Endeavour最新文献

Rhythm characterizes life on Earth. Daily physiological rhythms of eating and fasting, sleeping and waking, moving and resting, are common to almost all life forms which evolved under the solar light–dark cycle. Despite their ubiquity, historians of health and medicine have yet to grapple with the lived experiences of these daily rhythms in the past. This paper presents a potential new research agenda in ‘rhythmic history’ that understands rhythmicity as something which lies between biology and culture. Thinking with rhythms offers exciting opportunities to unite previously disparate historical studies of daily rhythms like eating and sleeping and opens up a new way to view the enmeshed connections between body and environment. In this paper, I take inspiration from the scientific concept of the ‘zeitgeber’ (‘time giver’), coined by the German chronobiologist Jürgen Aschoff, to frame a review of current literature relating to rhythms and explore Henry Lefebvre’s notion of ‘rhythmanalysis’ as a methodological tool for historians undertaking ‘rhythmic histories’.

In this paper I analyse Francisco Sánchez’s role in the Quaestio de certitudine mathematicarum debate. Despite some studies on the philosophical and medical scepticism of Sánchez and, his extant letter with Christopher Clavius, a participant in the debate, we have few analyses about Sánchez’s position regarding the certainty of mathematics. Sánchez discussed some problems that Clavius analysed in his Prolegomena to propose an empirical basis for mathematics through a questioning of its certainty. I will trace the conceptual connections between Sánchez’s 1589 letter to Clavius and the Quaestio debate, to introduce Sánchez’s sceptical approach to analysing the certainty of mathematics.

Today, reinforced concrete (RC) is the most commonly used construction material in Turkey. It first emerged in Europe in the 1850s and was adopted in a number of Late Ottoman period structures, mostly in İstanbul, during the first two decades of the twentieth century. During the Early Turkish Republic (1923–1938), RC appeared in public-use buildings in Ankara, such as the Ethnographic Museum, which was the first in the new capital to feature RC elements, leading the way for many more structures to come. Despite the fact that Turkish and foreign civil engineers faced a series of economic, social, cultural, political, educational and technical challenges during the transition from masonry and timber construction to RC, its adoption was facilitated by the fact that as a European building technology, it became symbolically important to the new republic. Equated with modernity, RC would allow its capital, Ankara, to construct an identity that would contrast with İstanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This transition would also be catalyzed by the rise of a professional class of Turkish civil engineers who deployed RC to reinforce their authority as trained specialists and agents of modernization.

Energy (in all its conceptualizations and connotations) is a glitch, a bug, an error. Energy is presented here as a roadblock in efforts to articulate and formulate a coherent physical model of the universe, as well as an impediment to achieving just and equitable social relations. Energy broke physics and broke society. This article traces conundrums and uncertainties that prevail in physics today, from the irreconcilability of quantum dynamics and gravitational spacetime to the unsatisfactory postulation of dark energy, and the profusion of probabilistic reasoning. I offer a brief history of thermodynamics and its entanglement with industrial capitalism via the steam engine. I explore alternate histories of energy (hydrodynamic and metabolic) and speculate on the potential social implications of these counterfactual trajectories. Finally, building on the novel Constructor Theory paradigm, I entertain the possibility of replacing energy with informed noticing as the undergirding architecture of physics, replacing dynamics with discernment as the underbelly of the discipline. The operation within is not to argue that the current course of energy-based physics is “incorrect,” but rather that it is problematic both for reasons of cosmological compatibility and the social disharmony it has wrought.

During the last two decades, the history of science in Israel has attracted much scholarly attention. Historians of science, science and technology studies (STS) scholars, and Middle East/Israel studies experts have focused on specific scientific disciplines or periods, analyzing the uniqueness of science and technology in Israel. This article explores what characterized Israel’s scientific activity precisely at the time of the state’s birth, and examine how the perception of science as key to Israel’s survival was constructed and reinforced in that formative phase. The focus here is on the natural sciences, as the perception of the natural sciences’ importance and their contribution to building the state and its security differed essentially from that of other disciplines. As this article demonstrates, the challenges that the natural sciences faced during Israel’s War of Independence were far more difficult than those faced by the social sciences and the humanities. This study analyzes scientific activity that took place in one single year, beginning with the establishment of the Science Corps in March 1948, two months before Israel’s declaring independence, until the end of its War of Independence in February 1949. As this study shows, both the war effort and the civilian activities strongly influenced scientific research and implementation in the nascent state.

In summer 2021, the Virtual History of Science, Technology, and Medicine group hosted two online panels on pseudoscience topics including Flat Earth, Hollow Earth, geohistory, alternate evolution, and forgeries. The panels discussed the roles of such theories in the history of science, as well as the public’s understanding of both history and science.

Hugh Diamond was a psychiatrist, antiquarian, and photographer, who was the first person to take photographs of female asylum patients. These photographs, using the newly invented technology of the camera, were intended to be objective and accurate visual indicators of mental illness. Considering Diamond’s overlapping interests, his project must be understood within the larger cultural and historical context and the tensions inherent in medical photography and portraiture. Despite the goal of capturing “objective, scientific data,” the photographs instead relied on traditional iconography dating back to the Greeks and Middle Ages and can be analyzed from an art historical perspective. As an antiquarian, Diamond collected portraits of his patients just as he collected various other objects. As such, while Diamond may be considered a humanistic leader of the moral treatment movement, his work in capturing these “specimens,” the female patients, reflects a perpetuation of the stigmatization of mental illness to be put on display for the Victorian audience.