2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
among their number. With historians now acknowledging Robert Boyle’s
marriage of corpuscularian and alchemical traditions, it is important to examine
the vitalist corpuscularianism of Samuel Cottereau Duclos (d. 1685), the
alchemist of the AcadÈmie royale des sciences. Although in 1668 Duclos
analyzed Boyle’s Certain Physiological Essays for his Paris colleagues, his
remarks (surviving in three manuscripts in Paris) remain neglected by
historians, who have mistakenly assumed that they concern Boyle’s Sceptical
Chymist. Yet Duclos’s remarks are crucial to understanding the theoretical
contexts within which savants, individually and collectively, carried out their
researches. Hence the Academy’s cryptic verdict, published in its earliest
histories, that Boyle was more the philosophical, Duclos the more chemical,
savant. Duclos’s critique clarifies the polemical usage of “alchimie,”
“alchimiste,” “hermÈtique,” “platonisme,” and “chimie” during a period when
the fledgling AcadÈmie was protecting what we might label “scientific
Gallicanism,” that is, the right of savants in France to inquire freely into natural
philosophy. Moreover, by criticizing the metaphysical engine driving Boyle’s
interpretations of experimental data, Duclos distinguishes his own
corpuscularianism from that of Boyle. As a hitherto unknown link between
the London and Paris scientific societies, Duclos’s critique of Boyle helps us
set the record straight by comparing these two (al)chemists, and (in the process)
reconsidering English and French science in the 1660s.
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Abha Sur Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Identity and Ideology in Meghnad Saha’s Physics
Meghnad Saha (1893-1957) was one of India’s foremost physicists. Saha’s
ionization theory of gases had a profound impact on astrophysics as it changed
astronomical spectroscopy from a qualitative tool for classification of stars to
a precise technique of quantitative measurements. Its simple integration of
atomic physics with thermodynamics established the fundamental link between
microscopic and macroscopic phenomena. Stewart A. Mitchell credited the
ionization theory for illustrating the essential unity of astronomy where spectra
of gigantic stars could provide information about the size of a tiny atom and
where a deeper understanding of the physics of the evolution of stars or the
structure of the universe necessarily involved “an intimate study of the ultimate
constitution of matter.” In this paper I juxtapose Saha’s scientific writings
with his commentaries on civic society to draw out the philosophical essence
of his science. I suggest that while hierarchical caste distinctions of the Indian
society as well as pervasive “orientalism” of the West mediated Saha’s social
interactions with other scientists, his opposition to caste ideologies and his
egalitarianism found a strong expression in his science.
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