History of Science最新文献

Historians have thoroughly documented the development of mercury-based silver refining in Spanish America in the late sixteenth century, and its use for over 300 years on an industrial scale unknown in Europe. However, we currently lack any consensus about the significance of this technology in the global history of knowledge. This article critically reassesses the invention and improvement of this refining method with the aim of addressing two interrelated issues. Firstly, how experiential knowledge and practical skills in silver refining were deliberately harnessed to solve a specific technical problem. Secondly, how economic incentives and patronage set the stage for empirical practices and a collaborative culture that facilitated the widespread use of this novel technique. In so doing, this article places silver refining within the theoretical constructs and historiography of useful knowledge, and bridges narratives that have remained largely isolated.

Michael Faraday's laboratory experiments have dominated traditional histories of the electrical sciences in 1820s and 1830s Britain. However, as this article demonstrates, in the mining region of Cornwall, Robert Were Fox fashioned a very different approach to the study of electromagnetic phenomena. Here, it was the mine that provided the foremost site of scientific experimentation, with Fox employing these underground locations to measure the Earth's heat and make claims over the existence of subterranean electrical currents. Yet securing philosophical claims cultivated in mines proved challenging for Fox, with metropolitan audiences, including Faraday, loath to give credit to the results of these underground experiments. This article explores how Fox developed a way of modeling his mine experiments, using clay samples, to communicate knowledge from industrial Cornwall to urban centers of elite science. It argues that the mine was an epistemologically complex venue of scientific activity, at once seeming to provide a way of examining nature directly, without recourse to laboratory contrivance, while simultaneously being a place where knowledge claims were hard to verify without access to these physically challenging locations. In exploring Fox's work, this study contributes to a growing literature of spatial investigation that takes the vertical as its unit of analysis.

Los Alamos, New Mexico has an enduring and complicated relationship with its past. During World War II, its residents worked to create the world's first atomic weapons. The nuclear legacies of the Manhattan Project are global, but in contemporary Los Alamos the Project is often primarily considered a local history before a national or international one. The community's modern identity is constructed in part through creating its history, and this article studies two children's performances of the Manhattan Project past. The plots of these performances attempt to sidestep difficult history by avoiding nuclear weapons, which can ironically raise their uncanny specter in the imagination of the audience. The community history created in the performances privileges white scientist perspectives and at times flattens differences between past and present. This performed Manhattan Project is not only domestic - Los Alamos domesticates its complex history through these performances.

Sanfte Chemie was a concept formulated in the 1980s in Germany by a group of environmentally conscious scholars. It emerged within a unique environment, marked by its radical critique of dominant forms of rationality, and against the rich background of German philosophical technocritical traditions. Its purpose was to profoundly reshape the practice of chemistry and the organization of the chemical industry along the lines of sustainability. In contrast to later concepts like green or sustainable chemistry, Sanfte Chemie went beyond setting new research directions; it critically reevaluated the entire epistemological foundation upon which the science of chemistry was built. Under the auspices of the German Green Party, the concept flourished in the 1980s before falling out of grace in the following decade. While largely deemed overly radical in its time and then subsequently forgotten, Sanfte Chemie not only anticipated some of the most promising trends in sustainability science today but also offered unique insights that may shed new light on the challenges of the ongoing environmental crisis.

This article explores the relation between two different modes of cosmology: the social and the scientific. Over the twentieth century, scientific understandings of the dimensions and operations of the physical universe changed dramatically, significantly prompted by astronomical and astrophysical research undertaken at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. Could those understandings be readily translated into social theory? Studies across a range of disciplines have intimated that the scientific cosmos might be less essential to the worlds of meaning and belonging that people and communities compose around themselves than more local and relational models of an ordered whole. The article applies that proposition to the Mount Wilson Observatory itself, arguing that the observatory's founder, George Ellery Hale, and his acolytes were deeply invested in practices of terrestrial place-making, the politics of belonging, and the cadences of civilizational time as applied to their city and its region. Moreover, they struggled to construct a philosophy integrating the cosmos they were seeking to fix at home with the contortions and careering trajectories of the universal whole.

Processes of adapting complex information for broad audiences became a pressing concern by the turn of the twentieth century. Channels of communication ranged from public lectures to printed books designed to serve a social class eager for self-improvement. Through analyzing a course of public lectures given by George Howard Darwin (1845-1912) for the Lowell Institute in Boston and the monograph he based on these, The Tides and Kindred Phenomena of the Solar System (1898), this article connects the important practices of public lecturing and book production-two aspects of knowledge dissemination that tend to be studied as separate entities. Darwin, Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and son of the famous naturalist, relied on a diverse material culture when lecturing and producing a book. Giving a new account of Darwin's scientific work through exploring his adaption of it for broader audiences, this article connects the diverse material culture Darwin employed in talks to the practice of producing a published book. The content of objects demonstrated and the lantern slides projected during Darwin's lectures evolved to form a book designed to engage broad sectors of society in Europe and the United States. Darwin's lectures were attended at full capacity, while The Tides was soon printed in numerous English editions and translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, and Spanish.

This article delves into Captain Samuel Alfred Warner's dogged campaign to sell two inventions - his submersible mine and "long range" missile - to the British government in the 1840s and 1850s. Departing from a historiography that dismisses Warner as a fraudster, it clarifies how he managed to generate widespread interest in his weapons technologies for nearly twenty years. I therefore analyze three key elements of his self-promotion: his personal branding, his pitch, and his simultaneous embrace and rejection of publicity. Neither elite nor highly educated, Warner ran up against a culture of "polite science" that distinguished disinterested practitioners from profit-minded schemers. To establish his credentials, he emphasized his practical maritime experience and represented himself as a martyr willing to bear the scorn of a disbelieving establishment. In pitching his devices, Warner capitalized on alarmism over border security and the integrity of the empire; he declared that they could hobble France's modernizing navy and quickly end colonial conflicts. When skeptics began to fret over the proliferation of his destructive weapons, Warner flipped the script and lauded the threat of mutual annihilation as a deterrent to needless warfare. The issue of publicity, however, would ultimately be Warner's professional undoing. Despite successful demonstrations, his clashes with official investigators and his refusal to disclose his chemical secrets led critics to dispute the originality of his discoveries. An examination of Warner's self-promotional strategies, his fraught interactions with the British state, and the ambivalent public reaction to his contraptions provides insight into how scientific authority was acquired and lost in this period.

While interest in early modern herbaria has so far mainly concentrated on the dried plants stored in them, this paper addresses another of their qualities - their role as manuscripts. In the 1670s, the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646-95) spent several years in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) as a medical officer in the service of the Dutch East India Company. During his stay he put together four herbaria, two of which contain a wealth of handwritten notes by himself and several later owners. First, it will be shown that these notes provide information on the linguistic skills and interests of those who collected plants in an overseas trading settlement. Hermann's botanical practice demanded and, at the same time, generated knowledge of Sinhalese (an Indo-Aryan language that is spoken by the largest ethnic group on the island) and its script. In his herbarium, observations on the semantics, morphology, and pronunciation of Sinhalese are inextricably intertwined with those of botanical nature. Second, on the basis of these voluminous notes, the character of early modern herbaria as manuscripts will be highlighted. And third, Hermann's herbaria will be integrated into an investigation of scribal practices and publication strategies of eighteenth-century botany. Along with field notes, letters, manuscripts, illustrations, and printed books, herbaria were knots in the textual-visual mesh of early modern botany.

This paper presents a case study of the "electric hypothesis" of the causes of earthquakes, which emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century as part of the first studies of seismology. This hypothesis was related to Franklin's views on atmospheric electricity and developed in a period when electric phenomena were widely studied, and was essentially based on solid empirical evidence and confirmed by model experiments. Even though it resulted from scientific reasoning, the theory remained strongly empirical, and was supported by Italian scholars who were familiar with seismic events. Among these, Giuseppe Saverio Poli, a follower of Franklin, was able to provide a careful and comprehensive explanation of the disastrous earthquake of 1783, which occurred in Calabria, a region of southern Italy, and the St. Anne earthquake of 1805, by drawing not just upon the electric evidence, but all the relevant phenomenology available. We outline here the emergence, the development, and the later evolution (up to the beginning of the nineteenth century) of the "electric earthquake" paradigm by focusing on different works by Poli, including a previously unknown manuscript containing a thorough account of the Calabria earthquake prepared by the Neapolitan scholar for the Royal Society. The present case study therefore offers the opportunity to illustrate how electrical science shaped earthquake science to a degree not usually appreciated in the literature, and is also supported to some extent by the transition from Enlightenment scientific ideals to the Romantic conception of unity in the natural world, in search of common causes among phenomena belonging to different fields.

Insect white wax is a type of biological wax, mainly produced in Jiading Fu (now Leshan, Sichuan province) in southern Sichuan province, also known as Sichuan wax. It is a special export product in China and an important source of income for local wax farmers. From the seventeenth century onward, Westerners who traveled deep into southwestern China studied the wax, including its geographical distribution, biological experiments, and production techniques. They assessed its commercial prospects and strove to introduce it to Europe and the areas it controlled. Based on the reports of the European scholars' expeditions, travelogues, conference proceedings, and correspondence, this paper examines the history of Western research on the insect white wax and aims to investigate the underlying motivations for the exploration activities, proposes the concept of "object colonialism," and discusses the impact of adopting objects from their countries of origin on the world's political and economic landscape.