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

German human geneticists’ most valuable service to the Third Reich was to confer legitimacy to the entirity of the Nazi racial project—
to publically bestow their professional blessing on the ideal of the “racial state.” An important—if not the most important—battle for
Nazi racial policy credibility would be fought on the world stage. The proposed paper will focus on the professional activities of human
geneticists affliated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWIA) during the Third Reich.
One of the most important ways in which KWIA scientitsts legitimized Nazi racial policy abroad as well as underscored their own political
usefulness at home was by doing what comes naturally to scientists: hosting, and participating in, international conferences in their
field. As in other areas of “service to the state,” KWIA researchers took up the call to arms in the international arena with their tried
and true weapon—with the “well sharpened and well-guided” sword of their science. The mutually beneficial arrangement between the
Nazi state and KWIA scientists on the international stage is but one example of the ways in which human heredity and politcs serves
as resources for each other under the swastika.
Stephen P. Weldon, University of Oklahoma (spweldon@ou.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom II
Humanistic Psychology and Liberal Religion in America, 1950-1980
After decades of opposition to and disregard of psychology, religious communities in America in the post-World War II decades rapidly
began to incorporate ideas from psychology into their work. This accommodation to modern psychology is most apparent in the
growing interaction between pastoral work and psychological counseling. New ideas and theoretical concerns in the field itself made
psychology more appealing to religionists. In particular, a group of self-proclaimed humanistic psychologists (Carl Rogers, Gordon
Allport, and Abraham Maslow, among them) began to challenge some of the philosophical foundations of the two reigning paradigms;
they attacked the positivistic and deterministic elements in both classical Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism. In so doing, they
made accommodation to religious ideas easier and paved the way for increased interaction. This paper explores the ways that disciplinary
concerns facilitated religious agendas.
Simon Werrett, University of Washington, Seattle (werrett@u.washington.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country A
Russian Science Illuminated: Physics, Fireworks, and Court Spectacle at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Common disciplinary boundaries ensure the history of the arts and history of the sciences in eighteenth-century Russia often remain
distinct, despite the fact that for much of the first half of the century, the majority of Russia’s artistic and scientific activity occurred in
the same place, the foreign-dominated St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and Arts. This paper re-integrates the arts and sciences in
eighteenth-century Russia to reveal how arts served a crucial legitimating role in the early Academy. While Russians exhibited hostility
or apathy to recently imported and so unfamiliar western physical sciences, they appreciated courtly arts and spectacle as a celebration
of their own prestige. During the reign of Empress Anna Ivanovna in the 1730s, academicians turned increasingly to arts such as portraiture,
jewelry, architecture, and printing as a new medium for promoting the Academy and the sciences to such audiences. This paper
focuses on one such activity, academicians’ designs of allegorical fireworks and illuminations for the court. Shifting the crucial years of
the early Academy into the thirties, I propose that arts such as fireworks were essential to the successful establishment of science in
Russia. I also use the career of the arts to re-read controversies over physics and cosmology during the academy’s first decades. Russia’s
famous ‘Newtonian-Wolffian’ confrontations over subjects like gravitation and vis viva may be seen to wax and wane in tandem with
developments in the arts, and cannot be fully understood outside of these developments.
Catherine Lee Westfall, Argonne National Laboratory (cwestfall@anl.gov)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom II
When Little Plays Big: Fifty Years of Mössbauer Spectroscopy at Argonne
Using illegally obtained radioactive materials, a turntable employing teeth wheels from Heidelberg’s mechanical toy shops, and other minimal
equipment available in post World War II Germany, in 1959 Rudolf Mössbauer announced that an atomic nucleus in a crystal does
not recoil when it emits a low energy gamma ray and provides the entire energy to the gamma ray. This result would lead to a Nobel
Prize for Mössbauer in 1961 and a highly productive line of inquiry in fields as diverse as physics, biology, and geology that continues
today. Mössbauer spectroscopy is distinct from work most often investigated by historians of recent science because for decades – well
into the era of so called “Big Science” it was cutting edge science that used small, inexpensive equipment. Since 1980 it has been used
by condensed matter physicists at some of the world’s largest accelerators including Argonne National Laboratory’s Advance Photon
Source. However, this work is significantly different from the accelerator based nuclear and high energy projects that are better known
to historians. Using the extensive literature on collaboration in large-scale research as a starting point, this paper will explore fifty years