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

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incorporated into, the state administration’s efforts to establish the Museum as a site of public education on natural history and natural philosophy. Patrick McCray, University of California, Santa Barbara (pmccray@history.ucsb.edu) Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom II Caltech, Project Vista, and the Dilemmas of Lee DuBridge In the summer of 1951, more than one hundred scientists and other academics participated in a secret study hosted by the California Institute of Technology. The purpose of Project Vista was to determine how existing technologies – tactical nuclear weapons, in particular could offset NATO’s weaker conventional forces and repel a massive Soviet invasion of Europe many perceived as likely if not imminent. Lee A. DuBridge, a former physicist and Caltech’s first president, convinced the school’s trustees and administration to carry out the project for several reasons among others, it brought an lucrative government contract to the school while it performed a national service at a time of great international tension. This paper explores how Project Vista came to Caltech and how DuBridge’s reluctant acquiescence to Caltech’s conscription in Project Vista during a state of national emergency conflicted with his initial goals for Caltech as the school adjusted to the postwar environment. More broadly, this paper’s focus on the local institutional environment provides a window onto scientists’ experiences and responsibilities as they attempted to apply their expertise to the relatively unfamiliar world of tactics and warfare during the early years of the Cold War. Peter McLaughlin, University of Heidelberg (peter.mclaughlin@urz.uni-heidelberg.de) Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country D Rethinking Internalism in the Scientific Revolution The story of Boris Hessen’s famous lecture on “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s ‘Principia’/Mechanics” has been rehearsed from a number of different angles. Although the talk reportedly had a powerful effect on a number of those attending, those not personally present have been almost uniformly derogatory in their evaluations. Two exceptions were Henryk Grossmann and R. K. Merton, who explicitly defended Hessen against the misunderstandings and misrepresentations widely accepted by historians, especially following G. N. Clark’s attack. In this paper I take these dissident readings of Hessen as a starting point to reevaluate the origin of internalism in the historiography of science, which defined itself in opposition to a position that never existed, leading it to study the mechanization of the world picture in the Scientific Revolution in abstraction from practical mechanics and technology. Colin Milburn, Harvard University (milburn@fas.harvard.edu) Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom III Nano Worlds: Vision Beyond the Limits of Fabrication The recent history of nanotechnology has been characterized by double-vision: in visualizing the nanoscale, in making molecular structures accessible through imaging technologies such as the scanning tunneling microscope, nanotechnology simultaneously imagines the future. Speculative visions of monumental social, economic and technological changes appear regularly in the writings of scientists and others involved in the development of nanotechnology, and these visions are usually linked to experimental successes in bringing the invisible atomic world to light. This paper analyzes the double-vision of nanotechnology and suggests that “seeing” the future is a media-specific effect of “seeing” the nanoscale, that the fantasy of a disembodied gaze capable of scrutinizing beyond the limits of sight and foresight structures the thinking of nanotechnology from its earliest history to the present day. The paper further suggests that this double-vision works to make radical technological change possible in the present by unfolding an alienating “world of the future” from within the maps and the media generated by its explorations of the new molecular frontier. David Marshall Miller, University of Pittsburgh (dmmst115@pitt.edu) Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom V The Thirty Years War and the Galileo Affair: A Plea for Political Contextualization All too often, historians of the “Galileo Affair” focus their attention on the intellectual bases of Galileo’s fateful interaction with the Holy Roman Church. They fail to recognize the dynamic – indeed, tumultuous – nature of the political landscape surrounding Galileo’s condemnation and the events leading to it. This was a landscape rent by the Thirty Years War, which dominated the affairs of European rulers, including Galileo’s patrons. In fact, Galileo’s publication of the “Dialogo” in 1632 could not have come at a more ill-advised moment: in the aftermath of the battle of Breitenfeld, the nadir of Catholicism in Germany. Blame for this calamitous defeat fell on Galileo’s most important protector, Pope Urban VIII. Thus, when Galileo’s book appeared, Galileo became a useful example by which Urban could consolidate his severely weakened position. The Pope carefully crafted the public image of an unusual trial, at the expense of his old friend. By telling this story, I aim to focus some attention on the political context of the “Galileo Affair.” Certainly, Galileo’s trial resulted from profound intellectual tensions that pervaded the early modern period, but it must also be understood in light of the political exigencies of the moment. Historians’ extensive exploration of the intellectual aspects of Galileo’s condemnation should be accompanied by more research regarding the less cerebral motivations of those involved.
Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame () Sunday, 21-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom II & III Caveat Emptor: On the History of Perceptions of the Supposed Independence of Scientific Research from the Forms of Economic Support Hazime Mizoguchi / Noriko Sato, Rissho University (hazime@ris.ac.jp) Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country D Japanese Biologists at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole During the hundred years from 1890 to 1990, about eighty Japanese biologists visited the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The academic careers, relationships with the MBL, and research interests of these scientists are investigated chronologically in relation to major biological world events. At the MBL, Japanese biologists were able to learn the latest research methods; they were also exposed to the atmosphere in the laboratory; lively discussion between distinguished scientists and beginning investigators. Japanese biologists also established professional and personal contacts with American biologists. Hence, the MBL was considered by Japanese biologists to be the most influential of all marine biological laboratories. Jill Morawski, Wesleyan University (jmorawski@wesleyan.edu) Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country C Socialized/Civilized: The Promise of Socialization Theory and the Protean Human in Postwar America Formulated through the amalgamation of learning theory and psychoanalysis in the 1930s, socialization theory emerged in the postwar decades to become a major empirical program and a popular explanatory device for understanding and regulating behavior. Socialization theory promised resolution to the binary tensions of individual and society, private and public, conscious and unconscious, and perhaps most importantly the theory represented a protean personhood, a human kind capable of change and adjustment. Examination of the experimental demonstrations and more general applications of socialization theory illuminate the promises it held for gender, race and citizenship in the 1950s. Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics and University of Amsterdam (m.morgan@lse.ac.uk) Sunday, 21-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom II & III The Prisoner’s Dilemma and ‘Modern’ Economics This paper analyses the relationships between two early nineteenth century practical sciences in Britain, namely experimental farming and classical political economy. The experimental farming activity of the day provided both form and content for David Ricardo’s theory of distribution about the allocation of output between economic classes. The formulation of his theorizing paralleled the reporting mode of farming experiments, not only in their shared accounting regimes, but also in the thought experiments to be found in each successive move in his argument. The content of his thought experiments mirrored the contemporary agricultural experiments that tested out the local applicability of technical changes introduced in the previous century. But the peculiarities of his arguments about rent can be linked directly to particular questions about spade-husbandry, an issue subject to debate and experiment precisely during the years he was developing his theory. Timothy Moy, University of New Mexico (tdmoy@unm.edu) Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom VI Recent Applications of History of Science and Technology in National Security Policy Recent debates over science- and technology-oriented national security policies in the United States bear some resemblance to debates earlier in the 20th century. In this paper, I will examine how the histories of technology-based military reform have been used, and misused, in shaping American national security policies and practices since the end of the Cold War. Shawn Mullet, Harvard University (mullet@fas.harvard.edu) Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom III Documenting Atomic Espionage: Historians’ Uses of Government Files Since the 1974 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, historians have made ample use of government generated documents such as FBI files. In the historical literature on atomic espionage such files have been given great significance in that they offer a detailed account of events for which no other written record exists. In examining the cases of Joseph Weinberg and G. Rossi Lomanitz, physics graduate students at Berkeley who were part of the Manhattan Project and accused of espionage, this paper questions the legitimacy of the accounts offered in such files. After tracing out the main problems associated with government documents on atomic espionage, it
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