2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Erastus made the subject a cause celebre in the appendix to his Disputationes de
nova Philippi Paracelsi medicina of 1572, and the topic was incorporated into
Daniel Sennert’s discussions of atomism, beginning in 1619. In my talk, I will
focus mainly on the highly polemical Erastus, while also pointing out the
ramifications of his argument for the history of atomism and the Aristotelian
distinction between artificial and natural substances.
Richard␣ J. Noakes University of Leeds
‘Imponderables in the Balance’:
Rewriting the History of Victorian Physics and Psychical Research
This paper explores the complex connections between Victorian research into
evanescent physical phenomena, technology, and spiritualism. The radiometer,
the electrical discharge tube, and the sensitive flame were among the most
spectacular instruments of the Victorian physics laboratory. For many latenineteenth
and twentieth-century scientific commentators, these instruments also
mediated phenomena that were of major importance in the ‘discovery’ of the
electron and in the understanding of gases and radiation. This paper contends
that these latter interpretations obscure some of the more striking uses to which
such instruments were originally put. It focuses on the work of William Crookes,
the analytical chemist who invented the radiometer, William Fletcher Barrett, a
physicist and leading exhibitor of the sensitive flame apparatus, and Cromwell
Varley, a telegraphic engineer whose experiments on electrical discharge were
judged to have furnished decisive evidence for the corpuscular nature of cathode
rays. Crookes, Varley and Barrett were also among the most eminent psychical
researchers of the nineteenth century, and this paper argues that their strategies
for producing evidence for spiritualistic phenomena were informed by and
informed the development of the instruments for which they were celebrated.
Although these strategies failed to produce conclusive evidence for spiritualistic
phenomena, Crookes, Varley and Barrett successfully exploited their command
of the transient phenomena displayed in their instruments to claim authority
over a much wider range of transient phenomena and to defend their scientific
reputation. The paper concludes by considering the implications of these historical
episodes for the historiography of Victorian physics and psychical research.
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Tara␣ E. Nummedal Stanford University
Gender, Authority and the Alchemical Career of Anna Maria Zieglerin
In 1571, a female alchemist named Anna Maria Zieglerin arrived at the court
of Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel in the Holy Roman Empire.
Zieglerin herself held no official position at court and was simply accompanying