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

oth in the beliefs and the membership of the pertinent scientific communitie(s), ii) the partisans of
different views, while not changing their scientific beliefs at the time changed the extent of their expression
of these in response to the perceived implications and concern about Nazi racial theories, iii) a new
generation of human geneticists subsequently emerged exposed differentially to the evidence pertinent
to one position. The last cited factor suggests that social factors did influence alterations in "scientific
beliefs" about race crossing, but only indirectly and slowly rather than abruptly as Provine claims.
Specifically, the views of scientific communities changed temporally as the membership of those communities
changed but not (according to available evidence) the beliefs of any individual members of
those communities.
Hunter, Patti
E-mail Address: phunter@westmont.edu
Statistics in the U.S. Comes of Age: A Case Study in American Influence Abroad
"The status of statistics in the rapidly developing countries is not too different from what my generation
experienced in the 1920s." So wrote Gertrude Cox in 1966, upon her return from a year as visiting
professor and consultant at the University of Cairo, Egypt. Cox had received her education in statistics
in the 1920s and '30s, during the formative years of the discipline's professional community in the
United States. Her experiences in Egypt in the early 1960s provide evidence that by this time, the
statistics community in the United States had matured to such an extent that its members had begun to
influence the development of the discipline on an international level. Americans, Cox among them,
were providing advice and training to emerging statistics communities abroad, particularly in developing
nations. This talk will describe Cox's contributions in Egypt, highlighting their implications for the
history of statistics in the United States.
Ito, Kenji
E-mail Address: kenjiito@fas.harvard.edu
"Student Radicals" in Science: Youth Cultures and the Roots of Quantum Physics Research in
Interwar Japan
This paper attempts to interpret the earliest Japanese attempts to digest quantum mechanics within the
cultural context of the time. In the early 1920s, political, industrial, educational, and scientific landscapes
in Japan were changing dramatically along with urbanization, democratization, industrialization,
World War I, a huge educational reform, and a severe earthquake. Grown up in a radically changing
world, Japanese youth began challenging old values and norms. Late 1920s Japan provided various loci
for these rebellious youth: school riots, literary movements, modernist urban lifestyles, political activism,
and new academic trends. Although science students were less political than other youth, they, too,
had their way of rebellion. Having been stimulated by Einstein's visit in 1922, young physicists in the
late 1920s were not satisfied by what the universities had to offer. Some recent graduates of Tokyo
University found its physics colloquium boring and fruitless. Frustrated, they formed a study group and
tried to learn by themselves something totally new. This splinter group read and translated papers by
Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and other founding fathers of quantum mechanics, and published them in
1927. Similarly, around the same time in Kyoto, young physicists, including two future Nobel laureates
Tomonaga Shin-itiro and Yukawa Hideki, began studying quantum mechanics on their own, a subject
that no professor at the university could teach. For these young people in Tokyo and Kyoto, quantum
mechanics was a harbinger of a new age, and learning it was an act of defiance, a revolt against their old
professors.
James, Jeremiah