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

Many new PhDs in HSTM seek jobs in liberal arts colleges. These institutions may emphasize
teaching more than research and may not have more than the single HSTM faculty member in their
History Department. This paper will discuss the qualifications that a liberal arts college looks for when
it decides to hire a historian trained in HSTM.
Seth, Suman
E-mail Address: sseth@princeton.edu
When is a Crisis not a Crisis? Theoretical Physics in the Fin-de-Siècle
Theoretical physics occupied a peculiar position as an area of research prior to the early twentieth
century. Although taught at an increasing number of institutions after the unification of Germany in
1871, the number of Ordinarius (full) professorships in the subject remained small, and even among its
pedagogues and practitioners there seems to have been little consensus concerning its precise character.
How then can one speak of 'theoretical physics' in this period? This paper does so by emphasising the
deep connections, the almost symbiotic relationship, between the rise of theoretical physics and the
heated debates over the so-called failure of the mechanical world-view. In both the content and the mode
of the discourse over the appropriate foundations for physics one can see many elements that
characterise theoretical physics after the turn of the century. The response to the Machian criticism of
mechanics is discussed in particular detail. In addition, the paper challenges the common
characterisation of the fin-de-siècle as the time of the crisis of classical physics. Crisis, it is argued, is a
post-hoc category. What later participants and historians have called crisis is better understood as the
practice of theoretical physics.
Shank, J.B.
E-mail Address: jbshank@tc.umn.edu
"There was no such thing as the Newtonian Revolution and the French Initiated It:" Newtonian
Mechanics in France Before Maupertuis
"There was no such thing as the Newtonian Revolution and the French initiated it:" Newtonian
Mechanics in France Before Maupertuis Like Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution (Chicago,
1996) from which I draw my title, my paper is an attempt to re-conceptualize a canonical component of
the classically conceived "Scientific Revolution." In the classic narrative, first authored by the French
philosophes (especially Voltaire and d'Alembert) and then instituted as a founding disciplinary structure
of the history of science by Koyrè, Hall, Dijksterhuis and others, Newton "synthesizes" the "Scientific
Revolution" by uniting the experimental and mathematical impulses which gave rise to modern
science after 1600. He also completes it by using his synthetic method to establish the foundations of
modern mechanics once and for all. Conceived this way, eighteenth-century physical science becomes
the epigone of the "Newtonian Revolution," adding, in A.R. Hall's canonical formulation, "an elegance
and a precision" not present in Newton's more "fumbling" system, but contributing no innovations that
were not "derivative" or characteristic of a "second order of discovery." The French play a schizophrenic
role in this classic story because while they at first let their parochial attachment to "Cartesianism" blind
them from Newton's achievements, they stunningly change roles after 1730 so as to become the leading
torchbearers of the "Newtonian Revolution." The recent historiography of the "Newtonian Revolution"
and its eighteenth-century legacies has completely undermined this traditional account, yet surprisingly
little attention has been given to re-framing the history of early-eighteenth-century French science in
light of this new understanding. My paper will argue that the French reception of Newton's Principia
was completely different than the traditional scholarship would lead us to believe, and that when properly
understood the early students of Newton in France are better seen as important contributors to the
Continental creation of Newtonian mechanics itself.