economics in the decades around the Second World War. It is argued that an important shift takes place in this period, as economic models of stock market prices change from the essentially deterministic to the essentially random. This shift is expressed through the increasing importance of "Brownian motion" as a model for changes in prices. In addition, it is suggested that an accompanying change occurs in the idea of rational economic behavior. While randomness and rationality were considered anti-thetical in the nineteenth century, by the 1950's they become inextricably intertwined, as the perfectly rational economic market becomes precisely that one that can be described in terms of random walks. It is thus hoped that by concentrating on the history of attempts to apply a specific physical model to the solution of an economic problem, a broader cultural shift in the meanings of statistical behavior in the twentieth century may be discerned.

Bernie Goldstein's many accomplishments include ground-breaking work on al-Bitruji's homocentric system, on Levi ben Gerson, and on the cosmological tradition indebted to Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses, as well as a host of cognate studies at the interface between physical and the mathematical approaches to astronomy. This paper offers a brief glimpse of the considerable interest of egiomontanus's Defense of Theon against George of Trebizond by highlighting and inter-relating themes that resonate with Goldstein's published work and ongoing research. These include the tension in Regiomontanus's work between approaches to astronomy derived from the Almagest, Peurbach's Theoricae novae planetarum, and Regiomontanus's own longstanding homocentric concerns.

This paper will show how Marianne North, known for her prolific production of botanical paintings housed in the North Gallery at Kew Gardens, utilized her artistic abilities to access a niche for herself within the scientific community. Working ostensibly within the framework of the "feminine" occupation of botanical art, North nevertheless defied the traditions of this art form. In doing so, she created unique botanical works of art that not only gained her respect in scientific circles, but also enabled her to encourage those who viewed her work to re-examine their conceptualization of the natural world and their imperial view of the relationship between nature and civilization.

Victorian wax flower modeling belongs to the cultural history of botany and the history of floral figuration in art. My paper explores wax flower discourses and practices during the 1830s-50s, and focuses on Emma Peachey, teacher, author of The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling (1851), "Artiste to Her Majesty," and supplier of illustrations to botanical lectures.

Literary historians have long recognized Ralph Waldo Emerson's role in shaping nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. It therefore comes as something of a surprise to learn that the essayist and poet began his career with a series of lyceum lectures on natural history. Less than a month after returning from his 1832-33 trip to Europe, Emerson presented a lecture titled "The Uses of Natural History" before the Boston Society of Natural History. "The Uses of Natural History" marks a number of turning points in Emerson's life. Prior to leaving for Europe in December 1832, Emerson had resigned as minister of the Second Church in Boston. "The Uses of Natural History" was the first public lecture of a career that was to last for more than forty years. It is also the first of a series of four lectures on natural history in which Emerson presents the themes that would occupy him for much of his life. (The titles of the other lectures in the series announce these themes: "On the Relation of Man to the Globe," "Water," and "The Naturalist." In this regard one can see Emerson's 1870 University Lectures at Harvard on "The Natural History of Intellect" as the culmination of these early interests). Of particular interest in "The Uses of Natural History" is Emerson's account of his visit to the Jardin des Plantes and the Cabinet of Natural History in Paris in July 1833. Although Emerson had read J. F. W. Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, in which the astronomer argues that the aim of classification is to "interweave all the objects of nature in a close and compact web of mutual relations and dependence," actually seeing such a principle illustrated by the physical arrangement of the Jardin des Plantes and the Cabinet of Natural History came as a revelation to him. While Emerson scholars generally acknowledge the fact that Emerson experienced an epiphany while visiting the Jardin des Plantes, it is less widely understood how this experience shaped Emerson's subsequent thought, both with regard to the way in which he understood his relation to the natural world and with regard to his reading and writing practices. In part one of this paper I discuss Emerson's recognition that "the limits of the possible are enlarged" by the principles of "natural" classification he found exemplified at the Jardin des Plantes. Emerson's moment of insight regarding relation and analogy points to the role of analogy in inquiry. I take up this topic in part two of this paper where Emerson's observations suggest a means of discussing the underlying relationship between the sciences and the humanities.

Before the French Revolution, Honoré Fragonard's garish anatomical models prepared from real human and animal subjects were to be found in collections all over Paris. While the major part of his work remained in the veterinary school at Alfort of which he was the first director, he nevertheless succeeded in selling pieces to various Parisian savants to adorn their natural history cabinets. Characterized by a distinctive aesthetic that would have to be classed as macabre, they were nevertheless collected and displayed as scientific, pedagogic items. In this paper, I explore the space these works occupied somewhere between the ghoulish spectacle of the public execution and the developing medical discipline of anatomy. While the rise in an analytical ideal of anatomical investigation and presentation, and the growth of anatomical classes based on such principles marked the decline of these particular models as scientifically-sanctioned educational tools, their aesthetics continued to exercise a broad appeal, even drawing the admiration of the same 18th-century anatomists who denied their scientific value. Furthermore, these objects existed in scientific and moral contexts that were not clearly distinguished. They not only embodied the artisanal skill in the service of medicine traditionally associated with anatomical models, but also allowed a mise en scène of classical themes or other images with a strong moral content. Thus, drawing on the information available concerning contemporary natural history cabinets, as well as on Fragonard's life and work, I hope to elicit what meanings these anatomical models might have had for their creator, owners and viewers.

Both because of their importance and the fullness of the record, Faraday's researches on electromagnetism continue to attract new scrutiny. His skills as an experimenter, and the limits of his formal mathematical training create special interest in the interplay between observation of phenomena and application of theory in determining his paths of discovery. In this paper, concepts developed in cognitive psychology concerning the interaction between search in the space of experiments and search in the space of theoretical hypotheses are evaluated against the evidence provided by the records of Faraday's decisive experiments that discovered magnetic induction of current in the Autumn and Winter of 1831-32. The analysis is expected to throw light on the processes of conceiving and designing experiments, including the relative importance or unimportance of theory as a basis for experimental design in a particular (but very striking) instance.

Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for elucidating the structure of complex, biologically active molecular structures, most notably penicillin and vitamin B-12, using X ray crystallography as her main technique. In the course of her distinguished career (DH was one of the earliest woman fellows of the Royal Society) she trained many students, as well as visiting scientists from all over the world in her laboratory at Oxford University. About one third of these students and visiting scientists were women, many of whom became independent researchers after working in Hodgkin's research group. One of the less successful students, working on the structure of gramicidin, Margaret Roberts Thatcher made her mark in a wider political arena. Other women students had a remarkable range of careers, from professors at IVY League US universities to innovators in the Third World, since Hodgkin maintained close ties with Chinese and Indian scientists. Continuing previous work by one of us on Hodgkin's career (Abir-Am in Mauskopf, ed., 1993, Chemical Sciences in the Modern World) we have examined the subsequent careers of a number of Hodgkin's female progeny to discover what strategies for success in science she transmitted to them, and how successful was she in training women to become independent and recognized scientists. Particular attention will be given to cross-national comparisons, as well as to historical periods such as before and after the Nobel Prize.

Beginning in the 1920s and until the early 1960s, R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright intensely debated the nature of the evolutionary process and its theoretical representation in population genetics. Fisher believed that evolution occurs on an adaptive landscape with a single peak. Large populations are driven up the peak by natural selection acting on the average excess of single allele substitutions within the population. Alternatively, Wright believed that evolution occurs on an adaptive landscape with many peaks. Small, subdivided populations traverse the landscape via a shifting balance of evolutionary factors including random genetic drift, intrademic selection, and interdemic selection acting on complex genetic interaction systems. Fisher and Wright debated two core issues, reflecting the main differences between their theories: (1) the role of gene interaction in evolution and how to represent it theoretically (2) the structure of populations and, so, the role of random genetic drift in evolution. These issues continue to be debated. Indeed, the debate has recently been rekindled with critical reviews by Jerry A. Coyne, assuming Fisher's role, and Michael J. Wade, assuming Wright's role. Regarding issue (1) there is currently ample theoretical work suggesting that gene interaction is crucial to understanding the relationship between selection and Mendelian heredity. Preliminary results of new molecular techniques for tracking gene interaction across generations suggest a similar conclusion. Regarding issue (2) population geneticists now know that populations are mostly structured. Nevertheless drift is, in general, thought to have little evolutionary effect. The current state of the Fisher-Wright controversy suggests that each scholar is likely to be vindicated on specific points, e.g., Wright on gene interaction and Fisher on drift, but that neither of their general theories is entirely correct. Of course, much work is left to be done. What are the historical implications of the current work on the Fisher-Wright controversy? Historical treatments of the controversy suggest that it ended without resolution, essentially, with Fisher's death in 1962. However, I suggest that the recent work demonstrates that the core issues of the Fisher-Wright controversy continue to be debated in precisely the spirit of the historical principals. That is, the Fisher-Wright debate is ongoing, and that is the way we must understand its history.

As an African-American scientist and entrepreneur of great accomplishment, Percy Lavon Julian (1899-1975) remains little known and virtually unstudied by professional historians. Nevertheless, his career-and in particular his work on steroids-reveals much about the nexus of science, business, and technology in mid-twentieth century America. With comparisons to better known chemical scientists such as Carl Djerassi and R. B. Woodward, this paper explores the ways in which issues of personal identity were intertwined with the career paths and research programs of chemical scientists. In this, questions of personal identity reveal details of the boundaries and relationships between the domains of science, technology, and industry.

The first decade of the 20th century saw a remarkable proliferation of published standards and specifications for industrial materials and products in the United States. The American Society for Testing and Materials, the National Bureau of Standards, and myriad smaller, more specialized bodies founded in this period together issued thousands of written regulations to carry the latest findings of science and engineering to the shopfloor and construction site. These written instruments regulated not only material matters but social ones, delegating responsibility and blame in the productive sphere. Such delegations might be of a vertical nature, in keeping with Tayloristic notions of the upward flow of corporate decision making (firming up divisions between inspectors and "inspected" in a workplace). But the use of standards also achieved lateral attributions of credit and blame, allowing suppliers and users of goods and services to distribute responsibility among themselves. In this latter use, the traditional fixity of scientific knowledge became a liability. The technical procedures embodied in standards, to say nothing of the actual findings of tests and inspections, are all predicated on the idea that science brings into being a fixed body of knowledge about the subject under study. But businesses must function in the realm of reputation, where the immutability of fact can be problematic. Negative test results, or the development of new products or new rivals, might all prompt a business to remake its public identity. Firm, scientifically derived data-about materials, products, or the performance of services-would seem to prohibit such a refashioning. How did standards and other science-based protocols accomplish the task of quality control without constraining the reputational flexibility of American industry? One answer resides in the self-fashioned identity of professional materials inspectors themselves in this period. These experts developed for their emerging discipline a reputation of subjective capacities that configured and transcended the direct application of standards and specifications-the testers' discretionary talents bringing to scientific standards a notably protean quality. This paper considers the formation of materials sciences after 1900 as occupational work that dovetailed perfectly and self-consciously with the conditions under which its commercial clientele had to function.

Perhaps no scientist, and certainly no nineteenth-century scientist, has received as much attention from literary and cultural critics as Charles Darwin. Yet historians seem to be wary of this work, even the best of which must sometimes appear insufficiently sensitive to the details of Darwin's science and its contexts, and perhaps too quick to proclaim the existence of generalized patterns and influences. This paper thus seeks to demonstrate that literary scholarship on Darwin, and the field of literature and science more generally, does indeed have something to offer the historians on whose work we draw. And it does so by taking up the most unpromising candidate, at least from the literary and cultural perspective, in Darwin's oeuvre, his multi-part taxonomic Mongraph on barnacles (1851, 1854). Tracing the mythic and scientific history of barnacles, I first sketch the significance of Darwin's research and the ways it both relies on and repudiates traditional conceptions of these creatures. Then I examine some of the cultural implications drawn from Darwin's work as it was communicated to a wider audience, primarily through the flood of popular books on seaside natural history that appeared in the 1850s. Finally, I argue that Charles Dickens's portrait in Little Dorrit (1855-57) of the Barnacle family, the corrupt bureaucrats in control of the Government's notorious "Circumlocution Office," not only reflects an awareness of Darwin's work, but incorporates it into a commentary on the same cultural issues raised by Darwin's popularizers.

In the past decade or so, historians have examined a variety of ways in which Cold War politics, pressures, and culture shaped the development of American science. This paper explores a precursor to this work from the 1960s when academics, politicians, and the public became widely concerned about the relations between the political and academic spheres. In particular, I will explore the debate over scholarly objectivity and the political corruption of research that arose in the wake of Project Camelot, an Army-sponsored multi-million dollar study of revolutionary movements that was cancelled in 1965 on the request of President Johnson.

The late 19th and Early 20th centuries were glory days of Scandinavian Arctic and Antarctic science, particularly the geo sciences. Contemporary uses of Polar science included the construction of national heroes and the articulation of an Arctic destiny and an Arctic mission tainted by Darwinist allusions to strength and civilisatory ability as well as future economic utility of natural resources. In the period between the two world wars a new rationale of Polar science emerged, stressing long term scientific significance, diplomatic and security ambitions, and the monitoring of natural processes and change (climate, glaciers, weather systems). Also, a number of international cooperative efforts were undertaken. The joint Norwegian-Swedish Svalbard expedition in 1931 was an early example, whereas the 1949-1952 Antarctic expedition involved Great Britain as well. The 1957-58 International geophysical Year presents yet another example of international cooperation in the Polar regions. In the present paper I will examine the routes and forms that Scandinavian geoscience took in the Polar areas, and why and to what extent international cooperation presented a valid method of achieving scientific and national goals. I will also discuss what the new rationale and the extensive internationalism, and its rhetoric, meant for the tradition of nationalism and heroism that had been associated with Polar science.

Characterizing the various social groups engaged in science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century presents historians with a semantic and conceptual conundrum. Using the terms professional or amateur with respect to eighteenth-century practitioners projects anachronistic modern categories onto fundamentally different institutional and social arrangements. Professionalization is commonly agreed to have taken place in the mid-nineteenth century however, as Morris Bergman argued in his seminal essay on 'the amateur tradition in British science', "scientific organizations were not inevitably evolving toward modern professional status." Nonetheless, the term amateur was widely used within both the British and continental astronomical communities. In this talk I examine the various contexts in which astronomical practitioners used the word 'amateur' and uncover the multiple meanings attached to the term. Although 'amateur' possessed something of its modern connotation of 'not professional', many of the nuances that have subsequently accrued to the term do not map onto eighteenth-century experience. For example, workers at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and individuals working in private observatories were clearly delineated, although not along the commonly perceived axes of amateur and professional.

My paper explores the ways in which French surgeons in the late eighteenth century grappled with extraordinary cases, especially the so-called 'extraordinary eaters', who consumed non-food items by choice. The tradition of surgical interest in such cases, developing out of a concern to distinguish the ontological terrain of surgeons from that of physicians, was problematised because extraordinary eaters appeared physically normal in many cases. Their otherness could thus only be constructed retrospectively, through the reiteration of common narrative themes, physiognomical descriptions and accounts of dissections. Taking extraordinary eaters as an example will allow me to consider, in more general terms, the tools available for surgeons to negotiate their own identity and agency in surgical encounters, or the ways in which the relations between the surgeon's body and the surgical body were construed.

I examine the development of the idea of a third generation of quarks (the "top" and "bottom" quarks), in order to restore a neglected part of the history of the Standard Model of physics. In 1973, M. Kobayashi and T. Maskawa suggested that a six-quark theory would be able to accommodate the phenomenon of "CP-violation," whereas, given reasonable constraints, no four-quark theory could. Kobayashi and Maskawa's proposal "leapfrogged" the thinking of particle physics at the time, introducing a fifth and sixth quark more than a year before experimenters produced evidence for the fourth quark. When physicists found evidence of a fifth quark in 1977, Kobayashi and Maskawa began to receive wide recognition as the originators of the six quark scheme, although their work had received little attention when it first appeared. Historians have neglected, however, the sources of Kobayashi and Maskawa's work that do not form part of the usual "march of progress" story of twentieth-century particle physics. These sources are both experimental and theoretical. Theoretically, Kobayashi and Maskawa had both come out of the "Nagoya school" of theoretical physics, centering around S. Sakata. Many of the Nagoya theorists subscribed to a version of dialectical materialism. Nature, as they saw it, possesses a dialectical structure of endless strata, each stratum being governed by distinctive, but approximate, laws, to be refined by unearthing a deeper level of structure. Drawing upon Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and Engels' Dialektik der Natur, they stressed the "inexhaustibility" of particles-one could always find further structure. The Nagoya school had produced important theoretical advances, particularly the SU(3) classification of the mesons. In 1956 Sakata proposed a model of the baryons that was also an SU(3) classification, but represented the proton, neutron, and lambda baryons as fundamental, relative to the other known baryons. The "Nagoya model" generalized this so as to unify it with the leptons (electron, muon, and neutrino). The Nagoya model introduced a fourth fundamental strongly interacting particle (a kind of proto-quark) in 1962. Although not explicit proponents of dialectical materialism, Kobayashi and Maskawa were deeply involved in work on the Nagoya model. There were two experimental findings motivating Kobayashi and Maskawa's 1973 paper. The 1964 discovery of CP violation was of great importance in the development of physical theory, and is well-documented. The discovery of an unusual cosmic ray event by a Japanese group in 1971 has been nearly forgotten, however. Almost completely unnoticed in the U.S. and Europe, the event was seized upon by Japanese, who interpreted it as the missing fourth baryon of the Nagoya model. A flurry of papers appeared in Japanese journals discussing the "X-particle," as it came to be known, and four-baryon "quartet" theories in general. Kobayashi and Maskawa appeared as authors on several papers on the X-particle and quartet theories, culminating in their 1973 paper. I describe these developments, showing how events of great contemporary importance have become read out of historical accounts. I also examine the nature of the influence of the Nagoya school and the X-particle discovery on the development of physical theory. In one of the few historical discussions of the Nagoya theorists, physicist Yuval Ne'eman has described their adherence to dialectical materialism as a quasi-religious dogmatism. I argue that it is better understood as the pursuit of what Gerald Holton has called a "thematic hypothesis," not directly testable by means of experimental evidence, but playing a significant role in determining the type of theory that a physicist is willing to consider.

In this paper I will show that the introduction of a probabilistic and statistical way of thinking in heredity around 1900 made it possible to make important steps forward. Such an approach fitted very well with a Mendelian framework. I will illustrate that with two examples. In 1889 Hugo de Vries published his hereditary theory: Intracullulare Pangenesis. In 1894 he explicitly raised his pangenes in a paper in which he used elements from probability theory for the first time. This new approach, inspired by Quetelet's and Galton's work, provided him with an instrument to relate his experimental results to his pangene theory. A line of research that he had already developed some years before was the study of hybrids. Without being aware of Mendel's work, he had discovered the Mendelian laws already in or before 1896 by applying newly obtained insights from probability theory to his research. After the rediscovery of Mendel's laws, there was difference of opinion which phenomena could be explained by these laws. One controversy was the heredity of continuous characters. A hypothesis to bring the continuous laws within the domain of Mendelian genetics was the multiple factor hypothesis. Tine Tammes, who had worked at De Vrie's institute in 1898 for some months, provided the most important contribution to prove the "multiple factory theory." She could attain this result by interpreting her experimental results in more probabilistic terms than other researchers did. And that links her work to that of Hugo de Vries who had also fruitfully applied probabilistic reasoning.

This paper argues that a relationship existed between the science of mechanics and the mechanization of Western military culture during the 16th and 17th centuries. As described in the "Military Revolution" debates, this culture was reflected by the growing military value placed on uniformity, interchangeability, mathematical reasoning, and group discipline. It was articulated physically by the geometrically optimized trace italienne fortress and siege operations, as well as the organization of pike, arquebus or musket troops through close-order drill and strictly maintained geometrical formations. Weber, Mumford and Foucault have argued that such early modern forces of destruction helped inspire the modern "forces of production." The astonishing military success Western European powers enjoyed on a global scale during the 18th and 19th centuries also relied on this uniquely Western military culture. By linking this fundamental component of modernity to critical developments of the Scientific Revolution, I will argue that the cultural meaning of early modern mechanics involved not only control over the natural world, but also control over the social world. I will commence by examining the development of Euclidean geometry during the 16th century as a language initially of the siege warfare in Northern Italy, followed by the field warfare of Spain and the Northern Provinces. Then I will note how the most prominent military reformers of that era personally embraced mechanics as an essential foundation for effective military leadership. They include the Duke of Parma, Maurice of Nassau, the Marquis de Spinola, Gustavus Adolphus, and Montecuccoli. The mechanistic military culture, in other words, involved not just the material domain of gunpowder weaponry, infantry bodies and fortress walls, but also the intellectual domain of the commanders‚ minds. Then I will observe how the early modern military culture in turn shaped the science of mechanics. The examples include the motivation Galileo received from the fundamental artillery questions, and how Descartes‚ construction of mechanical philosophy was sparked while studying military engineering in the army of Maurice of Nassau and Simon Stevin. I will conclude by observing how the meaning of mechanics became synonymous with military power for those who sought to adopt the Western art of war. These include Peter the Great of Russia, Selim III of the Ottoman Empire, and Mohammed Ali of Egypt.

In early modern Augsburg the discourse on the persona of the "charlatan, " a term which was predominantly used for those individuals in the medical world who lacked formal medical qualification, is extremely blurred. It lacks any precise sociological constituency, as the range of people who could be accused of charlatanism was extensive. A closer look at their knowledge and practices also reveals that their capacity in those areas often did not differ from those of authorized town practitioners. It has been argued that "charlatans" were despised and caricatured not only because they posed a threat to the corporative community's livelihood, but also because they represented an affront to the moral and social order. The learned members of the collegial medicum in early modern Augsburg, for example, deployed the blueprint of the "charlatan" as a means of denigrating any medical practitioners who seemed to threaten their epistemological, corporate, or moral standing. Although this seems certainly correct, one has to add that learned physicians were not alone in labeling their competitors in the medical market-place as "charlatans. " An analysis of different law suits filed by the Augsburg medical establishment against itinerant healers show that so-called charlatans had considerable self-confidence and pride in their knowledge and practice, and that they themselves employed the blueprint of the "charlatan" to criticize and condemn the practice both of their licensed Augsburg competitors as well as other itinerant healers. In my paper I shall argue that not only was the notion of the "charlatan" used to defend the moral and social order of the licensed practitioners and increase their chances in the fierce competition of the early modern medical marketplace. It was also a necessary means of ideological self-justification and self-fashioning for different practitioners as distinct groups and individuals within the town community. By distancing themselves from the "dangerous other" (the "charlatan" or "quack"), the different healers constantly constructed and reproduced their professional identity.

In the years immediately following Sputnik, American science received a huge infusion of cash and a mandate from the federal government to "catch up with the Russians." One field, origin of life research, went from the relative obscurity of a few scattered research groups to a high-profile new discipline called Exobiology during these years. One of the most prominent forces catalyzing this transformation was the patronage of NASA, the epitome of Cold War science institutions. I will sketch the broad outlines of the consolidation of this new discipline and also explore some of the many and complex effects NASA patronage had on the origin of life research agenda. Interdisciplinary research that would have had very little chance of funding from NSF or NIH got a much more favorable hearing at NASA, for example. Some of the other ways this played out will be explored by comparing the research from 1953-1972 of two prominent but antagonistic groups, those of Sidney Fox and of Stanley Miller.

In this paper, I examine the intersection of gender and nationalism in the making of India's first women scientists through a collective biography of women scientists in C.V. Raman's laboratory. C.V. Raman was India's foremost physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930. The entry of Lalitha Chandrasekhar, Sunanda Bai, and Anna Mani into his laboratory in the 1930s marked the hesitant acceptance of women in the higher echelons of science. The lives and works of these women who are at once traditional and modern--traditional in their demeanor, modern in their social outlook--reveal the process of reconstitution of gender relations in India. My study illustrates that while women's entry into such male-dominated fields as physics was initially facilitated by their adherence to a strict moral code, their intellectual and aesthetic development served eventually to undermine the ubiquitous moral regulation of women by the guardians of the Indian society. It also suggests that nationalist ideology coupled with insistent (although marginal) voices demanding equity in education, although instrumental in creating new opportunities for women in this pre-feminist era, precluded the construction of a self-conscious and affirmative "alternative identity" as women scientists.

In order to prepare graduate students in the University of Maryland Baltimore County's Public History Track for careers beyond academe, alternatives to the traditional exams and term papers are more suitable learning experiences and serve as useful elements for a student's dossier. So too, some substantial piece of alternative work may be more useful than the traditional M.A. Thesis. Press kits, brochures, exhibits, archival finding aids, contract proposals, living history scripts, historic site assessments, as well as web sites and other new media are among the alternative projects UMBC students have carried out. We as scholar-educators have a well-developed routine for helping our students generate appropriate topics for term papers, theses, and dissertations. We also have fairly clear expectations of scope and quality to apply in evaluating such traditional projects. These alternative projects, however, present difficulties in conception, execution, and evaluation. This paper considers the benefits and pitfalls of alternative literary forms of history.

At the end of the 17th century, natural philosophers aspired to participate in the fashionable culture of the cosmopolitan cities of Europe and Britain. The fashion for the physical sciences over the next hundred years fueled demand for natural philosophy books accessible to non-specialists. Conversely, the appeal these subjects held for readers in polite society contributed to the growing cultural legitimacy enjoyed by the sciences. Men of science wrote for an heterogeneous "public" comprised variously of ladies and gentlemen, provincial amateurs, bourgeois householders, men and women of letters, journal subscribers, government officials, and other men of science. Many of these authors sought the approbation of readers of discerning taste, partly as a way of selling books, but also as a way of making reputations in the rarefied atmosphere of the social and cultural elite. A book's success was measured by how rapidly an edition disappeared from the booksellers' shelves, but also by how much talk it stimulated in the press and in polite conversations. This paper deals with two complementary historical processes: the dissemination of scientific ideas and ideals into polite and sociable circles, and the legitimation of natural philosophy by social elites. It compares the style and reception of natural philosophy books for these audiences in England and France. Although there were significant overlaps in intellectual fashions in these two places, authors also made interesting distinctions between the image of science, and its moral valence, for English and French readers.

Robert Oppenheimer was simultaneously an insider and an outsider. Despite his influence as a scientific advisor after the war, he was never fully incorporated into America's scientific-political establishment. This was demonstrated by his political sacrifice at the hands of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954. This paper examines Oppenheimer's self-cultivation and the relation of this to cultural models of Bildung and of gentility. I argue that the active shaping of self played a key role in Oppenheimer's acquisition of social status and authority. Tracing Oppenheimer's career from student to director of Los Alamos to scientific advisor, I argue that the presentation of refinement and cultivation was vital to Oppenheimer in overcoming social barriers, particularly, in his early career, anti-Semitism, and in gaining access to elite groups and institutions. It was at Los Alamos that Oppenheimer's cultivated persona was most celebrated and I examine its significance in relation to the social, technical and organizational problems of that place. As advisor and scientific celebrity after the war, Oppenheimer combined the, usually distinct social types of 'expert' and 'cultivated man'. However, the cultural homogenization of the post-war years rendered this an uneasy combination. Oppenheimer's intellectual persona was increasingly at odds with, and threatening to the powerful, but narrow, conception of expertise being worked out in the post-war era.

In 1856, Faraday returned to a concern first expressed in his earliest papers and notebooks the action of matter on light. In this research, partly conducted using microscopical techniques, he sought to examine the optical effects of thin films of matter and colloidal suspensions on light. This quickly led him to consider the limits of microscopical vision, and he subsequently turned to chemical techniques. Two aspects of this research program are of interest first, it is a relatively late (and mostly unsuccessful) program, and thus sheds light on the social and psychological characteristics of failure in scientific endeavors, and , second, it concludes a series of attempts to extend and generalize his "force-centered" account of field phenomena, thus further revealing the nature of his "metacognitive" strategic decisions in research. These decisions can be understood within the context of recent descriptions of British science during this period.

This paper will describe the reconstruction of Liebig's apparatus and procedure for the combustion analysis of organic compounds which, after its introduction in 1831, became a standard tool of organic analysis. The reconstructed apparatus was used to analyze several of the pharmacologically-active alkaloids whose elemental compositions and "molecular formulas" were reported to Liebig in his important 1831 publication. The accuracy of the analytical technique for carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen will be assessed and the reconstructed results will be compared to Liebig's. The comparison will focus attention on the experimental errors inherent in this technique, on many of the methodological decisions Liebig was forced to make, and on the degree to which theoretical commitments shaped the interpretation of his quantitative results.

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