2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

were very successful in advancing their ideas. Yet beyond the organizational
aspects of Kuttner’s career is the fact that his racial views were not far removed
from views found throughout United States society.
Jeremiah␣ L. James Harvard University
HSS Abstracts
Disparate Bonds: Ends and Means in Early Quantum Chemistry
In the standard account of the early development of quantum chemistry two
monolithic theory conglomerates clash over the construction of the best
quantum mechanical account of chemical bonding. The account provides an
oversimplified model of interdisciplinary research both by ignoring significant
distinctions between the methods of theorists within each theory conglomerate
and by presenting the parent disciplines, physics and chemistry, as
undifferentiated wholes. The purpose of this paper is to initiate a more detailed
discussion of the development of quantum chemistry through an investigation
of the disparate goals and values to which early researchers in the field adhered.
To this end it explores two closely related and oft overlooked aspects of some
seminal works in quantum chemistry. First, it discusses the place that quantum
chemical investigations played in their authors’ broader research programs.
Early research into quantum chemistry was rarely pursued for its own sake.
Rather, it was normally one aspect of a multifaceted drive toward disciplinary
expansion or unification. Second it investigates how the authors perceived the
relationship between the sundry disciplines they drew upon in constructing
their novel theories of the chemical bond. Early quantum chemists borrowed
not only from the resources of quantum physics and laboratory chemistry but
also from spectroscopy and crystallography and sundry other fields, and the
ways in which they integrated these disciplines ranged from strong reductionism
to near nominalism.
H
S
S
Dale Jamieson Carleton College
Managing Planet Earth:
The Rise of Coupled Models and Integrated Assessment
The idea that global environmental change has thrust humans into the role of
planetary managers began to gain currency in the late 1970s, gaining
momentum throughout the 1980s. Ironically, as the collapse of communism
demonstrated the inability of people to manage rationally their own societies,
the attractions of planetary management seemed to become more compelling.
Beginning in ecology and spreading quickly to other disciplines, global
environmental management has come to be seen not just as one policy choice
among others, but as an obligation. Would-be planetary managers believe that
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