Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/HSNS.2021.51.1.87
Alexandre Bagdonas, Alexei Kojevnikov
Popularization of science typically follows the lead of scientific research, conveying to lay audiences ideas and discoveries initially published in professional scientific literature and vetted by the expert community. The physicist George Gamow (1904–1968) did not respect this tradition, but promoted some of his most unorthodox scientific hypotheses as funny stories in his popular writings for non-specialists and teenagers, sometimes years before he dared to present them to the purview of academic peers in papers submitted to specialized research journals. Gamow’s proposal of the Big Bang cosmology—the theory that our universe started out in an explosive manner from a superhot and superdense state with thermonuclear reactions forming matter—was discussed by him initially in a series of non-serious articles and books, starting in 1938. Historians of cosmology recognize Gamow’s crucial contribution to the development of the Big Bang theory on the grounds of his subsequent professional publications but have not paid sufficient attention to his popular science writings and their role in changing our conception of the universe.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/HSNS.2021.51.1.48
Machiel Kleemans
Despite the restrictions on knowledge and materials of the Anglo-American nuclear monopoly in the early Cold War, Norway and the Netherlands managed to build and operate a joint nuclear reactor by July 1951. They were the first countries to do so after the Great Powers. Their success was largely due to the combination of the strategic materials of heavy water (Norway) and uranium (the Netherlands). Nonetheless, they had to overcome significant political and technical obstacles. In that process a number of specific nuclear secrets played a central role. This case is used to study how and why knowledge circulation was impeded by secrecy. Specifically, I will explore four different secrets that illustrate how the Netherlands and Norway, being outside the British and American secrecy regimes, chafed against those regimes. Knowledge circulation was enabled through relations within networks that were at the same time scientific, diplomatic, and personal. I will identify three main factors that affected the mobility of information: the availability of strategic nuclear materials, the scientists’ individual interactions, and national interests.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2021.51.1.162
Dora Vargha
{"title":"The Vaccine","authors":"Dora Vargha","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2021.51.1.162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2021.51.1.162","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75559652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2021.51.1.155
Sharrona Pearl
{"title":"The Mask","authors":"Sharrona Pearl","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2021.51.1.155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2021.51.1.155","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85699596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2021.51.1.165
Oriana Walker
{"title":"The Ventilator","authors":"Oriana Walker","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2021.51.1.165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2021.51.1.165","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"71 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82213697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/HSNS.2021.51.1.140
Emily Candela
‘Designing the Virus’ brings together my ongoing research across the histories of science and design in two specific areas: practices of visualizing viruses for both scientific and public communication; and design in response to risk. In 2020, these areas intersected in a way that was impossible, as a researcher, to ignore, when a medical illustration of coronavirus released by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took on life in a way that no previous scientific image has done, as a frequently cut-and-pasted, remixed, and broadcast signal not only of the danger posed by the virus, but of the pandemic itself. By summer 2020, the ‘spiky blob’ coronavirus illustration had grown prevalent in the visual culture of numerous countries across the globe. This essay, written in August 2020 in part as a ‘timestamp’ of the period, questions what it means for a biomedical image to become an icon for a global crisis. I analyse the image from interdisciplinary angles of the history of graphic design for public health communication and scientific image-making practices, draw upon published interviews with the CDC’s medical illustrators, and build on recent research in disaster studies that critiques the notion of ‘natural disaster’. The medical illustration of the coronavirus presents an unusual case in the history of public risk communication, as a stand-alone scientific image that has come to act as a piece of wordless risk communication. I argue that this image, and its widespread dissemination in the US (and beyond), ‘implicitly reinforces a specific position within the politics of risk that have been unfolding in the US during the pandemic: that the overriding threat is the virus itself, divorced from the social, political, and environmental factors that shape how lives across the globe are affected by this pathogen’.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/HSNS.2021.51.1.1
Josh Bauchner
The Leipzig physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–88) is best known for his introduction of psychophysics, an exact, empirical science of the relations between mind and body and a crucial part of nineteenth-century sensory physiology and experimental psychology. Based on an extensive and close reading of Fechner’s diaries, this article considers psychophysics from the vantage of his everyday life, specifically the experience of taking a walk. This experience was not mere fodder for his scientific practice, as backdrop, object, or tool. Rather, on foot, Fechner pursued an investigation of the mind-body parallel to his natural-scientific one; in each domain, he strove to render the mind-body graspable, each in its own idiom, here everyday and there scientific. I give an account of Fechner’s walks as experiences that he both undertook and underwent, that shaped and were shaped by the surrounding everyday cacophony, and that carried a number of competing meanings for Fechner himself; the attendant analysis draws on his major scientific work, Elemente der Psychophysik (1860; Elements of Psychophysics), as the thick context that renders the walks legible as an everyday investigation. What results are three modes of walking—physiopsychical, interpersonal, and universal—each engaging the mind-body at a different level, as also engaged separately in Elemente’s three major sections, outer psychophysics, inner psychophysics, and general psychophysics beyond the human. This analysis ultimately leads to a new view of Fechner’s belief in a God who was “omnipresent and conscious in nature” and whom Fechner encountered daily on his walks in the budding of new blooms and rustling of the wind. More broadly, I aim to bring the analysis of everyday experiences as experiences into the historiography of science.
莱比锡物理学家古斯塔夫·西奥多·费希纳(1801 - 1888)以其引入心理物理学而闻名，心理物理学是一门精确的、研究身心关系的实证科学，是19世纪感觉生理学和实验心理学的重要组成部分。基于对费希纳日记的广泛而细致的阅读，本文从他的日常生活，特别是散步的经历的优势来考虑心理物理学。这段经历不仅仅是他科学实践的素材、背景、对象或工具。相反，费希纳徒步进行了一项与自然科学研究平行的身心研究;在每一个领域，他都努力使身心变得易于理解，每一个领域都有自己的风格，这里和那里都是科学的。我把费希纳的散步描述为他所经历的经历，这些经历塑造了周围的日常杂音，也被周围的杂音塑造了，这些杂音对费希纳本人来说具有许多相互竞争的意义;随后的分析借鉴了他的主要科学著作《心理物理学原理》(element der Psychophysik, 1860;心理物理学的要素)，作为厚重的背景，使行走作为日常调查清晰可辨。结果是三种行走模式——生理的、人际的和普遍的——每一种都在不同的层面上参与到身心中，也分别参与到element的三个主要部分中，即外在心理物理学、内在心理物理学和超越人类的一般心理物理学。这种分析最终导致了对费希纳信仰上帝的一种新看法，他相信上帝“在大自然中无所不在、有意识”，费希纳每天在鲜花盛开、风沙沙作响的地方散步时都会遇到上帝。更广泛地说，我的目标是将日常经验作为经验的分析带入科学史学。
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