2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
higher learning, Seoul National University, more than half the faculty positions in
the department of physics are held by theoreticians. In the South Korean view, the
physicist is symbolized by Einstein, the theoretician. What accounts for South
Korea’s preoccupation with theory over experimentation? The most obvious
explanations is offered by the influence of Confucianism in the Korean culture.
As a result of this influence, solely intellectual occupations enjoy much higher
status than those which require some manual input. The dominance of theoretical
over experimental physics began to change only after 1980, when a new military
government, under pressure from the United States, finally abandoned South
Korea’s dream of building an atomic bomb. South Korea focused instead on
expanding its electronics capacity, particularly its computer and semi-conductor
industries. With the strong backing of the new government, solid-state physics
suddenly flourished. Nonetheless, as a result of South Korea’s firmly imbedded
preference for theory versus practice, solid-state physics and other applied physics
disciplines have so far managed to find their place primarily in institutions outside
the physics departments of South Korea’s traditional universities.
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Mi␣ Gyung Kim North Carolina State University
Genealogy, Memory, and the Chemical Table
“A Chemical Table is in itself a specable agreeable to the mind,” so declared Bernard
le Bovier de Fontenelle, referring to Etienne-Francois Geoffroy’s Table des rapports’
of 1718. Fontenelle had been preaching for some time that chemistry could
approximate the ‘sublime questions of modern geometry’ which were reduced to
‘universal formula’, if only one could predict the changes corresponding to the
different chemical propositions. Geoffroy claimed in his presentation of the table to
the Academie des sciences that it would allow chemists to see ‘at a glance’ the
different ‘rapports’ of chemical substances, which in turn would help them predict
the outcome of complicated chemical actions. He seems to have chosen the word
‘rapport’ instead of ‘affinity’, to exploit deliberately its dual meanings as relationship
and as mathematical ratio. Even if Geoffroy’s affinity table failed to attain
mathematical certainty, it has an inherent appeal as an orderly representation of the
seemingly chaotic practice of eighteenth century chemistry, particularly to the modern
chemical reader accustomed to the periodic table. As Guyton de Morveau put it a
half-century later, after a considerable proliferation of affinity tables, these synoptic
chemical tables formed a kind of ‘chemical world map, in which one would perceive
at first sight the countries known & the space that remains to be discovered.’ That is,
the affinity table and similar devices allowed an instant recall of basic chemical
actions which mapped the chemical territory as it was then known and thus served
as an instrument of collective memory for the chemical community. It could function
as such, however, only in so far as it could efface the technologies of production. In
this paper, I would like to follow Foucault’s move from archaeology to genealogy to
unearth the shifts in chemical techniques which made Geoffroy’s table possible.