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13588 results in History of science and technology

Page 286 of 680

T. R. Malthus: The Unpublished Papers in the Collection of Kanto Gakuen University
  • Volume 2
  • T. R. Malthus
  • Edited by John Pullen, Trevor Hughes Parry
  • Published online:
    23 December 2009
    Print publication:
    08 July 2004
  • This is the second and final volume of manuscripts by or relating to Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) that are now held at Kanto Gakuen University in Japan. Volume I contains 75 items of correspondence, while Volume II contains transcriptions of further original manuscripts, including: four of Malthus' sermons; his diary of a tour of the Lake District; an extensive set of calculations in the bullion trade, suggesting that he was giving serious thought to becoming a bullion trader on his own account; lecture notes on European history from the fifth to the tenth century; his wife's diary of their holiday in Scotland in 1826 and an essay on foreign trade. These previously unknown and unpublished manuscripts promise insights into his intellectual development and the events and circumstances of his life, as well as glimpses of the lifestyle of his wider family and contemporaries.

The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage
  • J. M. Dubbey
  • Published online:
    22 December 2009
    Print publication:
    02 February 1978
  • Charles Babbage (1791–1871) is today remembered mainly for his attempt to complete his difference and analytical engines, the principles of which anticipate the major ideas of the modern digital computer. This book describes the evolution of Babbage's work on the design and implementation of the engines by means of a detailed study of his early mathematical investigations. Babbage is an almost legendary figure of the Victorian era, yet relatively little is known about him and no authoritative account of his life and work has appeared. He was primarily a mathematician and his early working life was devoted mainly to the study of pure mathematics. While containing much biographical information, this book concentrates on this crucial aspect of Babbage's work.

The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology
  • John D. Greenwood
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    24 November 2003
  • The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology is a critical conceptual history of American social psychology. In this challenging work, John Greenwood demarcates the original conception of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and behaviour and of the discipline of social psychology itself, that was embraced by early twentieth-century American social psychologists. He documents how this fertile conception of social psychological phenomena came to be progressively neglected as the century developed, to the point that scarcely any trace of the original conception of the social remains in contemporary American social psychology. In a penetrating analysis. Greenwood suggests a number of subtle historical reasons why the original conception of the social came to be abandoned, stressing that none of these were particularly good reasons for the neglect of the original conception of the social. By demonstrating the historical contingency of this neglect, Greenwood indicates that what has been lost may once again be regained.

  • The problem of raccoon intelligence in behaviourist America

  • MICHAEL PETTIT
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 43 / Issue 3 / September 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 December 2009, pp. 391-421
    Print publication:
    September 2010

  • Even during its heyday, American behaviourist psychology was repeatedly criticized for the lack of diversity in its experimental subjects, with its almost exclusive focus on rats and pigeons. This paper revisits this debate by examining the rise and fall of a once promising alternative laboratory animal and model of intelligence, the raccoon. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, psychological investigations of the raccoon existed on the borderlands between laboratory experimentation, natural history and pet-keeping. Moreover, its chief advocate, Lawrence W. Cole, inhabited the institutional and geographic borderlands of the discipline. This liminality ultimately worked against the raccoon's selection as a standardized model during the behaviourist era. The question of raccoon intelligence was also a prominent topic in the contemporaneous debates over the place of sentiment in popular nature writing. Although Cole and others argued that the raccoon provided unique opportunities to study mental attributes such as curiosity and attention, others accused the animal's advocates of sentimentalism, anthropomorphism and nature faking. The paper examines the making and unmaking of this hybrid scientific culture as the lives of experimenters and animals became entangled.

  • Test objects and other epistemic things: a history of a nanoscale object

  • CYRUS C.M. MODY, MICHAEL LYNCH
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 43 / Issue 3 / September 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 December 2009, pp. 423-458
    Print publication:
    September 2010

  • This paper follows the history of an object. The purpose of doing so is to come to terms with a distinctive kind of research object – which we are calling a ‘test object’ – as well as to chronicle a significant line of research and technology development associated with the broader nanoscience/nanotechnology movement. A test object is one of a family of epistemic things that makes up the material culture of laboratory science. Depending upon the case, it can have variable shadings of practical, mathematical and epistemic significance. Clear cases of test objects have highly regular and reproducible visible properties that can be used for testing instruments and training novices. The test object featured in this paper is the silicon (111) 7×7, a particular surface configuration (or, as it is often called, a ‘reconstruction’) of silicon atoms. Research on this object over a period of several decades has been closely bound up with the development of novel instruments for visualizing atomic structures. Despite having little direct commercial value, the Si(111) 7×7 also has been a focal object for the formation of a research community bridging industry and academia. It exhibits a complex structure that became a sustained focus of observation and modelling. Our study follows shifts in the epistemic status of the Si(111) 7×7, and uses it to re-examine familiar conceptions of representation and observation in the history, philosophy and social study of science.

Unrolling Time
  • Christiaan Huygens and the Mathematization of Nature
  • Joella G. Yoder
  • Published online:
    07 December 2009
    Print publication:
    24 February 1989
  • This case study examines the interrelationship between mathematics and physics in the work of one of the major figures of the Scientific Revolution: the Dutch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer, Christian Huygens (1629–1695). Joella Yoder details the creative interaction that led Huygens to invent a pendulum clock that theoretically beat absolutely uniform time, to measure the constant of gravitational acceleration, to analyze centrifugal force, and to create the mathematical theory of evolutes. In the second half of the book, Dr Yoder places Huygens's work in the context of his time by examining his relationship with other scientists and the priority disputes that sometimes motivated his research. The role of evolutes in the history of mathematics is analyzed; the reception of Huygens's masterpiece, the Horologium Oscillatorium of 1673, is described; and finally, the part that Christian Huygens played in the rise of applied mathematics is addressed.

Robert Boyle Reconsidered
  • Edited by Michael Hunter
  • Published online:
    03 December 2009
    Print publication:
    03 February 1994
  • This book presents a new view of Robert Boyle (1627–91), the leading British scientist in the generation before Newton. It comprises a series of essays by scholars from Europe and North America which scrutinise Boyle's writings on science, philosophy and theology in detail, bringing out the subtlety of his ideas and the complexity of his relationship with his context. Particular attention is given to Boyle's interest in alchemy and to other facets of his ideas which might initially seen surprising in a leading advocate of the mechanical philosophy. Many of the essays use material from among Boyle's extensive manuscripts, which have recently been catalogued for the first time. The introduction surveys the state of Boyle studies and deploys the findings of the essays to offer a revaluation of Boyle. The book also includes a bibliography of writings on Boyle since 1940.

Promoting Experimental Learning
  • Experiment and the Royal Society, 1660–1727
  • Marie Boas Hall
  • Published online:
    03 December 2009
    Print publication:
    03 October 1991
  • In spite of all that has been written in the past decades about the first half-century of the Royal Society's existence, no one has so far examined just what took place at the Society's weekly meetings nor how far they fulfilled the expressed aim of promoting 'experimental learning'. Students of the early Royal Society have often taken its aim to have been fully expressed in the writings of such Fellows as Boyle, Hooke and Newton, aware that Hooke especially performed very many experiments at the meetings between 1662 and 1703, while he and others wrote about the necessity of doing so. This study attempts to analyse the content of the meetings in detail in order to discover how far and in what manner the aims of the Society were fulfilled in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This book for the first time explores the practices of the Society's Fellows, and shows how these altered between 1660 and 1727.

After the Breakthrough
  • The Emergence of High-Temperature Superconductivity as a Research Field
  • Helga Nowotny, Ulrike Felt
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997
  • The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity was hailed as a major scientific breakthrough, inducing an unprecedented excitement and expectation among the scientific community and in the international press. This book sets this research breakthrough in context, and reconstructs the history of the discovery. The authors analyse the emergence of this new research field and the way its development was shaped by scientists and science policy-makers. They also examine the various settings in which the research was undertaken, as well as considering the scientific backgrounds and motivations of researchers who entered the field following the original discovery. The industrial connection and the general belief in promises of future applications were important elements in strategies devised to obtain funding. A remarkable factor in this process was the media's role. The sustained attention that followed the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity resulted in it being seen as the symbol of a new technological frontier.

An Introduction to the Historiography of Science
  • Helge S. Kragh
  • Published online:
    30 November 2009
    Print publication:
    09 April 1987
  • This book introduces the methodological and philosophical problems with which modern history of science is concerned, offering a comprehensive and critical review through description and evaluation of significant historiographical viewpoints. Incorporating discussion of key problems in general historical writing, with examples drawn from a range of disciplines, this non-elementary introduction bridges the gap between general history and history of science. Following a review of the early development of the history of science, the theory of history as applied to science history is introduced, examining the basic problems which this generates, including problems of periodisation, ideological functions, and the conflict between diachronical and anachronical historiography. Finally, the book considers the critical use, and analysis, of historical sources, and the possibility of the experiemental reconstruction of history. Aimed primarily at students, the book's broad scope and integration of historical, philosophical and scientific matters will interest philosophers, sociologists and general historians, for whom there is no alternative introduction to the subject at this level.

The Cambridge History of Science
  • Volume 6, The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences
  • Edited by Peter J. Bowler, John V. Pickstone
  • Published online:
    28 November 2009
    Print publication:
    13 April 2009
  • This book in the highly respected Cambridge History of Science series is devoted to the history of the life and earth sciences since 1800. It provides comprehensive and authoritative surveys of historical thinking on major developments in these areas of science, on the social and cultural milieus in which the knowledge was generated, and on the wider impact of the major theoretical and practical innovations. The articles are written by acknowledged experts who provide concise accounts of the latest historical thinking coupled with guides to the most important recent literature. In addition to histories of traditional sciences, the book covers the emergence of newer disciplines such as genetics, biochemistry and geophysics. The interaction of scientific techniques with their practical applications in areas such as medicine is a major focus of the book, as is its coverage of controversial areas such as science and religion, and environmentalism.

  • BJH volume 42 issue 4 Cover and Back matter

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 42 / Issue 4 / December 2009
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    26 November 2009, pp. b1-b4
    Print publication:
    December 2009
    • Article
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  • BJH volume 42 issue 4 Cover and Front matter

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 42 / Issue 4 / December 2009
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    26 November 2009, pp. f1-f2
    Print publication:
    December 2009
    • Article
      • You have access
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Page 286 of 680