2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
called because of their Newtonian importance) but in more significant, though
lesser known, innovations in his treatment of the earth’s orbit.
176
Ulf von␣ Rauchhaupt Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Colorful Clouds:
West Germany’s First Steps into Experimental Space Science in the Early
1960s
In late 1959, the West German federal government and German Scientists started
to think about how to enter the space age. These plans were triggered by American
offers to fly German instruments on US rockets and satellites. After the foundation
of NASA in 1958, such offers had been advertised also to other western nations.
But unlike other nations, West Germany had long stayed away from everything
related to rockets because of the Peenemuende legacy—and consequently from
building rocket-borne hardware. Now West German Politicians and Scientists
quickly agreed to set up an experimental group affiliated with Werner Heisenberg’s
Max Planck Institute, where Ludwig Biermann had been doing theoretical space
plasma research since the early 1950s. Top of the list of intended research topics
for the new group championed by Heisenberg and Biermann were the “hot” topics
of the time: cosmic ray research and the newly discovered radiation belts. However,
when the group eventually took up work in late 1961, their first—and for some
years only one—project was something rather different and novel: ionospheric
and magnetospheric research by means of ion-clouds released from sounding
rockets in high altitudes. These ion-cloud experiments grew out of an idea by
Biermann to probe the solar wind with “artificial comets” made of metal vapor,
photoionized and exited by sunlight. This change of program not only reflects the
different contexts of the plan and its realization but also the changes of those
contexts themselves. The most notable of these changes was driven by the efforts
towards a European Space Research Organization (ESRO) for which first ideas
surfaced in early 1960. However, both the difficulties with starting experimental
research from scratch and doing it in an dynamic international environment were
dealt with in an institutional tradition which favored personality over structure.
␣
Andre Wakefield Dibner Institute for the History of Science and
Technology
Science and Silver in the Mines of Central Europe, 1650-1850
My paper explores the place of the mining sciences (e.g., metallurgical
chemistry, geognosy, mineralogy, geology) between the 17th and 19th centuries.
In order to comprehend the perceived purpose of these sciences for
contemporaries, we need first to understand the larger “economy of the mines,”