2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
examine the detailed debates within the SPR concerning scientific method
and the use of apparatus that arose around, for example, the exposure of the
fraudulent medium Eusapia Palladino in the mid-1890s. Investigators such as
Oliver Lodge and Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick began to reexamine their
positions concerning the integration of apparatus into experimentation on the
phenomena. Standard uses of technologies in psychical research had focused
on both measuring effects and controlling the medium. Oliver Lodge and the
conjurer J. N. Maskelyne explored the ways in which experimental apparatus
could be used against investigators to produce fraudulent effects—leading
Lodge to conclude that uses of technology in investigation might distract the
observer more than assuring the validity of results. In conjunction with this,
debates concerning the relative validity of spirit photography in the 1920s
brought issues of the use of apparatus and instruments in psychical research to
the fore. Scientists like Lodge, who had been at the forefront of improving the
apparatus, films and techniques of x-ray photography for both diagnostic and
research purposes, flatly rejected the utility of photography for the recording
of spirit phenomena. Finally, this paper will conclude with the argument that
a renaissance of the experimental techniques, methods, and apparatus employed
by the SPR in the 1880s and 1890s (when its research program emphasized
the implementation of experimental technologies) occurred in the 1920s and
1930s. Research programs based at Duke, Princeton, and the University of
Pennsylvania explicitly drew upon the technologies and methods employed
by the SPR to investigate psychic phenomena.
66
Deborah␣ R. Coen Harvard University
Taking Nature’s Pulse: The Place of the Organic in Austrian Physics
In answer to his question “What is Life?” Erwin Schrödinger located the
uniqueness of living things in the balance between the persistence of their
general forms and their potential for random variation. This vision of variability
as the signature of the organic will be the focus of my talk. In the nineteenth
century, writers in German from Goethe and Schelling to Houston Stewart
Chamberlain sought the essence of the organic in nature’s fluctuations—from
the rise and fall of a barometer, to changes in seasonal temperatures from year
to year, to physical variations between members of the same species. My talk
will consider how nature’s fluctuations turned from a literary trope associated
with Naturphilosophie into a new field of twentieth-century physics, that of
Schwankungserscheinungen. Breaking with the firmly entrenched method of
paring away the “scatter” in experimental measurements to focus on the
“normal” value, Schrödinger was among a group of German-speaking
physicists who came to treat fluctuations as phenomena in their own right. In
radioactivity, for example, instead of imposing regularity on their measurements
like colleagues abroad, Schrödinger and his Viennese collaborators mapped