2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

Ken Alder Northwestern University
HSS Abstracts
PASCAL DEFEATS NEWTON!
Or Originality and Verisimilitude in History and Science
This paper invokes the “Pascal-Newton” forgeries to explore the transformation
of the historical discipline into a “science” in France in the late nineteenth century,
and the role of the history of science in this transformation. As such, the paper is
a contribution to the history of proof and evidence in diverse disciplines and
cultural contexts. In particular, it examines the relationship between the concurrent
marketplace craze for “authentic documents” and the rise of professional historywriting
based on a critical analysis of texts. The forgeries themselves were a set
of 30,000 letters purchased by the prominent French mathematician (and amateur
historian of science), Michel Chasles. These letters included a correspondence
between Blaise Pascal and an eleven-year-old school-boy named Isaac Newton,
proving that Newton had stolen from Pascal his demonstration of the law of
universal gravitation. Proved this, at least, to the satisfaction of several members
of the French academy, who invoked it as further proof of how French priority/
originality had been once again neglected. Other academicians, however, and
many more savants outside its walls, including of course many in England,
were more dubious. The ensuing polemic, which lasted for three long years
(1868-1870), reveals the difficulties faced by scientists (and historians of science)
when they tried to bring the methods of scientific verification to bear on the art
of verisimilitude by which we represent the past. To bring these difficulties
home to contemporary historians, this conference paper will take the form of a
pseudo-letter from the hand of the guilty forger (Vrain-Lucas) in which he defends
his compositions as merely a “dramatization” of historical events based on
extracts from original documents, a dramatization which he hoped would capture
both the inner-workings of a remote historical period and the attention of an
otherwise-preoccupied public (as well as earn him a small fortune). As a particular
kind of dramatization, this conference paper is meant to challenge our own
concepts of authorship and originality in history, as well as in science.
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Jennifer␣ K. Alexander University of Minnesota
Engineers, Charlatans, and Progressive Efficiency
Few people spoke of efficiency at the turn of the twentieth century, in the early
days of American progressivism. The term remained technical, used by physicists
and engineers to discuss particular aspects of thermodynamics. By the time the
progressive era waned, however, efficiency had become one of America’s most
recognizable slogans. Scholars have found progressive interest in efficiency
superficial and portray it as an empty vessel ready and willing to carry all sorts of
contextual baggage. Historians have even called some popularizers of efficiency
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