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

Normal Pathways: Controlling isotopes and building biomedicine in postwar France.
In December 1945, the French physician and physicist Louis Bugnard arrived in New York for a
scientific voyage of two months in the United States. Bugnard was then the official envoyé from the
French Ministry for Health. He was in charge of documenting the status of medical research, and of
advancing the collaboration between the two sides of the Atlantique. During his trip Bugnard was
fascinated by US instrumentation, in particular the biophysical instrumentation: electron microscopes,
electrophyosiological apparatuses , cyclotrons and isotopes. Rather than means for curing diseases like
cancer, the latter were perceived as elements of a new form of experimental medicine. As he returned to
Paris, Bugnard started a laboratory of nuclear medicine with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation.
He however was soon nominated head of Institut National d’Hygiene, the medical state research agency.
As such he became responsible for authorizing the circulation and the biological uses of radioactive
material. This paper will examines the part played by the control of radioisotopes either locally produced
(by the French CEA) or imported from the United States in Bugnard’s attempt to normalize biomedicine.
Gaukroger, Stephen
E-mail Address: stephen.gaukroger@philosophy.usyd.edu.au
The Idea of a Mathematical Physics in the Early 17th Century
In the early decades of the seventeenth century, various attempts were made to develop a quantitative
dynamical vocabulary on the basis of work in the practical mathematical disciplines. The paper, which
summarises some research undertaken jointly with John Schuster, looks at some of the issues involved
in early seventeenth-century thinking on just how a mathematical natural philosophy might be established.
The paper focuses on what, prior to the dynamical fleshing out Galileo’s kinematic model by
Newton and others, seemed to be the most promising areas of practical mathematics, namely statics and
hydrostatics. It contrasts various possible understandings of the role of mathematics in natural philosophy,
and distinguishes sharply between the Mechanica approach and Archimedean approaches, and
within the latter compares conceptions of statics and hydrostatics and their possible extensions in the
work of Galileo, Stevin, Beeckman, and Descartes. Descartes’ approach to hydrostatics is quite different
from that of his contemporaries, above all in his attempt to provide a natural-philosophical grounding for
it, at the same time using it to develop a range of concepts, approaches, and ways of thinking through
problems that will shape his mature work in optics and cosmology. These questions will be taken up in
John Schuster’s paper, which looks at some of the details of Descartes’ approach.
Geimer, Peter
E-mail Address: geimer@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Noise or Nature? Photographing the Invisible around 1900
The talk is based on the observation that every new photographic procedure has produced its own
specific chemical and physical accidents that emerged in the shape of disturbing blurs, dots, veils, halos
and spots. Since they menaced the photographic task of representing natural phenomena, photographers
and scientists described them as ‘mysterious phenomena,’ ‘enemies,’ ‘parasites,’ and ‘waste.’ I will argue
that these photographic accidents are neither defective nor exceptional cases, but on the contrary are
constitutive manifestations of photography. Special attention will be dedicated to cases in which photographs
functioned as visible (and the only) proof of the existence of certain invisible rays and fluids.
Here, scientific representations could resemble those conspicuous blurs and veils that were normally
treated as photographic waste. In this scenario, separating facts from artifacts became problematic.
Moreover, what first appeared as disturbing accident could later serve as scientific explanation for
otherwise inexplicable phenomena. Scientists found themselves involved in a sphere of knowledge in
which the interpretation of visual recordings oscillated between accidents and incidents, inscriptions of