Conservation and Innovation : Helmholtz's Struggle with Energy ...

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term derives from a sociological debate 448 challenging the "priority" approach 449. Kuhn, adopting this sociological perspective, is obliged to identify different statements of the pioneers 450 with a "simultaneous discovery", despite some explicit difficulties with a stricter historical perspective 451. Paradoxically he gives, against his own basic historiographical claims 452, a Whiggish explanation 453. Whatsmore in so doing, and here we deal with the second historiographical problem, he adopts a concept of energy that has substantialistic tones 454 and that is by no means shared contemporary physical knowledge 455. Nowhere in the paper can be found an explicit definition of "energy conservation", a rather serious weakness, shared by the great majority of the contemporary secondary 448 "the main objective" of the paper is the preliminary identification of the sources of this phenomenon. Kuhn Sim Disc p.70. Elkana, Yehuda. "The Conservation of Energy: A case of Simultaneous Discovery?" In Arch Int Hist Sci 24 (1970): 31-60. Pp 36-7. 449 Kuhn Sim Disc n.8, p.72. See also: Cantor "Locating" p. 1. 450 "no two of our men even said the same thing". Kuhn Sim Disc p.70. 451 "Even to the historian acquainted with the concepts of energy conservation, the pioneers do not all communicate the same thing.", and " What we see in their works is not really the simultaneous discovery of energy conservation". Kuhn Sim Disc p.72. 452 Against the scientist-historians who "retrieved the current contents of the specialty from past texts of a variety of heterogeneous fields, not noticing that the tradition they constructed in the process had never existed. In addition, they usually treated concepts and theories of the past as imperfect approximations to those in current use, thus disguising both the structure and integrity of past scientific traditions." Kuhn, Thomas. "The Relations between History and the History of Science." In Daedalus 100 (1971) : 271-304. Rep. in Kuhn Ess Tension. Pp. 127-161. P.149. Kuhn himself warns against the "inappropriateness of our concept of discovery", as remembered by Cantor Locating p.2. See Kuhn, Thomas. "The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery." In Science 136 (1962) :760-64. Rep. in Kuhn Ess Tension. Pp 165-77. 453 "Only in view of what happened later can we say that all these partial statements even deal with the same aspect of nature". Kuhn Sim Disc p.70. 454 "We know why these elements were there: Energy is conserved; nature behaves that way". Ibid. p.72. 455 "It is important to realize that in Physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is.". Feynman, Richard. The Feynman's Lectures on Physics. 3 vols. Addison Wesley, 1963. Vol.1, chapt.4, par 4.1, p.4.2.
literature 456. There is an intrinsic difficulty in assuming an implicit definition of energy conservation as a historiographical tool: there were many formulations at the mid of last century, many competing views in the debates of the following decades, and even competing views in this century on the general validity of the principle 457. Thus what is needed for an historical analysis is an explicit point of view that does not offer "the formulation" but a possibility of grouping and comparing the various expressions. An important contribution was already given in 1887 in one of the "classics" mentioned above; Planck in fact clarified the difficult meaning of the principle of energy conservation: following W.Thomson he defined "energy" as the amount of work that can be done between two states of a system, he asserted that can be experimentally proved that this (quantity of) energy is conserved, he outlined a certain arbitrariety in the theoretical expression of this quantity, he warned 458 about the impossibility of a primary definition of energy and about the everlasting theoretical-empirical interplay that leads to different formulations and applications of the principle. If we accept that "energy" is not a thing, nor a theory but that it is a relational term 459 whose principle of conservation, if adopted, had and has a number of different formulations we understand the reason for the difficulty in the historians' works to offer "one" explicit definition: there are in fact many. Contemporary textbooks, adopting a superposition principle, list one for every field of inquiry (mechanical, electromagnetic, nuclear,...) but for each of these at the time of the original 456 When a definition is referred to, there is always a lack of generality; see for instance: Heimann, Peter. "Conversion of Forces and the Conservation of Energy." In Centaurus 18 (1974):147-61, p.148 refers to Rankine 1853. Hiebert holds a factorisation approach: Hiebert, Erwin. "Commentary on the Papers of Thomas Kuhn and I.Bernard Cohen." In Critical Problems in the History of Science . M.Clagett ed. Madison: Wisconsin U.P, 1959: 391-400. P.392; see also: Hiebert, E. Historical Roots of the Principle of Conservation of Energy University of Wisconsin:1962. Rep: New York: Arno Press, 1981. Pp. 1-6 and the related criticisms of Jammer, Max . "Factorisation of Energy". In BJPS 14 (1963-4): 160-6. 457 Pauli, Wolfgang. Aufsätze und Vorträge über Physik und Erknenntnistheorie (1933-58) . Chapt.16. the "classics". 458 Planck Princip Pp. 104-115. 459 Cantor Locating p.2, recalls Cassirer, showing the relevance of the inheritance of
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Fabio Bevilacqua Conservation and I
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different formulations 4 and priori
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and interesting results, despite th
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principle of correlation is express
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principle to the existing empirical
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the origin and meaning of the princ
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Whether physiological research, apa
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In a discussion on the origins of a
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his "Wärme" that one of the differ
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generate a determined equivalent of
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"Bericht", despite the application
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experiments in the most disparate b
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The premise reveals that the struct
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intelligible if it can be referred
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elevant consequence of the deductio
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Needless to say the plan was to be
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and from here that the direction an
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since Leonardo 113; the "ad nihilum
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But unfortunately for the whole str
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The principle of conservation of vi
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different from the one joining the
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"The equality that exists between e
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In virtue of its limitations to New
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Helmholtz, while asserting that lig
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the temperature of 1 Kg of water ca
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In his search for a mechanical equi
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had already been achieved in the Be
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approach is discussed at length and
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and unaware of Green's results190,
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potential function 201. It is worth
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and judged unreliable, despite prov
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The relevance of the first question
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principle taking this potential int
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Finally we get to the real conclusi
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conservation 234, on the theory of
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for the mechanical equivalent of he
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The controversy started with some r
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where μ are immovable masses, m th
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