Centaurus最新文献

Contributions of a historiographical bent have been a regular presence in Centaurus. However, from 2007 onwards, when Centaurus became associated with the European Society for the History of Science, a number of papers and thematic special issues that chose to tackle specifically historiographical reflections on sciences in Europe made their appearance. Our long-lasting interest in this problematic, and the urgency of (re)addressing it in a very dynamic disciplinary scenario marked by global studies, and more generally by the necessity of exploring multi-disciplinary connections, provides the springboard for this second virtual issue: It offers a selection of nine papers (published in 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2018, 2019, and 2021), of which five are introductions to special issues or spotlight sections (published in 2009, 2013, 2018, and 2021) covering the 15 years of association between Centaurus and the European Society for the History of Science, from 2007 to 2021.

The use of energy from wind has a multi-faceted relationship to visibility. Between 1973 and 1991, various actors in the West German environmental movement made assertions about the visibility of renewable sources of power, but wind energy took on a particular prominence. In this article, the question of how different actors have used knowledge and the materiality of wind turbines for competing purposes is explored. Environmentalists attempted to create visible signs of a valid alternative energy future by tinkering with small, decentralized wind turbines, while the Federal Republic of Germany's Ministry of Research and established energy providers used the failure of the state-subsidized large-scale wind-energy project GROWIAN to criticize renewables and brand their application as misguided. In both cases, actors created new wind energy visibilities to convey their conflicting interests—pitting those advocating a new, environmentally friendly energy system against those who sought consolidation of the large-scale fossil-nuclear energy system.

More than other energy industries, the electric power industry relied on calculating practices and codifications like load management to handle and develop their technical systems. Scholars have approached these practices largely from the point of view of the history of electricity. While it is true that these practices facilitated the expansion of the industry, this paper argues that electrical systems and the calculations around them were also used to “decipher” the new relations between power, economic change, and society that were emerging in the first decades of the 20th century. This paper asks how electricity took on the form of a mode of representation of economic life. Starting from the control of currents in early electrical systems via the calculation of voltage, current, and resistance, the paper shows how load management developed, and how the calculations around the large, interconnected power systems of the early 20th century were used as information on the “power economy.” In the medium of the power economy, engineers, economists, and politicians imagined the relation between the national and the world economy, between technical progress and the nascent macroeconomic object of “the economy.” Based on an analysis of the contributions to the World Power Conferences, the paper distinguishes two ways in which calculations around electricity became relevant for economic policy in the interwar years: as an indicator of economic growth and as the ground for a new economy.

In 2021, the Italian Society for the History of Physics and Astronomy (SISFA) celebrates its 40th birthday. The Society, today an institutional member of the ESHS, was founded as the Gruppo Nazionale di Storia della Fisica (GNSF) during two conferences in 1981 (in April and October) at the Collegio Ghislieri in Pavia, and later (1999) became the Società Italiana degli Storici della Fisica e dell'Astronomia. A significant feature of the Society is that it emerged and developed in the physics departments of Italian universities. Since 1981, historians of SISFA have published extensively and have produced over 1,500 contributions in the Proceedings of the yearly national congresses, which have continued in an uninterrupted series.1 On this 40th anniversary, we briefly recount here how the scientific, cultural, and institutional experience of the history of physics was born and developed in Italy, and present a short discussion of its relationships with the community of Italian physicists.

Italian physicists have made pioneering professional contributions to the history of physics. In 1839, the first congress of Italian scientists was inaugurated with an historical overview. After the unification of the country in 1861, within the framework of the institutionalization of the physical sciences (the Italian Society for the Progress of the Sciences [SIPS] was founded in 1862, and the Italian Physical Society [SIF] in 1897), many bibliographical works with a historical perspective appeared, including an extensive volume in 1881 (with 3,000 papers by 700 authors) on Italian contributions to electricity. The publication of the collected works of Galileo (1890–1909) and Volta (1918–1976) owes much to historians with scientific backgrounds. In 1929 in Firenze, the physicist Antonio Garbasso organized the first national exhibition of history of science, with more than 9,000 exhibits submitted from 80 cities. Then in 1930 what is today the Museo Galileo was established in Firenze, followed shortly thereafter by the Museum for the History of the University in Pavia. Vasco Ronchi—an assistant to Garbasso and founder and Director of the National Institute of Optics, as well as author of the interesting Storia della luce (1939)—was the President of the Union internationale d'histoire des sciences between 1953 and 1970, and in 1959 became the first director of Physis, the Italian history of science journal intended to build on the work of Aldo Mieli.

In 1941, the Domus Galilaeana (the Italian Institute of History of Science) was founded in Pisa. The first director was the physicist Sebastiano Timpanaro (senior); the physicist and historian Giovanni Polvani was the President from 1955 to 1970, and played an important role in the professionalization of Italian historians of physics. Indeed, Polvani always emphasized the connection between physics and history of physics, and worked towards overcoming the gap between the two cultures

The concept and material manifestations of energy are often considered elusive and invisible per se. In most historical, sociological, and anthropological studies, the idea prevails that processes of energy conversion and transmission have become more and more invisible to humans since the industrial revolution, although worldwide energy consumption has increased massively since the 19th century. This conclusion is based on the idea of a directly proportional relationship between physical visibility and public awareness: as one goes down, so does the other. This special issue takes a closer look at this premise. We assume that energy is never invisible per se, but is a product of human action engaging with the material preconditions of energy carriers. Three categories of practice and objects that render energetic processes (in)visible are crucial to the analyses in this issue: codifications, infrastructures, and representations. Four case studies, grouped around these categories, investigate the question of the visibility of energy and provide answers from different historical and geographical contexts. The articles render more tangible and concrete the often-referenced, yet blurry idea of energy visibility/invisibility, and thus integrate energy visibility into the history of science, the history of technology, and energy studies.

This article examines three cases of mid-20th-century oil media—oil-related imagery, iconographies, and media—in visual culture: a series of popular science books entitled The Story of Oil published in the US, an oil-themed set of Kuwaiti postage stamps (1959), and an art exhibition in Zurich (1956) titled Welt des Erdöls: Junge Maler sehen eine Industrie (World of Petroleum: Young Artists See an Industry). While depicting crude oil in its natural habitat was a common photographic theme in the early 20th-century United States, the material discussed shows that, by the mid-20th century, crude oil no longer had the same visual presence. The iconography of oil in the three case studies came to rely increasingly on images of oil infrastructure and on context-specific depictions of living within petro-modernity or petro-culture, meaning lifestyles fueled by cheap fossil energy. However, it is not just the changes in visual representations of petroleum that matter; any debate about the visibility and invisibility of petroleum has to take into account the very media through which petroleum has become visually communicated—that is, the precise forms of oil's mediatization. The aesthetic negotiation of petroleum through media-based visual representations has been crucial for the dematerialization of fossil matter in its conversion to fossil energy, as well as the decoupling of sites of extraction from sites of production and consumption in the public imagination. As petro-culture has morphed into national or even global culture (rather than representing just one possible energy source among many), oil media has paved the way for our intimate relationship with fossil energy-dependent lifestyles, which is one of the biggest drivers of climate change.

The electrification of East Africa followed an exceptionally uneven path. After about 50 years of relative neglect under colonial rule, the construction of hydroelectric dams moved electricity generation into the focus of late colonial development policy and became the major field of intervention for foreign donors after independence. The metrics of electricity attained a role as indicator and driver for economic growth, and therefore as a target figure in economic policy, one that was arguably not justified by their actual significance in the energy landscape of East Africa. This paper analyses both the global preconditions of this shift and its local repercussions. Rather than the physical visibility of electricity in the form of large dams and high-tension lines, the paper focuses on the processes that rendered electricity ontologically visible. It traces attempts by engineers, expert advisors, or development consultants to translate the complex information associated with the generation and consumption of electricity into calculable and comparable metrics. The paper scrutinises these commensuration processes in terms of the resources and knowledge they required, the frameworks of agency they opened, and the way they fed into wider discourses of development. It asks how the metrics of electricity themselves became part of the colonial and postcolonial politics of calculation, as they increasingly came to be seen as a medium for conceiving national economies. This trend was reinforced by the ascent of development economics in the 1950s and its influence on the ontological foundations of international development cooperation and post-independence nation-building. Because of the calculability and capital-intensity of its production, electricity lent itself perfectly to an economic policy based on macroeconomic aggregates and abstract growth models. Conversely, the electricity bias of international development agencies and the national government rendered rural, non-commercial, and non-productive energy use largely invisible.

In this paper I explain Kepler's procedure for refuting the Ptolemaic-Tychonic approach to the problem of Mars, by using latitudinal observations at Mars's opposition, from Chapter 19 of the Astronomia Nova. This critique is fundamental to his reformation of the foundations of astronomy with his first two laws. Moreover, as I argue, the strategy he follows is deeply rooted in certain rhetorical considerations that he employed during the composition of his work.