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

Haeckel’s Deferred Action
As Ernst Haeckel developed his scientific ideas, he steadily altered his portrait of his teacher, Johannes Mueller. Each of Mueller’s most
famous students (Henle, Schwann, Virchow, Remak, DuBois-Reymond, Helmholtz, and Haeckel) told his own story about what Mueller
was like, but Haeckel’s has had some of the greatest impact on the historical record. As Mueller’s last prominent pupil, Haeckel had the
last word, serving as pallbearer at his teacher’s funeral. Unlike Mueller’s more physiologically oriented students, Haeckel adored Mueller’s
comparative anatomy and marine biology, taking Mueller’s studies of radiolaria as his scientific point of departure . In Haeckel’s early
works, he mentioned Mueller mainly to cite specific anatomical studies, but his references to him began to change after his enthusiastic
adoption of evolutionary theory in the mid-1860s. Haeckel’s embrace of Darwinism set off an extended process of Nachtraeglichkeit
(Deferred Action) in his history of science which caused him to depict Mueller as endorsing evolution in retrospect. An admirer of
Cuvier, Mueller never believed that species evolved, so this narrative maneuver required considerable agility on Haeckel’s part. In his latest
depictions of Mueller (1900-1910), Haeckel portrayed his teacher as obsessed with the relations between animal forms but unable
to solve the “Raetsel” of their affinities, a “Raetsel” that he, Haeckel then solved with his version of evolution and his monistic philosophy.
Haeckel was the only student of Mueller to claim that his teacher committed suicide, yet his account of Mueller’s unexpected
death in 1858 (at age 57) has been widely accepted. A close analysis of the way Haeckel changes his portrait of Mueller over time reveals
how markedly scientists’ current perceptions of their own work can shape the stories they tell about science’s history.
Sharrona Pearl, Harvard University (spearl@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Big Bend A, B, & C
Natural-Born Beggars: Physiognomy and Determinism in Victorian Britain
This paper will examine the Victorian discourse of self-improvement and personal change against the biological determinsim of physiognomy.
Using published monographs as well as newspaper and periodical literature, I will look at the ways in which the political and
class implications of “being born to a face” were used to limit the mobility of the London poor. I will argue that physiognomy provided
a justification for London’s urban underclass that resonated with and contributed to anti-welfare theories of Spencer and Malthus. I
will consider the role of visual culture and caricature in establishing the paramaters of this underclass, and the ways in which visual cues
and perception offered an approach to questions of will and determinism.
Slobodan Perovic, York University (perovic@yorku.ca)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom V
Recent Revival of Schrödinger’s
Ideas on Interpreting Quantum Mechanics and Relevance of Their Early Experimental Critique
E. Schrödinger’s early ideas on interpreting quantum mechanics, as well as their later reformulation, have been recently reexamined by
historians and revived among philosophers of quantum mechanics. The doctrines of relational holism and emergentism arise as neo-
Schrödingerian doctrines. These doctrines share with both Schrödinger’s earlier and later views the common assumption that the corpuscular
properties of quantum systems can be successfully discarded, and the discontinuities related to measurements successfully
reformulated in wave-mechanical terms or within the framework of quantum field theory. I argue that these doctrines fail to acknowledge
the significance of the experimental results concerning electron scattering, in the face of which Schrödinger himself abandoned
his 1926 interpretation, and which haunted his return to these ideas in the 1930s. In his 1926 papers, Schrödinger argued against Bohr’s
discontinuous account of quantum phenomena, suggesting that the atomism of classical mechanics fails with regard to very small
dimensions of the path and very great curvatures. The true laws of quantum mechanics show that the particle cannot be treated as a
single unit, but rather must be seen as a manifold of paths. Bohr, however, confuted Schrödinger’s interpretation. Schrödinger agreed
with Bohr’s critique, based on the experiments performed by Compton and Simon and Geiger and Bothe, which demonstrated the corpuscular
nature of atomic interactions. The experiment’s key point was the angle-dependency that indicated ordinary corpuscular interaction
between field and matter. In 1935, Shankland’s experiment demonstrated an apparent conflict with the results of Bothe-Geiger,
partially inspiring Schrödinger’s return to the wave-mechanical interpretation. Subsequent measurements, however, have proven the original
experimental results accurate. I conclude that the neo-Schrödingerian trend should be cautioned by these experimental results, in
which the corpuscular properties cannot be “explained away” in wave-mechanical terms, as the discontinuities related to the measurement
results may. These results concern the pre-measurement property of the interaction that we come to know indirectly through the
angle-dependency.
Jahnavi Phalkey, Georgia Institute of Technology (jphalkey@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country B
Meghnad Saha and the Calcutta Cyclotron
The origins of nuclear physics can be traced to a few centers in Western Europe and later to the United States. However, there were
physicists in other countries on the international periphery, where local scientific communities tried to keep up with the research frontiers
of their disciplines for various reasons, within constraints and with varying results. This paper will examine the motivations to establish
a nuclear physics research facility by Meghnad Saha, through the story of building the first cyclotron in Calcutta, British India beginning
1938. Meghnad Saha joined the department of physics in the University of Calcutta in 1935. Traveling on a Carnegie Fellowship
in the USA, Saha met Ernest O. Lawrence whose group in Berkeley built the first cyclotron accelerator. In 1938, Saha sent an Indian