2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

yielded innovative results in the scientific understanding of disease causation.
Both of these cases demonstrated that, despite reliance on a proprietary
epistemology, local experience and ideas helped to shape veterinary scientists’
production of knowledge about North American animal disease problems.
Edward Jones-Imhotep Harvard University
Ionograms, Identity, and the ‘Idea of North’
HSS Abstracts
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Throughout much of its history, Canada has imagined itself as a northern nation.
In the absence of linguistic or cultural unity to bind the country together,
governments and citizens alike have historically turned their gaze northward and
have seen in the Canadian geography and climate, and in the hardships they
produced, a distinctive identity: an imagined community centred around the famed
‘idea of North’. This paper explores how this cultural touchstone played into the
more ethereal realm of post-war Canadian ionospheric research, and particularly
into the analysis of its most cherished inscription—the panoramic ionogram.
Following the Second World War, Canada entered a period of intense self-reflection.
Tied ever more loosely to a declining Britain, bound ever more closely to an
emerging U.S. superpower, Canada sought to re-imagine itself. In music and
literature, in art and film, the nation attempted to fashion a distinctive post-war
identity rooted in the image of Canada as a northern land. Scientific research in
traditional fields like climatology and geology helped underwrite such claims to
northerness, but they were crucially buttressed by less traditional allies. Ionospheric
research—struggling to remedy the problems of shortwave radio in the Canadian
North, resonating with the profound cultural discourse of communications in
Canadian history, and attempting to establish its significance for North American
defense and international cooperation during the Cold War—played a critical role
in the scientific construction of the ‘New Canada of the North’. Marshalling
magnetic effects, auroral disturbances and the singular geophysics of northern
polar regions behind them, Canadian ionospheric researchers pointed to the visual
traces of the ionogram as instantiations of a ‘Canadian ionosphere’, and came to
read in these images the distinctive characteristics and identity of a northern nation.
David Kaiser Massachusetts Institute of Technology
On a Wing and a Prayer:
Roger Babson and the Rediscovery of General Relativity
Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, fell out of American physicists’
curricula during the 1930s and 1940s, yet it returned to some American
physicists’ research agendas in the mid-1950s. One of the reasons for its return
can be traced to a little-known private foundation, the “Gravity Research
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