2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
vigorous defender of human rights and of the League of Nations. Yet he was
also known for ruthless suppression of native black South Africans, labor unions
and political revolutionaries he is also remembered as the General who jailed
Mahatma Gandhi. This apparent contradiction provides a focus for my analysis:
how could someone both defend human rights and carry out a policy of racial
segregation and political suppression? This paper will show that what may
look like a paradox to our contemporary eyes actually was a coherent
ecologically oriented politics of holism. Smuts’s passion for nature, his training
as a lawyer and his religious background serve as contextual explanations of
his reading of natural law as a basis for civil law. These readings of law were
recapitulated by 1926 in a grand theory of holism and evolution. (Smuts coined
the word ‘holism’ in this connection). In his moral and political thinking Smuts
became known also as a defender of gradualism, by which he meant that people
should gain civil rights and respect incrementally according to the stage of
their evolutionary development. Smuts would use these successive stages in
the development of the human mind in his holistic theory of evolutionary
development in general. Leading ecologists in South Africa such as John
William Bews and John Phillips (who coined the term “biotic community” )
owe a great debt to Smuts and his politics of holism. Two aspects of this
human ecological research were particularly important: the human gradualism
or ecological “succession” of human personalities researched by Bews, and
the concept of an ecological “biotic community” explored by Phillips. Smuts
transformed this research into a policy of racial gradualism that respected
local ways of life in different ecological homelands, a policy he tried to morally
sanctify and promote as author of the famous 1945 Preamble of the United
Nation Charter about human rights.
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Theodore Arabatzis Dibner Institute,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology., and University of Athens
The “Discovery” of the Electron and the Atomism Debate
This paper concerns the entanglement of the “discovery” of the electron with
the debate over the existence of atoms. It is a widespread view that J. J.
Thomson’s measurement of the charge to mass ratio of the electron in 1897
and his subsequent measurement of its charge in 1899 eliminated all doubt
about the existence of this new sub-atomic entity. I have recently argued that
this view is too simplistic and that the so-called “discovery” of the electron
was an extended process, lasting from the early 1890s till the early 20th century,
that involved scientists working in different areas, from the discharge of
electricity through gases to spectroscopy and electromagnetic theory. This is
an episode that has been fairly well-documented in the historical literature.
However, one of its important aspects has not been adequately explored, namely
its interconnection with the debate over the existence of atoms. The belief in
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