2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
of quantum mechanics by Herman Zanstra, a young Dutch theorist with a Minnesota
Ph.D.. The central ideas behind it were suggested to him by Walter Baade, the
outstanding observational astrophysicist then at Hamburg-Bergedorf Observatory
in Germany. Zanstra first gave an oral paper on his method at an American Physical
Society meeting at Stanford University in 1926, just before Donald H. Menzel
arrived at nearby Lick Observatory to take up a research position. Menzel had
been Henry Norris Russell’s star graduate student at Princeton, where he earned
his Ph.D. in 1924. Menzel published an excellent, short, critical review of nebular
astrophysics soon after he arrived at Mount Hamilton. Zanstra published the full
theoretical treatment of his method in 1927, and in 1928 published results he
obtained with it using the 72-in reflector of the Dominion Astrophysical
Observatory, Victoria, BC In this period he was at Caltech and then at the University
of Washington. However, beginning in 1931, Menzel frequently claimed that he
and Zanstra had invented the method independently and nearly simultaneously,
and that it should therefore be called the “Menzel-Zanstra” method. This was not
correct; the paper he cited for his claim was his 1926 review, which did not give a
physical basis for the method, and in fact further concluded that it did not work.
His review had therefore stated that fast particles rather than ionizing photons
were probably the mechanism at work in the nebulae. Several possible reasons for
Menzel’s incorrect will be discussed.
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Eric␣ J. Palmer Allegheny College
A Philosophical Education Program:
Descartes Selon l’ordre des Recitations
Those who have control of the youth of a generation stand to have their ideas
diffused broadly as that generation moves through adulthood. Descartes freely
admits the goal of promoting his new philosophy for the purpose of educating
the elite of coming generations. He famously solicited the Sorbonne for
approval of his approach in the preface to the Meditations, and he went on to
write a textbook suitable for educating the youth at university. Those strategies
did not work: the Sorbonne initially ignored him, and the Jesuits, responsible
for lower education, swiftly attacked him on theological grounds. So on what
roots could Cartesianism have grown in France during the second half of the
17th century? Though it should be unsurprising that Descartes’ success connects
intimately with that of Nicholas Malebranche of the Oratoire Francaise, no
adequate account of the general popularity of Descartes’ system has yet been
offered. The Oratoire de France, an activist Catholic order begun in Paris in
1611, was granted the right to set up schools, beginning in the 1620’s. Whereas
Jesuit schools continued to stress metaphysics, the Oratoriens also distinguished
themselves by turning their new curriculum further toward mathematics and
natural philosophy, which were subjects especially consonant with Cartesian
philosophy. Thus, I suggest, Descartes used the Oratoire to forward scholarship
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