British Journal for the History of Science最新文献

This article examines the significant relationship that existed between commercial British television and the study of animal behaviour. Ethological research provided important content for the new television channel, at the same time as that coverage played a substantial role in creating a new research specialism, the study of primate facial expressions, for this emergent scientific discipline. The key site in this was a television and film unit at London Zoo administered by the Zoological Society and Granada TV. The Granada unit produced 'Animal expressions', a twenty-five-minute television film based on research on monkeys and apes by the Dutch postgraduate student and soon-to-be-leading-authority Jan van Hooff. Recovering the production and multiple uses of 'Animal expressions', this paper offers the first sustained historical analysis of science on commercial television. I show how Granada patronage helped Van Hooff to support his argument that human expressions such as smiling and laughter shared common evolutionary origins with similar facial movements in nonhuman primates. Emphasizing the mutual shaping of science and ITV, I argue that 'Animal expressions' repurposed televisual conventions of framing talking heads, and blended serious science with the comedy of 'funny faces', thereby epitomizing Granada's public-service strategy at a time when commercial television was defending itself from criticism in the Pilkington report.

A new genre of treatises on practical seamanship emerged in eighteenth-century Britain. Authored by a group of seamen with decades of experience on the lower deck of merchant and naval vessels, these texts represented the ship as a machine, and seamanship as a form of mechanical experiment which could only be carried out by deep-sea sailors. However, as this article finds, this group of sailor-authors had only a brief moment of authoritative legitimacy before their ideas were repackaged and promoted by land-bound authors and naval officers, and the progenitors of the 'science of seamanship' were deemed unfit participants in its ongoing practice. This article explores this brief moment, taking seriously the ideas and influences of the maritime milieu which spawned it, and arguing that the codification and circulation of 'useful knowledge' in eighteenth-century Britain often hardened social hierarchies. Examining seamanship forces us to question the progressivist linear trajectory of an increasingly open scientific culture during this period, and to focus instead on a repeating pattern in which the working knowledge of labourers and artisans was appropriated and its original practitioners denigrated.

In his Telluris Theoria Sacra and its English translation The Theory of the Earth (1681-90), the English clergyman and schoolmaster Thomas Burnet (c.1635-1715) constructed a geological history from the Creation to the Final Consummation, positing predominantly natural causes to explain biblical events and their effects on the Earth and life on it. Burnet's insistence on appealing primarily to natural rather than miraculous causes has been interpreted both by his contemporaries and by some historians as an essentially Cartesian principle. On this reading, Burnet adhered to a Cartesian style of explanation in which there was no place for miracles. In this paper, I propose a different interpretation. Burnet's commitment to natural over miraculous causes, I argue, was grounded in an anti-voluntarist theology which he inherited from the Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians. This anti-voluntarism, moreover, also dictated the kind of miracles to which he did appeal. This reading of Burnet contrasts with the view that he was simply following Cartesian principles. First, Descartes had espoused a radical form of theological voluntarism. Second, Burnet's and Descartes's views of providence were based on distinct attributes of God, and these attributes had quite different implications regarding the place of miracles in the providential order.

This article examines the early modern household's importance for producing experimental knowledge through an examination of the Halifax household of Margery and Henry Power. While Henry Power has been studied as a natural philosopher within the male-dominated intellectual circles of Cambridge and London, the epistemic labour of his wife, Margery Power, has hitherto been overlooked. From the 1650s, this couple worked in tandem to enhance their understanding of the vegetable world through various paper technologies, from books, paper slips and recipe notebooks to Margery's drawing album and Henry's published Experimental Philosophy. Focusing on Margery's practice of hand-colouring flower books, her copied and original drawings of flowers and her experimental production of ink, we argue that Margery's sensibility towards colour was crucial to Henry's microscopic observations of plants. Even if Margery's sophisticated knowledge of plants never left the household, we argue that her contribution was nevertheless crucial to the observation and representation of plants within the community of experimental philosophy. In this way, our article highlights the importance of female artists within the history of scientific observation, the use of books and paperwork in the botanical disciplines, and the relationship between household science and experimental philosophy.

Given that the practices and institutions of knowledge production commonly referred to as 'science' are believed to have 'Western' origins, their apparent proliferation entails negotiations and power dynamics that shape both science and diplomacy in specific locales. This paper investigates a facet of this co-production of science and diplomacy in the emergence of knowledge infrastructure in Japan during the Allied Occupation. It focuses on the 1947 delegation from the United States National Academy of Sciences to Japan and its role in creating the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). While historians view this mission as having been dispatched to provide advice on the foundation of the SCJ, it was in fact an unintentional outcome. The original plan was to recruit long-term scientific advisers on science policy to Douglas MacArthur's headquarters. The creation of the SCJ was not the brainchild of any individual but the result of an unforeseen alteration of the original idea through negotiations among various actors. By examining the transnational aspects of this process and the complex social process underlying it, and drawing on Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory, this paper proposes the concept of 'techno-diplomatic assemblage' for understanding the transnational construction of knowledge infrastructure such as the emergence of the SCJ.

In the faculty of arts at the University of Padua in the years around 1600 professors debated the reliability of astrology, the existence of occult celestial influences, and the idea that celestial heat is present in living bodies. From the 1570s to the 1620s many professors in the faculty of arts pushed back against astrology and Jean Fernel's theories surrounding astral body. Girolamo Mercuriale, Alessandro Massaria and Eustachio Rudio thought that some forms of astral causation and Fernel's ideas were incompatible with their observations of disease, Aristotle's philosophy and Hippocratic theories. Later, Santorio Santorio and Cesare Cremonini, who were allied to the political circle of Paolo Sarpi, polemicized against astrology. Their writings show that at Padua medical theory was linked to Aristotelian cosmology, which emphasized the incommensurability between celestial and terrestrial elements. Their rejection of astrology, however, did not lead to the complete marginalization of astrology at Padua. By the middle of the 1620s, as the political climate changed in Venice, the University of Padua hired professors who promoted astrology and Fernel's theories about the celestial nature of innate heat. The diversity of opinions about astrology reflected Venice's divided politics and multiple approaches to interpreting Aristotle and other authorities.

This history of a statement attributed to the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert exemplifies the making and uses of quotations in recent science. Wolpert's dictum, 'It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life', was produced in a series of international shifts of medium and scale. It originated in his vivid declaration in conversation with a non-specialist at a workshop dinner, gained its canonical form in a colleague's monograph, and was amplified as a quotation on a poster derived from an undergraduate project. Although it drew on Wolpert's authority and he accepted his authorship, it thus represents a collective sifting of earlier claims for the significance of prenatal existence through the values of 1980s developmental biology. Juxtaposing a technical term with major life events has let teachers engage students, and researchers entice journalists, while sharing an in-joke that came to mark community identity. Serious applications include arguing for an extension of the fourteen-day limit on human-embryo research. On this evidence, quotations have been kept busy addressing every audience of specialized knowledge.

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the logistical challenges and difficulties encountered by those responsible for the collection, preservation and safe transport of specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory. This article builds on this trend by looking beyond apparent successes to consider the practices and practicalities of shipboard travel and maritime and coastal collecting activities. The discussion focuses on the example of William Henry Harvey, who travelled to Australia in pursuit of cryptogams - non-flowering plants like mosses, lichens and algae - in 1853. In his private correspondence to family and friends, Harvey offered insights into the challenges and obstacles faced by all collectors in the period. His experiences were fundamentally shaped by the material culture, embodied knowledge and physical constraints he encountered on the way. On one level, shipboard and onshore collecting activities were facilitated by the connections forged by new technologies and Britain's global empire. But they also depended on specific contexts and relied on local agents and actors, as well as on the physical and technical facilities (and limitations) of those doing the collecting. The examples of Harvey and others shed light on the real, 'lived' experiences of individual collectors, the difficulties and challenges they encountered in amassing their collections, and the networks of people on which they relied.

The digester, invented by Denis Papin in the 1680s, was a rudimentary pressure cooker used to soften hard bodies by boiling them at high pressure. In this paper, I propose a reassessment of Papin's work on the digester, arguing that his research was located at the intersection of the chemical laboratory and cooking practice. I then examine cases from the eighteenth-century European circulation of the instrument in Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands in order to showcase the different practices in which the digester was embedded, including chemical research, philanthropic projects to feed the destitute, and proposals for the improvement of home cooking. The digester's history represents a key episode for demonstrating the intertwined nature of natural-philosophical research and the practice of economy or 'thrift'. All users of the digester engaged in a rationalization of its functions through quantification, not only to fulfil a concern for precision but also to display the device's potential to reform practical daily life. The digester could save time and fuel, reduce material waste, make cooking easier and foster collective meal preparation for the needy.

This essay explores the research practice of French geometer Michel Chasles (1793-1880), from his 1837 Aperçu historique up to the preparation of his courses on 'higher geometry' between 1846 and 1852. It argues that this scientific pursuit was jointly carried out on a historiographical and a mathematical terrain. Epistemic techniques such as the archival search for and comparison of manuscripts, the deconstructive historiography of past geometrical methods, and the epistemologically motivated periodization of the history of mathematics are shown to have played a crucial role in the shaping of Chasles's own theories. In particular, we present Chasles's approach to the 'material history' of algebraic symbolism and argue that it motivated and informed his subsequent invention of a novel notational technology for the writing of geometrical proofs and propositions. In return, this technology allowed Chasles to carry out a programme for the modernization of geometry in keeping with epistemic requirements he had also delineated via a form of historical writing.