St Louis Program

Registration

Need a Roommate?

Exhibitor Information

About St. Louis

Please note that these abstracts are subject to change. All abstracts will be printed in the final meeting program. If you would like to make corrections, please e-mail the changes to hssexec@u.washington.edu by 25 May!

Dong-Won Kim KAIST
Australians and Canadians at the Cavendish Laboratory in the Early Twentieth Century

This presentation aims to analyze the activities of Australian and Canadian researchers at the Cavendish Laboratory in the early twentieth century. From its beginnings, the Cavendish provided the former British colonies of Australia and Canada with prominent teachers, notably R. Threlfall and W. H. Bragg (Australia) and E. Rutherford (Canada). Later, the Cavendish also offered these countries a fertile training ground for advanced physics students. The "Cavendish connection" clearly was crucial to the development of the Australian and Canadian physics communities. But, how did it start? Which Australians and Canadians traveled to the Cavendish and what were their purposes in doing so? What effects did the Cavendish have on their learning and future career patterns? Finally, what influences did the Cavendish Laboratory ultimately exert on these two former British colonies?

Ki-heung Kim Science Studies Unit, The University of Edinburgh
Controversy on the Nature of the Scrapie Agent in the 1960s

Although the so-called madcow disease is a very controversial disease in current Britain, its prototype known as scrapie and occurring in sheep has a long history in Britain and Europe. The first official records of scrapie in Britain date back to 1752. Until the 1960s, there had been no full-scale scientific research into this mysterious and fatal disease. During the 1940s and 1950s, biologists and veterinarians attempted to uncover the nature of this disease in terms of conventional biological and veterinarian methods, but the result was total failure. However, in the 1960s, some groups of scientists began to conduct scientific enquiries in Britain. There were two main centres of scrapie research, and they produced significant speculations as to the nature of this disease during the 1960s one was the Edinburgh-based research group, and the other was at Compton, England. Each scientific community produced opposite scientific speculations of the nature of the disease based upon their radiobiological experiment the latter group speculated that there was no nucleic acid components in the agent of scrapie, to the contrary, the former group claimed that though the agent was too small to detect, the pathogenesis of the disease showed it to have a certain type of nucleic acid structure. This controversy provides a sort of prototype for current disputes on the nature of mad-cow disease. In this paper I will describe what the two groups achieved within this subject and why they produced such opposing theories. In this controversy, many peripheral, but critical factors, e.g., disciplinary background, institutional competitions, styles of doing science and so on, were involved and influenced to make consensus of this subject. I also examine these factors in my paper.

Charlotte Klonk University of Warwick
Artful Science: Natural History and its Images in Eighteenth-Century

Europe In the eighteenth century the boundaries between art and science were not yet clearly marked. The many sumptuous publication produced by geologists give an indication of the breadth of the educated public's interest in scientific research. These publications were illustrated with views which drew on contemporary artistic conventions for the depiction of nature. The implications of these conventions often stood in blatant contradiction with the theories they illustrated, as I shall show in the case of the first volumes of Buffon's Histoire naturelle. In the course of the eighteenth century, the theories of natural historians themselves increasingly came to influence landscape art, however. It is often forgotten that it was natural historians such as the Swiss Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, who first adapted the previously purely literary category of the sublime not only to convey the vast character of mountains with their dreadful precipices and irregular features, but also to give visual expression to their temporal dimension. The mountains were believed to be the residues of the first ages of history and the aesthetic of the sublime was used to convey the huge gulf in time that separates the contemporary observer from the formative events in the earth's history. What distinguishes eighteenth-century geological representations, including the diagrammatic depictions which came into use as the century developed, from their nineteenth-century successors is the way in which the former show successive stages in the history of the earth through the representation of immediately visible phenomena rather than by the conventional abstractions of later geological maps and stratigraphic depictions. What brought art and science together in the eighteenth century was their common quest for knowledge of nature within the realm of the senses. When this common ground disappeared there would never again be an aesthetic within which all three constituencies, the scientists, artists and the broader public, could represent and comprehend the earth's long history.

Juozas A. Krikstopaitis and Romualdas Dviedrys Polytechnic University
History of Science behind the Iron Curtain in the Baltic Nations

The three Baltic states have been active in the field of history of science for the past fifty years. A major turning point was the inauguration in 1958 of bi-annual history of science conferences rotating among the three countries. Since 1990 it has attracted scholars from western Europe and with it, a more frequent use of English or German languages at our meetings. The Acta historiae scientiarum baltica is published in Riga and has been the main vehicle for publishing, in addition to a series of national publications in the national languages. In 1993, the Baltic Association of the History and Philosophy of Science became a member of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science. And starting with fall semester of 1999, Lithuania was the first Baltic state to introduce a Master’s degree program in the History and Philosophy of Science. The program took some ideas from the United States and eventually, given time and resources, may develop into a full Ph. D. program. It is located at the Kaunas Technological University and its first graduating class will have about a dozen students. In Lithuania, during the Soviet occupation, history of science was a vehicle for resisting soviet ideology and russification of society. That function is no longer a prime interest of the rising generation of historians of science since Lithuania’s independence achieved in 1991.

Russell M. Lawson Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics
The Pious Scientist: Jeremy Belknap, the New Science, and Christianity

Eighteenth-century New England was a center of controversy respecting the challenge of the New Science to traditional Christian assumptions of God's active will and man's uncertain fate. Jeremy Belknap (1744-1798) was an Enlightenment thinker who tried to maintain Christian legitimacy notwithstanding the attacks of Deists and other skeptics. Belknap was a geographer, historian, biographer, and northern New England's most accomplished naturalist. Scientific study forced Belknap, a Congregational clergyman, to reconsider the Calvinist dogma upon which he was raised. Navigating his way between the Scylla of Old Light doubt and the Charybdis of New Light enthusiasm, Belknap tried to bring empirical methods to bear on the Gospels. He sought to reinterpret human nature according to his assumption of divine goodness. In his natural History of New Hampshire Belknap forced the hand of natural theologians to reveal just how Nature, the Creation, is a mirror of God the Creator. However much inquirers then and now scoff at Belknap's integration of faith and reason, he was satisfied that the sine qua non of the scientific enterprise, and the most important characteristic of the scientist, was piety.

André R. LeBlanc Université du Québec à Montréal
The Problem of Post-hypnotic Suggestion in France, 1884-1896

The first half of this paper narrates how the concept of dissociation originated as a solution to the problem of post-hypnotic suggestion. The second half examines the logic of this solution and proposes that it may be radically false. In 1884, the philosopher Paul Janet (1823-1899) introduced the problem of post-hypnotic suggestion. Give a hypnotic subject the post-hypnotic command to return in 13 days. Awake, the subject remembers nothing yet he nonetheless fulfills the command to return. The problem then is this: how does the subject count 13 days without knowing it? The philosopher and psychologist, Pierre Janet (Paul's nephew) (1859-1947) proposed the concept of dissociation as a solution in 1886. He argued that a second consciousness kept track of time outside the awareness of the subject's main consciousness. This was the origin of the concept of dissociation, which has become so prominent in recent years with the epidemic of multiple personality disorder, renamed dissociative identity disorder in 1994. In analyzing the concept of dissociation, I take up a debate between the Belgian philosopher Joseph Delboeuf (1831-1896) and the French physiologist H. Beaunis (1830-1921) over the implications of certain post-hypnotic suggestions for our belief in the possibility of free will. I attempt to show that one of the consequences of Delboeuf's argumentation is to demonstrate a logical flow both in the concept of dissociation and also in the associated theory, propounded by Janet and others, that memories of trauma can be forgotten yet affect our actions and thoughts.

Daryn R. Lehoux University of Toronto
Astronomy and Weather Prediction in Ancient Egypt

This paper deals with the Saft el-Henna Naos published by Christian Leitz (in his 'Tagewahlerei'). I show that the Naos preserves for us an otherwise almost unattested Egyptian interest in astronomical weather prediction. It uses observation of the fixed stars to forecast rain, heat, the nile flood, etc. It also contains predictions of the prevalence of certain diseases at particular times of year. A close analysis of these passages reaveals that the author(s) of the Naos text believed that the fixed stars, rather than simply indicating the possibility of these atmospheric and disease phenomena, actually caused these events on earth. This causal relationship will be fleshed out as much as possible, and the Naos text will be compared and contrasted to other Egyptian texts, in particular the Calendar of Lucky and Unlucky days, and the Autobiography of Harkhebi.

Rhona G. Leibel Metropolitan State University
Epistemic Disunity in the Study of International Relations: Assessing Interwar Idealism

The discipline I investigate is political science, and more specifically, the sub-field of international relations. As a community of scholars who purport to produce politically neutral models of the complexly patterned global system, but whose work is often used as the basis for justification of state action, this is an intriguing science to track historically. What has counted as legitimate knowledge when why? One theme that has both defined the discipline and kept sub-groups at odds with each other has been the centrality of the political realist research program. The larger project I am involved in is to see in which ways it makes sense to speak of a unified vs a disunified conception of knowledge in this discipline. I do this by mapping out the vagaries of acceptance and rejection of the realist program, both across sub-groups and over time. What I do in this paper is lay out the academic writings of the scholar/policy-maker most identified with the group long dismissed by much of the discipline as the antithesis of an acceptable realist research program This group of actually very disparate scholars, 'idealists', are often represented by the work of Woodrow Wilson. I argue that in Wilson's academic work, he can best be understood not as having failed to be 'scientific', as realists charge, but as having a conception of explanation and justification different from those that underlie the realist research programs. I end the paper by raising the question of whether assuming the possibility of disparate notions of explanation in science in general, and in their own discipline in particular, would have been useful to the discipline as it attempted, but failed, to explain the radical global changes of the 1980's

Martin Lengwiler University of Zurich
Welfare State and Risk Society - The historical Dimension of Current Risk Debates

Focusing on the discussions in Germany and Switzerland, the paper argues that the parameters of contemporary debates over the notion of health risks have been determined by the perception of risk developed by the Welfare institutions of a number of European states after the turn of the century. The history of the scientific conception of health risks is marked by three different stages, all linked to Welfare institutions. Before WW1, risk was predominantly a technical and mechanical term, closely related to the prevention of industrial accidents, and defined by engineers. Thus, this conception of risk was more practical than scientifical. The second period, after WW1, led to the first scientific conceptions of risk within occupational hygiene and industrial medicine. As the case of silicosis shows, this scientific conception of risk was in fact part of a new conception of illness, based on statistical evidence and probabilistic calculations. The third period, after WW2, was marked by the rise of social medicine and its more generalized conception of health risks. Together with the development of public health institutions, knowledge about risk and risk prevention was popularized by a series of health campaigns which eventually led to the current public concerns about health risks. The paper argues that there would be no Risk society without the history of the Welfare state. Welfare institutions were among the first to grasp scientifically the future of individuals as well as of societies. Thus, this paper is a first step, too, towards a history of the future, seen as a set of conceptions and ideas on future events.

Constance A. Malpas Princeton University
Framing the Master Narrative: Museological and Bibliographic Approaches to the Organization of Knowledge

The proposed paper examines the construction of disciplinary meta-narratives in continental and Anglo-American histories of science and medicine in the early part of the twentieth century, focusing in particular upon the place of museological and bibliographic classifications in the formulation and articulation of an authoritative canon of "master works." I am interested here in developing themes explored in the work of Tore Frangsmyr, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Anne Rasmussen (among others) on the visual and verbal rhetoric of expository narratives embodied in the "universal exhibitions" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the sweeping bibliographic surveys produced by Sarton, Osler, Garrison, and others in the same period. It is my purpose in this paper to offer an account of how the universalizing master narratives of works like Sarton's Guide to the History of Science and Osler's Bibliotheca Osleriana shaped (and were, in turn, shaped by) the ideological and institutional contexts in which they were elaborated. Specifically, I mean to examine how the spatial and conceptual organization of contemporary museological expositions (e.g., the development of a comprehensive classification of the "works of all nations") gave shape to the new disciplinary histories of science and medicine.

Ben Marsden University of Aberdeen
The Professional and Professorial: Engineering under Cover in the Early Victorian Universities

Studies of academic training for engineers in nineteenth century Britain have concentrated fruitfully upon the periods following either the Great Exhibition (1851) or the Paris Exhibition (1867). Debates have consequently tended to focus upon a late nineteenth century 'age of inquiries' into the nature of technical and scientific education, construed as remedial action for long-term comparative economic decline. In this paper I consider the rapid formation of classes, departments and professorial chairs of engineering in most British universities at an earlier time. The late 1830s and early 1840s constituted a time of dire economic malaise, extreme social unrest - and signficant change in the university provision of technical education. Specifically, between 1837 and 1842 there was a cascade of new classes for engineers in Durham, Cambridge, University College London, King's College London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Trinity College Dublin and an independent "College for Civil Engineers" in London's Kentish Town. Academic change was motivated both by the promise and the threat of political, administrative and social reform. Engineering academics shaped their professorial practice to meet local circumstances, structures and markets, even as they sought to manufacture secular utilitarian "scientific professionals" or to socialize high ranking Christian gentlemanly professionals. There was competition between institutions and amongst professors as the occupants of science chairs sought alternately to block and to promote the academic training of engineering youth. In order to show the nature of the teaching of engineering at this time of innovation I outline the prosopography and practice of the professorial engineers. I further examine the relationship between the professorial engineer, the student or aspirant engineers, and the profession of engineering. I suggest that the heterogeneity of the engineering profession was matched by the multiple manners of getting to be a professional engineer. In a time of flux for the young Institution of Civil Engineers (founded in 1818 and chartered a decade later), there was ample scope for re-routing the paths to professionalism - or for making substantially new paths. Those promoting bookish, theoretical and gentlemanly civil engineering 'under cover' exploited parallels between the young hitherto apparently unlearned profession of engineering and the ancient learned professions, particularly the legal, medical and clerical professions. For these advocates the university class-room was, henceforth, to be an essential passage point on the educational itinerary of the professional engineer. In making such claims, the professorial engineers and their allies implied a re-evaluation of the authority vested in the ICE, a body which purported, alone, to define and represent the profession. Finally, I offer some suggestions on how examining the professional and the professorial engineering of the late 1830s and early 1840s might revise an older school of histories of academic engineering and technical education. First, accounts couched in terms of the implementation (or non-implementation) of state-intervention have to some extent obscured the importance of the micro-political agency of the largely self-governed and self-financed early Victorian University. Second, as this and many other studies show, the term "profession" is clearly useful as a way of structuring narratives of academic engineering: but by stressing its employment as an actor's category, rather than seeking to impose general definitions, analysts can witness the diversity and the richness of the early nineteenth century engineering "profession" as a practice which might variously be "scientific", "gentlemanly", "Christian", on a par with the learned professions, or indeed any combination of these. Recognising heterogeneity in engineering profession and tuition allows us further to undermine the myths that universities were univocally opposed to engineering education, that "science", or even science professors, uniformly favoured it, or that training for British engineers in the nineteenth century was "better" in so far as it was "more scientific" (perhaps following German or French models). Science, of course, has its own history, and the history of academic engineering education can best be understood by taking this fully into account.

Linda C. McCabe
Origins of the Cultural Image of the Cave Man

Neandertals have been subjected to insults since their introduction to the scientific world in 1857. The popular representation of the Cave Man contradicts current scientific thought regarding Neandertals and interferes with the public's understanding of human evolution. Some scientists attempting to identify the source of this negative imagery have blamed Marcellin Boule. This study puts the origins of the Cave Man icon into an historical context and shows that it is far more complex than the work of one man. Procedure: Four periodicals (Harper's New Monthly Magazine Harper's Weekly, Illustrated London News, and Punch) were surveyed from August 1856 until December 1923 for relevant images. These images were classified into categories such as: Wild Men, Hercules, Africans, Australians, caricatures of Charles Darwin with monkeys and Cave Man images. Findings: The first identified Cave Man caricature was in 1881, but it was not until 1893 that a stylistic convention surrounding the Cave Man started in earnest. The addition of a woman being dragged by the hair was not identified until Buster Keaton's movie "The Three Ages of Man" in 1923. Conclusions: The Cave Man Icon had many influences which includes: a long artistic tradition of depicting primitiveness by hairiness, wearing animal skins, carrying clubs as weapons and living in caves; a conscious rejection of Darwin's theories of evolution; the influence of physiognomy and phrenology; and prevailing racist attitudes of the day, including stories of violent bride capture by Australian Aborigines.

Susan McMahon University of Alberta
Inventing Botany at the Royal Society

By the late seventeenth century, a community of natural historians consistently began to identify themselves as botanists and their enterprise as botany. By 1690, there were more individuals actively engaged in this endeavour in England than elsewhere in Europe indeed the Royal Society had entered what one recent historian of the Society refers to as a period of Kuhnian 'normal science'. This represents the period during which the natural history project of John Ray F.R.S. (1627-1705) became fully established. My paper will consider the disciplinary transformation of natural history into the single agreed upon activity of Raian botany, which especially included the proper conduct of botanists, methodology and textual presentation, development of a working technical vocabulary, preoccupation with taxonomy, and an appropriate reward system. In addition, dedicated research and teaching facilities were established for training and educating botanists in the correct tradition. Raian natural history also became established as a powerful model for respectable Anglican activity and a legitimate expression of religious piety, which further reinforced the practice of botany in eighteenth century English society.

Jill G. Morawski Wesleyan University
Tales of Sperm: The Storied Historiography of Artificial Insemination

The history of the reproductive sciences and medicine has largely been a history of knowledge about female physiology and function. The minimal attention to male reproductive processes, including a virtual absence of monographic studies on the subject, indicates a partial historiography that re-inscribes the cultural associations linking women to reproduction and the body. However marginal men's reproduction is in these histories, it has been the object of substantial scientific scrutiny and medical intervention. One significant development has been artificial insemination (A.I.), a procedure that at once dispensed with the need for intercourse and altered what Mary O'Brien described as the "social fact of paternity". As part of a project chronicling male reproductive science, I located a number of histories of artificial insemination. Often imbedded in medical journal articles, attached to autobiographies, or appended to medical texts, these historical accounts tell of the procedure's scientific background, notable experiments, and early successes. Although varied in form and published over the period of a century, the accounts employ a historiography that is remarkably consistent in both narrative and rhetorical style. The histories are structured mainly through stories of adventure and alluring mystery: legends of surreptitious uses of semen, deceptions, and long kept medical secrets. In tone and detail, these narratives resemble the lore shared at family reunions - tales of ancestors' daring and clandestine pasts. Especially in the accounts of early practices, the male subjects are practically invisible, represented only by seminal fluids. Thus, the historiography is one of silence as well as secrets, thereby avoiding direct consideration of matters of paternity. Missing too from such adventure narratives are donors, ethics concerns, legal implications, and connections to veterinary science and eugenics ideas.

Scott L. Montgomery
Nativizing Western Science: Two Examples from Japan

Among non-western nations, Japan is perhaps the most advanced in terms of modern scientific and engineering research, and has been so for more than a century. When, how, and in what forms were western scientific ideas taken up and nativized in Japan? Two examples --that of Newtonian theory and the periodic table of the elements-- will be discussed to show how complex the answers are to such questions. For as much as a century, from the mid-18th to mid-19th century, those who might be called "scientists" in Japan were almost universally translators. Translation, not experimentation, was the dominant form of scientific work during this crucial period. Newtonian physics and astronomy entered Japan by means of a translation of a Dutch work that was itself a translation of an English volume by John Keill, a well-known popularizer of Newton. The Japanese rendering of the Dutch work was epochal in the history of Japanese physics, as it established a considerable amount of the basic vocabulary and related concepts that remain in use today. The specific character of this vocabulary, which has some striking aspects compared with its western models, will be outlined. The case of the periodic table of the elements is equally complex. Element titles were assembled from a host of different sources: Chinese, ancient Japanese, Latin, German, and English. All these sources remain in evidence today. They represent an accumulation that directly reflects changing cultural loyalties on the part of Japanese scientists, from the late 18th to the 20th centuries. Even a brief delineation of this process is sufficient to reveal the complex activity involved in nativizing scientific knowledge to different cultural-linguistic settings.

Scott L. Montgomery
Needed Revision in the History of Science and Art: The Case of Jan Van Eyck

Evaluations of the relationship between the history of science and the history of art have expanded significantly in recent years. The role of pictorial representation has been increasingly studied with respect to styles of observation that proved important to scientific uses. One area perhaps too little pursued to date involves pre-Renaissance trends in the naturalistic portrayal, particularly of non-organic phenomena. It is now clear, for example, that one must push back the beginnings of a truly documentary perception of the natural world. The early Netherlandish painter Jan Van Eyck, known for a relatively small number of works performed between 1410 and 1445, makes this certain. Van Eyck provides a remarkable and wholly unparalleled example of naturalistic observation on the twilight of medieval pictorialism. Van Eyck is the first artist in the western world, possibly in the whole of world art, to paint aspects of the inorganic physical universe--astronomical, meteorological, and geologicala--in wholly realistic fashion. Indeed, the degree of realism in his Moon, clouds, and rocks is sufficient to permit a detailed contemporary scientific analysis. A century before Leonardo da Vinci and 200 years before Galileo and Sidereus nuncius, Van Eyck produced works that reveal an impulse to precisely record from nature directly. This raises inevitable questions about the origin of such an impulse at this early date. As a court painter in the employ of Philip the Bold of Burgundy, a somewhat flamboyant patron of intellectual activity, it is possible that Van Eyck was influenced by the Greco-Islamic tradition of natural philosophy and used this to inform the abject materialism in which he lived and worked. His significance reveals that revisions are needed in existing histories of science and art.

Scott L. Montgomery
Translation and the History of Science: An Overdue Subject

Knowledge, whatever its contents, is a mobile form of culture. Beyond any doubt, the transfer of learning has been critical to the building of societies, those we call "modern" most of all. Time and again, the introduction of new concepts and methods--Roman law, the system of Arabic numerals, the sonnet, Newtonian physics, natural selection--has proved the source of new capacities for ordering, directing, and expanding human existence. Placing the knowledge of one people into the hands of another involves the transfer of certain powers: powers of expression in the case of literary or artistic knowledge powers over the patterns and organization of life, in the case of political ideas and, in the case of science, powers of imagination and practice with regard to the material world and uses of it. Such transfer therefore defines a critical historical process: it is what scholars really mean when they speak (and they do so often) of "influence" between different periods or societies. Knowledge is rendered mobile by translation. This is what has made scientific understanding able to cross boundaries of time, place, and culture. Yet, despite its obvious importance, translation has rarely been a sustained topic of investigation among historians of science. Reasons for this may be related to unspoken assumptions about the nature of scientific language, its presumed universality. This belief deserves re-evaluation. It is clear, for example, that successive cultures--Rome, Islam, Persia, India, and Europe--nativized, and therefore left their individual imprint on, Greek astronomy. This suggests that western science is a complex amalgam and may not be identical today in different cultural settings. Such realities make it clear that study of translation as an evolutionary force in the history of science is overdue.

Falk Mueller Carl-von-Ossietzky- University
Experimental Spaces and Conceptual Development in 19th Century Gas Discharge Physics

In my work I try to trace some developments in gas discharge research in the second half of the 19th century. What I have been concentrating on has mainly been the historical creation of material (experimental, instrumental) environments in which gas discharge phenomena were produced, investigated and constituted as a physical phenomenon by researchers like Johann Wilhelm Hittorf or William Crookes. In the beginning of their researches, the production of gas discharge phenomena followed some principles of creation, which were easy to realize, and which led to a stunning variety of effects. The connection between these effects was maintained by their practices of creation, and by the space opened up by the vacuum contained in glass tubes. However, this was not enough to provide experimental or conceptual coherence. I am interested in the way different kinds of coherences and understandings were produced by means of instrumental and experimental design as an aim and as a product of the research process. Wilhelm Hittorf (1824-1914) and William Crookes (1832-1919) had a similar education and, although extremely different in their characters, had comparable research interests. Their theoretical ideas led, however, to opposing explanations of the phenomena. Can we follow their conceptual development by tracing the material formation of their experimental world, of the experimental spaces they were using and transforming? What part may the replication of some of these experiments play in such a research project?

Michael Nauenberg University of California, Santa Cruz
The Role of Curvature in Newton's Dynamics

One of the most important tasks in the history of science is to elucidate the origin and development of scientific concepts. In this talk I will discuss the development of some of Newton's ideas which culminated in his great masterpiece, the Principia. The publication during the past decades of Newton's mathematical papers and correspondence has led to a reassessment of earlier narratives of this development, but some crucial aspects have remained controversial. In particular, the seminal role of Hooke's contribution in his 1679 correspondence with Newton has been obscured by a lack of understanding of Newton's approximate method to calculate orbital motion prior to this time. I will show that a letter of Newton to Hooke written on Dec. 13, 1679 demonstrates that Newton had a much deeper understanding of orbital dynamics than had been thought previously. I will argue that Newton's early computational method was based on his application of the concept of curvature which he had developed in the late 1660's. Hooke's suggestions led Newton to consider a complementary approach to orbital motion which led to his crucial discovery of the physical origin of Kepler's areal law, which was hidden in his earlier curvature method. I will give evidence for the effect of Hooke's intervention on Newton's new approach to dynamics in 1680/1. In the first edition of the Principa (1687), Newton presented only his newer approach without discussing this curvature method, but later he presented it as an alternative approach in the second and third edition (Book 1, Prop. 6). This led to the general belief that Newton had developed his curvature approach in the 1690's. I will illustrate, however, how already in the first edition of the Principia he applied the curvature method to the solution of difficult problems in resistive motion (Book 2, Prop.15) and in lunar theory (Book 3, Prop. 28). I shall conclude with some further evidence that the curvature method was Newton's first approach to orbital dynamics although in the Principia he presented it as derived from other fundamental propositions.

Katherine L. Neal University of Sydney and John Schuster University of New South Wales
Practical Mathematics and Narratives of the Scientific Revolution

Over fifty years ago the classical externalist narratives of Hessen, Strong and Zilsel claimed that practical mathematics and practical mathematicians played a seminal role in the process of establishment of modern science. However, no consensus was reached on the issue, within or without externalist accounts, which in any case were then occluded in the Cold-War ambiance of internalist-biased eclecticism‚. Modern contextualism and social history of science has put practical mathematics back onto the historiographical agenda, with recent work by Bennet, Johnson, Cormac, Dear and others shedding new light on the field and its leading players. Less energy, however, has as yet been expended in revisting the externalists‚ key question of the role of practical mathematics in the process of the the so-called Scientific Revolution, although hints and clues do appear in the newer literature. We propose one way forward for investigating the issue: We suggest that practical mathematics be treated as a tradition or sub-culture in dynamic process, and that the field of natural philosophising be treated similarly. This directs attention to the varied and nuanced relations and articulations that occurred between these fields over time. After briefly discussing the historiographical background to this problem we apply our model to three case studies: Gilbert and Wright--scholar and craftsman, or, natural philosophising and practical mathematicising, Tycho--between practical mathematics and the cosmological agon and the young Beeckman and Descartes: subsuming Stevin's practical mathematics in the interest of natural philosophical revolution.

Elizabeth R. Neswald Kulturwissenschaftliches Seminar, Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin
Cyclical Cosmologies in late 19th Century Germany

Much has been written about the contribution of the natural sciences and especially the hypothesis of the heat-death of the universe to the pessimism of the late 19th century. A closer look at popular scientific works and philosophies in late 19th century Germany reveals a different picture. Far more prevalent than assumptions of a final heat death were theories which postulated an eternal cyclical universe. Since neither hypothesis could be scientifically verified, which hypothesis an author supported depended on his fundamental assumptions about the nature of the universe and was, in many cases, closely connected to a more general world view concerned not only with the development and fate of the physical world, but with the human world and the direction of society as well. In my paper I propose to examine the cosmological hypotheses of four German proponents of the cyclical universe hypothesis - the philosophers Moses Hess and Friederich Engels, the physiologist and popular science writer Ludwig Buecher, and the astronomer Oswald Koehler - and to analyse the relationship of these hypothesis to their social and political views. Although these four scholars are only a few of those who supported cyclical theories of the universe, they have been chosen because they wrote not only on astronomical and cosmological theory but on political and social topics as well. Thus the connections between their cosmological and philosophical premises and their social and political views can be investigated and can perhaps shed some light on the premises behind other cyclical theories of the universe.