Abstracts of the History of Science Society 2004 Austin Meeting 18 ...

Thomas De Quincey’s 1846 essay “The Systems of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” celebrates the construction
of far and away the largest telescope in the world at that time a 56-foot long telescope with a six-foot wide mirror designed to study
nebulae. Lord Rosse, who built the telescope, claimed (mistakenly, it would turn out) that the telescope had enabled him to “resolve”
the Orion nebula. With this advance in telescopy, De Quincey writes, the previously defiant nebula has become famous “for the submission
with which it has begun to render up its secrets to the all-conquering telescope.” And yet the “secrets” of the Orion nebula
would prove extremely hard to interpret. De Quincey’s essay foregrounds these interpretive problems—his own rhapsody on the Orion
nebula uses John Herschel’s illustration as a springboard for a fanciful rant on the nebula as celestial monster. This paper places De
Quincey’s literary representation of the nebula in the context of those of contemporary astronomers Herschel, Lord Rosse and John
Pringle Nichol—and shows that their representational strategies are more continuous than one might imagine. Any representation of
the nebula involves an unwieldy negotiation between what the observer half-perceives and what he half-creates. At a moment before
astronomers had begun to photograph nebulae, the goal of getting a reader or a viewer “to see what I see” involved a set of representational
choices with complicated implications in terms of negotiating between subjective and objective knowledge, imagination and perceptual
accuracy. How could such observations and illustrations be weighed against one another as “evidence” for or against the nebular
hypothesis? At one end of the spectrum is William Herschel, who proposes that “Seeing is in some respects an art that must be
learnt” and that he himself has acquired “a certain dexterity” by “practicing to see.” At the other end is De Quincey who constantly disorients
his reader and indulges the arbitrary impressions of a particular point of view at a particular moment in time, by a particular
consciousness. In the process, he suggests that the very ideal of objective knowledge depends on a stable sense of bodily orientation
that the nineteenth-century universe disrupts. The debates around the status of the nebula mark an uncomfortable transition between
a moment in which the astronomer’s knowledge was relied upon in fashioning illustrations and a later period in which mechanical objectivity
became the preferred representational mode.
Dieter Hoffmann, Max Planck Institute for History of Science (dh@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country B
The “Ramsauer Era” and the Self-Mobilization of the DPG
Under the auspices of Carl Ramsauer as the chairman of the the German Physical Society (DPG) - I would even like to speak of the
“Ramsauer Era” - it becomes clear that under his auspices DPG emerged from its marginal existence and intervened ever more actively
in the socio-political processes of the Third Reich. While doing so, Ramsauer used his position as an industrial physicist and his good
connections to military circles in order to forge an alliance with the military-industrial complex of Nazi Germany. The position of the
DPG as well as its prestige and influence profited greatly and lastingly from this alliance, but simultaneously the society was transformed
into a functioning institution of scientific specialists serving the NS state loyally and effectively, although not in any case enthusiastically.
In this way the society lost its political innocence - if the DPG had have had it ever - since this alliance established various structures
of collaboration with the political power centers.
Ute Holl, Bauhaus-University Weimar (uteholl@medien.uni-weimar.de)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom VII
Science and Avantguarde. Dziga Vertov’s Filmwork and the Techniques of Observing in Russian Reflexology
The work of avantgarde filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1898-1954) goes back to his studies with the famous founder of Russian
Psychoreflexology, Vladimir Bekhterev. Bekhterev, coming from the German (Flechsig) and French (Charcot) schools of neurology,
stands in the tradition of objective psychology, i.e. a strict observation of the physiological, outer symptoms of nervous reactions and
behavior. Without giving it much considerance as a medium, their evidence was largely based on visual imaging techniques. In my paper
I want to trace back the history of chrono-photographic and filmic techniques in neurology and psychology. I will give examples of
how time and space were constructed in the scientific research. I argue that the notion of behavior, especially in Russian history, relies
on the employment of film and filmic techniques in the epistemological process. Dziga Vertov then takes this back into art as a social
process. To prove this I will show excerpts of films by Vertov and of older material from the psychological and psychiatric laboratories.
Giora Hon, University of Haifa (hon@research.haifa.ac.il)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom III
Living Extremely Flat: The Status of Errors in Experimental Studies of Biological Systems
John von Neumann (1903–1957) paid much attention to the phenomenon of error in his studies of large scale computing machines
and automata. Important issues of reliability were after all at stake: success or failure of expensive technological inventions was hanging
in the balance. These machines and software schemes were partly conceived with a view to imitating features of living systems.
Drawing on the studies of von Neumann, I shall present a comparative, general analysis of error in the inanimate realm and in living
systems. An inherent feature of the epistemological phenomenon of error is the divergence from a given standard. Such discrepancy
may arise because of innumerable reasons, but its detection is due invariably to evaluative procedures against that standard. Crucial then
for the detection of error and its characterization in experimentation is the presence of a standard against which a divergence is discerned
and assessed. In this paper I examine the nature of errors in biological systems when they interact with the constraints of experimental
setups as distinct from errors that arise in physical, inanimate system. Von Neumann’s analysis of the problem of error in
machines that are designed to simulate life processes, provides an instructive background against which errors that arise in experimenting
on biological systems may be fruitfully studied. I seek to demonstrate that such errors may not have clear identification since the