British Journal for the History of Science最新文献

This paper examines the contest between Canadian American industrialist Cyrus Eaton and the Pugwash scientists' leadership for influence over the early Pugwash scientists' conferences. Eaton's activism has generally been dismissed in the historical literature as ineffective, naive and too uncritical of the Soviet Union. This paper argues that he was genuinely committed to international peace and security, that Eaton shared with Pugwash scientists a belief in the importance of intellectuals to global unity, and that he worked to bring about greater international peace and understanding through both his personal activism and his own conferences held in the town of Pugwash. Eaton, however, favoured a broader push for peace, which included participation by a wider range of intellectuals and a call for rapprochement with the Soviet Union. These differences between Eaton and the Pugwash scientists, I argue, were more than simply about approach: they represented different internationalist visions and manifested in different conceptualizations for the Pugwash scientists' conferences. Eaton hoped to incorporate non-scientists and humanism into the conferences, and integrate them into his own broader conference programme at his Thinkers' Lodge at Pugwash. The scientists, however, wanted to keep their conferences as distinctly scientists' events, tied to science and its authority.

This paper looks at a genre of meetings that, while neither purely 'scientific' nor 'diplomatic', drew on elements from both professional spheres and gained prominence in the interwar decades and during the Second World War. It proposes to make sense of 'technical conferences' as a phenomenon that was made by and through scientific experts and politicians championing the organizing power of rationality, science and liberal internationalism. Against the background of swelling ranks of state-employed scientists, this paper documents the emergence of technical conferences as the forums where they got down to work. To make this case the paper traces the influence of a new way of thinking about the function and organization of conferences, originating in the time around the First World War, on one international organization in particular: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), as a new hub of scientists and technicians.

In the early and mid-twentieth century, scientific conferences were a popular tool to establish communication between scientists. Organisational efforts, research and funds were spent defining what makes a productive and successful scientific gathering. A unique example of this was the monitoring and evaluation system of the Gordon Research Conferences (GRCs), which conceptualized informal communication in small, specialized meetings as the best method of advancing cutting-edge research. Studying the detailed monitoring reports of the sessions and the evaluation forms filled by the participants, this paper explores how a concrete format of scientific knowledge production and identity formation was created and reproduced. The normative assessment of the participants' interactions is examined in the contexts of (a) their professional affiliations, (b) the conference presentations and discussions and (c) activities related to play. The study of the GRCs exemplifies how scientists actively conceptualised characteristics like academic affiliation, manners, leisure practices and social categories such as gender as ways to understand, describe and measure how knowledge is best produced and transmitted, turning the conferences into a fertile ground for meta-scientific reflections.

Hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, yet the history of science has often treated them as stages for scientific practice, not as the play itself. Drawing on recent work in the history of science and of international relations, the introduction to this special issue suggests avenues for exploring the phenomenon of the international scientific conference, broadly construed, by highlighting the connected dimensions of communication, sociability and international relations. It lays out a typology of scientific conferences as a way of gaining an overview of their diversity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the international scientific conference is a central locus for understanding science as a social, cultural and political practice.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, geologists created the International Geological Congress (IGC) to achieve the methodological and terminological uniformity that they thought their science lacked. Their desire to standardize their practice and their use of the conference to do so was neither new nor unique. Although late nineteenth-century international conferences have been recognized as important arenas of standardization, relatively little is known of the ways in which conferences organized standardization negotiations. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring how the IGC practically and socially organized standardization work. It appears that the session hall was not the sole and not even the main stage of geological standard-setting. The standardization process was also enacted through comparative study and informal exchanges that regular visits to purpose-built comparative geological exhibitions made possible. Relying on a sophisticated apparatus of commissions and subcommittees, the IGC also socially organized standards negotiation beyond the space and time of the triennial sessions. By tracing the material, spatial and social practices engineered through the IGC to serve geological standardization, this article unboxes the conference process and in so doing enriches our understanding of the period's wave of standardization.

The emergence of conferences in the late nineteenth century significantly changed the ways in which the international scientific community functioned and experienced itself. In the early modern Republic of Letters, savants mainly related through print and correspondence, and apart from at local and later national levels, scholars rarely met. International conferences, by contrast, brought scientists together regularly, in the flesh and in great numbers. Their previously imagined community now became tangible. This paper examines how conferencing reshaped the collective of international scientists by zooming in on the massive meetings of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry, 1893-1914. Drawing on Emile Durkheim's studies of religious gatherings it analyses the ritualization of routine conference practices, such as plenary ceremonies, toasts, ladies' programmes and committee meetings. It looks at how roles were distributed as participants performed as hosts and guests, and in masculine and feminine and national and international identities. Importantly, it shows both how the sacralization of chemistry as a higher aim served to instil senses of dedication in order to organize labour and mitigate conflict, and how the self-perception of the international chemical community was based on contemporary understandings of parliament, democracy and representation.

The move online of almost all meetings in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic threw into sharp relief the taken-for-granted centrality of conferences within scientific culture. While its impact on science has yet to be fully grasped, for the authors of this special issue, this situation held heuristic power for understanding the meanings and functions, now and historically, of international scientific conferencing. Ongoing discussions in the academic world about the pros and cons of virtual meetings bring out the central place of presence in these events and its mediation across space and time by modern infrastructures and technologies. From their rise in the mid-nineteenth century to the experiences of the present day, as well as in imagined futures, international conferences have been about communication. Following James Carey, they can be considered both as places for sharing knowledge and as rituals aimed at fostering and performing communities.

Focusing on South Korean biologists and their efforts to establish national parks in the 1960s and 1970s, I illuminate the ways in which they negotiated their relationship with the ecological diplomacy of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the anti-communist and developmentalist diplomacy of the South Korean government. To justify their activities, these South Korean biologists emphasized the importance of nature conservation activities in the competition for international recognition and economic development with their northern counterparts. The national-park initiative was thus subsumed into the politics of this legitimacy competition between the two Koreas, or what I call 'victory-over-communism' diplomacy. The IUCN's influence over South Korea was limited to the extent that both the government and scientists recognized the diplomatic merit they could gain in the context of their Cold War competition and developmentalism. It is also shown how, during the short detente period of the two Koreas, South Korean biologists used victory-over-communism diplomacy to renew their government's attention to their activities. This Korean episode contributes to the wider perspective of decentralizing the Cold War history of environmental diplomacy in the free-world bloc by illustrating the importance of its entanglement with the Cold War politics surrounding Asian developmentalism.

This paper is a study of the intersection between aviation and diplomacy in the semi-autonomous Indian state of Jodhpur in the final decades of British colonial rule in India. Jodhpur's Maharaja Umaid Singh established a major international aerodrome, patronized one of India's first flying clubs and collaborated with British authorities to make aviation laws for the Indian states. He would also serve in the Royal Air Force during the war and placed Jodhpur state's aviation resources at the disposal of the king-emperor. This paper argues that Jodhpur was able to leverage its aviation resources to wield substantial influence both within and beyond the British Empire through both war and peace. An analysis of Jodhpur's engagement with aviation diplomacy is also revealing of some of the limitations as well as possibilities for the deployment of science diplomacy frameworks, especially in non-Western contexts.

Italian mycologist Pier Andrea Saccardo is best remembered for his monumental Sylloge Fungorum, the first 'modern' effort to compile all identified fungi within a single classification scheme. The existing history of mycology is limited and has primarily focused on developments within England, but this article argues that Saccardo and his collaborators on the Sylloge supported a vital transnational expansion of mycological knowledge exchange and played a crucial role in stabilizing the tangled knot of local naming and identification among the world's amateur and professional mycologists. Written in the 'universal' scientific language of Latin, the Sylloge served as an early database of fungal knowledge and symbolized a broader unification of mycological inquiry in a moment of expanded scientific correspondence. The article situates this proto-database in broader histories of big data in biology and shows how the Sylloge formed a globalizing foundation for the twentieth century's major collecting and taxonomic advances in mycology.