Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

kind of technological infrastructure, this was more so in the West than the former Soviet Union. This
paper will compare and evaluate the notion of bigger and better technology in science between the two
cultures of America and Russia. In the American nuclear weapons industry, scientists were constantly
employing bigger and better high-performance computers, in anticipation of simulating ever-more
refined weapons problems in multiple dimensions. Yet the push for computers in America came partly
from the computer industry, particularly IBM and other companies. Lacking a commercial computer
industry, the Soviets still managed to build sophisticated scientific computers for their nuclear weapons
programs, but at a much slower pace than in the United States. Still, the Soviets successfully matched
the United States in terms of nuclear stockpile numbers and types of weapons. For what they lacked in
material technology, the Soviets compensated by focusing on algorithms and accurate mathematical
estimation, and employed scores of people to work out problems by hand. In their own way, Russian
algorithms were as powerful tools as American high-speed computers.
Flannery, Maura
E-mail Address: flannerm@stjohns.edu
The Legacy of Francis Lee Jaques: Dioramas in the 20th Century and Beyond
Francis Lee Jaques was one of the most noted painters of natural history diorama backgrounds during
the first half of the 20th century. He worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York
for 18 years painting, among other displays, the sky-like ceiling in the Hall of Oceanic Birds and the
backdrops for all 18 of its dioramas. After leaving the Museum in 1942, he painted backgrounds for
dioramas at a number of institutions including the Bell Museum of Natural History in Minneapolis and
the Museum of Science in Boston. In all three of these museums, the Jaques dioramas are still intact,
but the museums have chosen different approaches to making these and their other dioramas relevant in
the 21st century. This paper will examine Jaques's work as an exemplar of the diorama art form and also
explore how these museums are employing the diorama form of display to deal with issues of
biodiversity, direct experience of nature, and access for the physically challenged-issues that Jaques
would not have been aware of at the time he was producing his art. I will argue that the diorama, in
expanded format and within changing contexts, is still a valid and valuable form not only for conveying
information about the natural world but for encouraging public appreciation of that world.
Gal, Ofer
E-mail Address: ofgal@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
From Realism to Constructivism and back Again
The eighties realism debate revolved around the following dilemma: what commitment towards
science's categories and concepts should arise from acknowledging the absence of independent perspective
from which to adjudicate knowledge vis-a-vis nature? Should one, despaired with the possibility to
Found these concepts on rock bottom, adopt an empiricist skepticism? Or perhaps the inexistence of
external foundations implies rather an immunity for scientific ontology from such epistemological
criticism? The debate lost its vivacity once its succeeded in driving out 'logical positivism' and crowning
'realism' its successor as mainstream philosophy of science. Science historians experienced the
flight from foundationalism rather as a liberating breakthrough. 'Social constructivism' attempted to
hold to both horns of the conundrum insisting on its own scientific merit while denying science any
autonomous epistemic dominion of pure reasons. In the name of the scientific values of empirism,
objectivity and generality, it demanded causal historical accounts for scientific knowledge as well as its
paraphernalia, for its true as well as erroneous claims. Though the empirical success of social
constructivism gives credence to its methodological credo, its requirement for symmetry between accounts
of truth and error comes at the price of reinforcing a-symmetry between nature and society. Yet it