Peter Galison Research Articles

The Telescope as Prosthesis

The Telescope as Prosthesis Anna Henchman (bio) In 1845, William Parsons, the Earl of Rosse, completed a 56-foot long reflector telescope with a 6-foot wide mirror that would remain the largest telescope in the world until 1917. Telescopes are not conventionally described as prostheses, a word that tends to refer to devices that supplement a lack, replacing or augmenting a part of the body that is in some way missing or defective. Yet by adding to what the human body can do, telescopes hold strong structural similarities to such prosthetic devices as artificial hands, legs, or teeth: they extend human vision into distant regions of space, supplementing the capacities of a healthy eye and enabling a vastly intensified level of perception. The question of whether telescopes are best thought of as prosthetic devices or merely as tools sheds light on longstanding debates about the relative importance of scientific instruments and the human beings who use them to advance science. Any account of the role of telescopes in the history of astronomy tends, at least implicitly, to be based on some conception of the relationship between eye and telescope, and, by extension, the relationship between human being and machine. Writings on astronomy usually emphasize either the abilities of the astronomer looking through the glass or the power of the telescope itself. Frequently those writers who focus on the power of the telescope stress the [End Page 27] relative deficiencies of unassisted human vision, characterizing human vision as having the kind of lack that would require a prosthetic device. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Lord Rosse's reflector telescope, with a 6-foot wide mirror, built in the 1840s. By permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's 2007 Objectivity explores the assumptions behind dueling conceptions of the scientist in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The authors contrast faith in "mechanical objectivity," which places instruments and machines at the centre of scientific inquiry, with the ideal of the scientist as learned seer. The synthesizing mind of the seer absorbs extensive empirical data and then extrapolates from that data the image of an ideal type. By contrast, those who begin to doubt the objectivity of the human eye and mind rely increasingly on information gathered by machines. In this model, the impersonality of the machine becomes preferable to the unpredictable human observer, and mechanical instruments are valued for their abilities to make up for specific lacks in human vision or in the judgment of individual observers. This is a helpful framework to apply to discussions of telescopes, because it sheds light on why one writer might place so much importance on the role of the astronomer, for whom the telescope is simply a tool, while another imagines the telescope to work almost without a human agent. William Herschel (1738-1822), John Keats's famous "watcher of the skies," in many ways conforms to the model of the scientist as seer ("On First Looking [End Page 28] into Chapman's Homer," line 9). Herschel emphasizes the importance of human knowledge and experience in the collaboration between eye and telescope. For much of the eighteenth century, the most important developments in astronomy had been the result of theoretical, mathematical calculations rather than observation through a telescope.1 Newton's 1687 explanation of the universal law of gravitation holding the solar system together had depended on calculations and theory rather than empirical research. Starting in the 1780s, however, Herschel placed empirical observation through telescopes, rather than mathematical theory, back at the centre of the study of astronomy. He virtually invented stellar astronomy by developing a series of telescopes that made it possible to study the stellar universe—as opposed to the contents of the solar system—in unprecedented detail.2 Herschel's theory that stars began as amorphous nebulae and gradually evolved into systems of stars, planets, and moons was based on decades of meticulous empirical observation. While his work relied heavily on telescopic observation, Herschel emphasized the importance of training the eye and mind over the powers of the telescope. In a 1782 letter, he characterized his own interpretive ability as the...

Objectivity and Historiography

Previous articleNext article No AccessEssay ReviewsObjectivity and HistoriographyMartin KuschMartin Kusch* Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 3RH, United Kingdom. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 100, Number 1March 2009 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/597564 Views: 220Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref © 2009 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021‐1753/2009/10001‐0013$10.00PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Alan Richardson The Social Virtue of Science. Motivating Structural Objectivity in Logical Empiricism, (Jan 2022): 33–51.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80363-6_3Alberto Fragio Epistemología histórica cum relativismo epistémico, Cuestiones de Filosofía 7, no.2828 (Apr 2021): 35–51.https://doi.org/10.19053/01235095.v7.n28.2021.12335James Conant, Sebastian Sunday Wittgenstein on Philosophy, Objectivity, and Meaning, 58 (Aug 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108151764Katherina Kinzel Geschichte ohne Kausalität. Abgrenzungsstrategien gegen die Wissenschaftssoziologie in zeitgenössischen Ansätzen historischer Epistemologie, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 35, no.22 (Jun 2012): 147–162.https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.201201551Martin Kusch Hacking’s historical epistemology: a critique of styles of reasoning, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41, no.22 (Jun 2010): 158–173.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2010.03.007

Zur Geschichte der Kybernetik

The article starts by reminding on the wide spread popular use of the term ‚cybernetics‘ in composita such as ‚cyberspace‘ which seems to be in apparent contrast with the lacking success of cybernetics in academia. The article deals with the indetermination of cybernetics which always provided a certain amount of openness. A survey of the history of cybernetics is made including ego-documents and oral history as produced by cyberneticians themselves as well as recent contributions from the side of history of science and technology. Against Peter Galison’s widely repeated verdict of cybernetics as a kind of war-science it is argued that cybernetics has an interesting tradition as a social science as well as a source of societal reforms.

Objectivity - by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison

Objectivity - by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison

The Objective Self

the back of Objectivity, after many striking images, there is a table that maps the historical trajectory of scientific objectivity (371). Along the horizontal axis we find the three that structure the study: truth-to-nature, and judgment. The vertical axis lists persona, image, practice, and ontology. The authors, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, argue that each of the epistemic virtues prescribes a distinct kind of scientific practitioner as well as how these scientists work, what they believe the world to be made of, and how they represent it. Their argument that objectivity is historically variable and that different versions of it are linked to distinct forms of scientific identity make this an exciting book. Still more boldly, the authors place the epistemic virtues in historical sequence, with truth-to-nature arising in the late Enlightenment period and passing the torch around 1850 to mechanical objectivity, which itself gives way to trained judgment circa 1920. These transitions are not quite ruptures, for while Daston and Galison insist on the genuine novelty of each emerging formationof objectivity and then of trained judgmentthey allow the old ones to endure right up to the present. Yet the persistence of antique forms of objectivity is hard to square with the discontinuities on which so much of

Commentary 01 on Galison 1982

CentaurusVolume 50, Issue 1-2 p. 160-161 Commentary 01 on Galison 1982 Peter Galison, Peter Galison Joseph Pellegrino University ProfessorDepartment of History of ScienceHarvard Universitygalison@fas.harvard.eduSearch for more papers by this author Peter Galison, Peter Galison Joseph Pellegrino University ProfessorDepartment of History of ScienceHarvard Universitygalison@fas.harvard.eduSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 May 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0498.2008.00106.xCitations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume50, Issue1-2Special Issue: Centaurus at Volume 50February 2008Pages 160-161 RelatedInformation

On the Case

663 Thanks to Bradin Cormack, Richard Neer, and Tom Mitchell for reading beyond compare. Thanks also to Anat Benzvi, Burke Butler, Andrea Haslanger, Elizabeth Hutcheon, Jay Williams, Andrew Yale, and Abigail Zitin for their generous, creative, and rigorous editorial labor, without which none of this work would appear. 1. Peter Galison argues against the naive view of the self-evidence of case-study knowledge and the comparability of all case studies with each other in his “Specific Theory,”Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 379–83. Nonetheless, the surge of the singularity concept in some contemporary humanist discussions—as that which resists being generalizable—runs antagonistically into the prevalence of case-study narrativity in scholarship, whichmobilizes a whole variety of descriptive and interpretive processes of determining likeness, generality, or patterning and whose interest in typification often (incoherently) produces evidences of singularity as the optimisticmoment of excess or surplus to its very analytic activity.Mark Seltzer provides great analyses of the legal and literary development of the situation of case logic in Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York, 1998). On the Case

Revisiting Galison’s ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’ in light of Neurath’s philosophical projects

In his article entitled ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’ and related work, Peter Galison explores the connections between the Vienna Circle and the Dessau Bauhaus. Historically, these groups were related, with members of each group familiar with the ideas of the other. Galison argues that their projects are related as well, through shared political views and methodological approach. The two main figures that connect the Vienna Circle to the Bauhaus—and the figures upon which Galison focuses—are Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. Yet, in our view, the connections that Galison develops do not properly capture the common themes between the Bauhaus and Neurath’s philosophical projects. In this paper, we will examine a few of the historical connections between the Dessau Bauhaus and the Vienna Circle, as well as the philosophical connections that Galison draws between these two groups. By examining in greater depth Neurath’s philosophical commitments, we aim to demonstrate that some of these philosophical connections fail to resonate with Neurath’s projects. And, finally, we develop different connections between Neurath’s projects and the Bauhaus. In our view, these new connections between Neurath and the Dessau Bauhaus are both substantive and philosophically interesting.

Husserl and the Sciences: Selected Perspectives (review)

Reviewed by: Husserl and the Sciences: Selected Perspectives David Morris (bio) Richard Feist , editor. Husserl and the Sciences: Selected PerspectivesUniversity of Ottawa Press. x, 230. $35.00 This collection of essays by Canadian and European philosophers sheds new and thoughtful light on the relation between Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), [End Page 320] founder of phenomenological philosophy, and the mathematical and natural sciences. Once upon a time, Kant tried to enthrone philosophy as 'the queen of the sciences.' Now the situation seems quite the reverse, since contemporary natural science would claim to explain everything scientifically, including philosophy, natural science, knowing, and thinking, not to mention sexual preferences, ethics, etc - just open your morning paper for the latest. Granted its starting points, contemporary science would thus dethrone philosophy. Strangely enough, most philosophy of science, at least in the English-speaking world, is willing to grant this. Instead of asking how scientific knowledge first gets started in the world - the original question of epistemology - current philosophy of science pursues a subtly but drastically different question, namely, how, given knowledge already underway, scientists come to possess standards and methods for arriving at scientific truth. Instead of digging down past the roots of science, current philosophy offers to shore up knowledge as outlined by science. For Husserl this shift marks nothing less than the crisis of the European sciences, a crisis in which the sciences, philosophy, and European culture dangerously lose sight of their starting point in what Husserl calls the life-world, in a pre-scientific engagement with a living human world. (Husserl is writing about this in 1933, and was himself persecuted by the Nazi regime.) As Husserl puts it, 'it is not always natural science that speaks when natural scientists are speaking.' Husserl thus adds his voice to those of recent figures such as Bruno Latour, Peter Galison, and Georges Canguilhem, who find something other than natural science - social processes, material cultures of image making, pre-scientific concepts - speaking in natural science. But Husserl has a different, more radical contribution to make, precisely because his work, which from the start is driven to root mathematics and science in the soil of experience, takes him to the most basic philosophical questions about the genesis of science. Unfortunately, Husserl is not often studied as a philosopher of science, and his contributions to this area are often overlooked in light of his immense contributions to phenomenology and insights into areas such as cognition. (Husserl's star is currently rising among cognitive scientists, for example.) Richard Feist's collection is an important and welcome corrective, especially in the English-speaking world. For those interested in the deep questions that philosophy and the humanities still pose to the natural sciences, part 3 of this collection, 'Phenomenology, the Sciences, and Community,' will be most important, with contributions tracing Husserl's views of the relation between the life-world and the natural sciences, and studying the roots of science in communal praxis. The most expansive part is part 2, 'Phenomenology, Mathematics, and Physics.' As Feist emphasizes in his helpful introduction, [End Page 321] Husserl not only carried out philosophical investigations into the foundations of mathematics and science, he knew and corresponded with several mathematicians and scientists, who were, as was characteristic of this period, preoccupied by foundational questions. The essays in this part give us enlightening glimpses of these connections. Especially fascinating are studies of Husserl's relation to and influence on the mathematician and physicist Herman Weyl, in which we learn about the connection between Husserl's phenomenology and Weyl's interpretation of relativity. Other essays canvass Husserl's relation to the geometry of David Hilbert and his views of multiplicities. The essays in part 1, 'Phenomenology, Epistemology, and the Sciences,' take up some now-classic questions of Husserlian phenomenology with special attention to issues of math and science. Like Husserl's philosophy, Husserl scholarship is a notably rigorous discipline, and it is hard to leap into it unprepared. Husserl and the Sciences is not a book for the unprepared - it is hard work and presumes more than passing familiarity with Husserl. For those prepared, it will be rewarding and significant. It is very good to see...

The Trading Zone Communication of Scientific Knowledge: An Examination of Jesuit Science in China (1582–1773)

The linguistic relativist thesis maintains that there is no neutral ground for different scientific traditions with different theoretic frameworks to communicate rationally, due to the fact that linguistic structure crucially decides the way people think about reality. For quite a long time, historical studies of scientific exchange between East and West have been guided by this thesis. The challenge to this thesis comes from recent studies by Peter Galison, who argues that scientists from different research traditions can communicate rationally in a way similar to the trading exchanges between two countries, in which a local coordination can be reached even if there is a global disagreement about the corresponding word usage in two natural languages. In this paper, I try to show that the concept of trading zone communication provides an interesting and useful theoretical tool to examine how, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Chinese scientists communicated with and learned Western knowledge from Jesuit scientists by building local coordination among them. In the first section I introduce the basic ideas of Galison's trading zone theory. In the second section I study the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological differences between Chinese science and Western science. If the linguistic relativist thesis is taken for granted, these differences are likely to lead many historical studies on Jesuit science in China to reach the relativist conclusion. The third section deals with some of the basic concepts of the trading zone theory to explain how local rational communication among Chinese and Jesuit scientists was built and developed. In the last section I argue that Galison's trading zone theory can help us understand how Chinese scientists learned new knowledge from the Jesuits, especially astronomical and mathematical knowledge, despite the global differences between these two research traditions.

The Donders Machine: Matter, Signs, and Time in a Physiological Experiment, ca. 1865

The Donders Machine:Matter, Signs, and Time in a Physiological Experiment, ca. 1865 Henning Schmidgen (bio) The history of experimentation in physiological and psychological laboratories is a history of machines—of spatially circumscribed and temporally limited installations that connect a vast number of heterogeneous components: partial objects derived from the experimenter and the experimental subject (eyes, hands, voices, etc.), more or less isolated organs (hearts, lungs, muscles, nerves, etc.), energy sources, styli, sooted paper, tables, notes, and publications. Starting in the 1850s, the territories of physiological and (later on) psychological laboratories were increasingly populated by such installations that transitorily "machinized" mechanical and organic components and combined material with semiotic aspects. In Berlin and Paris, physiologists hooked animals up to kymographs and quicksilver manometers in order to turn bodily functions into indexical curves. In Königsberg, nerve and muscle preparations were integrated into electromagnetic circuits, not just to produce demonstrative contractions, but also to measure the propagation speed of excitations in the still-living nerve. In the 1870s, Leipzig physiologists presented artificial circulation models to academic audiences and the general public: installations made of rubber hoses, glass tubes, and funnels, in which beating frog hearts functioned as "natural motors" pumping salt water in circles—until the organic components would irrevocably refuse to do service (for a further example, see Fig. 1). All these machines developed continually and as within a "phylum" (while single parts, such as the brass cylinder and [End Page 211] the stylus of the kymograph, moved closer to one another); at the same time, they were ready to undergo mutations, breaking with each other and replacing one another (e.g., water motors being replaced by electric motors). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Experimental set-up by Jolyet and Regnard for the quantitative investigation of the gas exchange in respiration. The model organism is forced to breath through a respiration mask (G) which is connected, by means of a three-way cock, to bottle C. Operating the cock allows the animal's respiratory tract to connect to the air kept in the bottle. The consumption of oxygen through respiration is balanced by vessel O which stands under constant pressure. (From Catalogue des instruments de précision servant en physiologie et en médecine construits par Charles Verdin [Chateauroux: Verdin, 1882], p. 44.) The role of machines in experimental physiology has often been studied by historians of the biological and biomedical sciences.1 As is well known, the advent of the kymograph, one of the central instruments of laboratory physiology, was connected to the emergence and development of the steam engine. More recent studies have argued that electrophysiological procedures for precision time measurements [End Page 212] relied on and further developed features of telegraph technology. In addition, it has been shown that the actual functioning of physiological instruments in the laboratory required advanced technological infrastructures, involving central motive forces placed in the basement (steam engines, gas motors, etc.) as well as urban networks providing electricity and water. While these studies have contributed in important ways to our understanding of experimental physiology as embedded in a specific material culture, more general aspects of the relation between experiments and machines have been addressed in studies concerning the history of the physical sciences. Authors such as M. Norton Wise, Andrew Pickering, and Peter Galison have investigated machines as "mediators" connecting scientific projects to societal concerns and vice versa. They have directed our attention to the "field of machines" that constitute the "material performativity" of science. And they have taught us to look at the "experimental apparatuses" of specific disciplines as machines. (In his "technological reading" of Einstein's famous 1905 article, Galison even suggests conceiving of scientific theories as machines— "Theory-Machines," as he puts it.)2 Yet these studies seldom spell out to what extent their respective notions of machines differ from commonsense ideas of technological objects. Explicit definitions of what a machine is or can do are rare.3 References concerning the history of the machine concept and/or philosophical notions of the technological objects are often lacking. As a result, we sometimes seem to be thrown back on the modern, twofold vision of the machine: on...

Author of Error

Peter Galison Author of Error THE NUCLEUS OF ERROR WHEN THE 1938 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS WAS GIVEN TO ENRICO FERMI, the short citation said this: “[F]orhis demonstrations ofthe existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.” Professor H. Pleijel, chairman of the Nobel Prize committee for phys­ ics, reiterated the citation in his presentation of the award, congrat­ ulating Enrico Fermi for producing elements beyond the end of the then-known periodic table (that is, those that would fall on the chart of elements beyond uranium (element 92)). Hailed for work that had begun in earnest in 1934, accolades fell on Fermi for finding a remark­ able way to produce a myriad of radioisotopes and for also producing, for the first time in histoiy, “transuranic” (beyond uranium) elements number 93 and number 94-“these new elements,” Pleijel noted, “he called Ausenium and Heperium” (Pleijel, 1938). Understandably, Fermi was proud of his accomplishment in producing these extraordinary new forms of matter. In his prize accep­ tance speech on December 12,1938, Fermi recalled that we concluded that the carriers [ofthese radioactive proper­ ties] were one or more elements of atomic number larger than 92; we, in Rome, used to call the elements 93 and 94 Ausenium and Hesperium respectively. It is known that O. Hahn and L. Meitner have investigated very carefully and extensively the decay products of irradiated uranium, and social research Vol 72 : No 1 : Spring 2005 63 were able to trace among them elements up to the atomic number 96 (Fermi, 1938:416-17).1 Celebrated across Italy, blessed by the highest authority of scientific accolade, Fermi’s production of transuranics stood as one of the great­ est of scientific discoveries. Reading a bit further in Fermi’s speech, one comes across one of the most extraordinary footnotes in the histoiy of science—oddly stuck in the text sometime between his December 1938 appearance in Stockholm and the Nobel book’s appearance in print—to the effect that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had just found barium among the disin­ tegration products of bombarded uranium. Though it entered only as a late footnote to Fermi’s presentation, this news hit the physics world of 1939 with the force of a bomb: it meant that Fermi had almost certainly not seen what he (and the Nobel Prize committee) thought he had seen: the decay of one or more neutrons within the uranium nucleus into a proton, and by doing so transforming uranium nuclei into nuclei of new (transuranic) elements. Instead, if Hahn and Strassmann were right, uranium had split into two approximately equal parts. This, Fermi allowed, “makes it necessary to reexamine all the problems of the transuranic elements, as many of them m ight be found to be products of a splitting of uranium” (Fermi, 1938: 417). W hat Fermi, his collaborators, the phys­ ics community, and indeed the Nobel Prize committee had taken to be transuranic elements—elements past uranium on the periodic chart of the elements—were not that at all. They were nuclear fragments from far lower in the periodic table of the elements, not the exotic new elements 93 and 94 but the decidedly unexotic elements like element 56, barium (useful for clearing moisture from vacuum tubes, and not headline news). One ofthe great triumphs of Fermi’s physics, a triumph hailed by the scientific world’s greatest honor, was a world-historical mistake. In experiment after experiment from 1934—and in the following years— 64 social research E nrico Ferm i in his lab. the pope of physics had missed nuclear fission. What would the world have been like had Fermi not made this mistake, if he had used his slow neutrons on uranium and realized that there were reaction products, like barium, that lived far down the period chart? What would it have meant had fission been found five years before 1938 and 1939? Writing counterfactual history is a difficult way to make a living. But let’s put it this way. From the time that Hahn and Strassmann submitted their paper in February 1939, it...

Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time (review)

Reviewed by: Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time Carlene E. Stephens (bio) Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. By Peter Galison. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Pp. 389. $23.95. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein identified the key to transforming how we understand the dynamic universe. The way to that understanding, he believed, lay in a new way to think about time. With the publication of his paper on the theory of special relativity in 1905, Einstein abandoned the notion of the ether, accepted the speed of light as a constant, and overturned Newton's definition of a single uniform and unidirectional time in favor of a universe that allowed multiple times relative to moving [End Page 241] observers. The paper furnished the crucial road map for a new physics and the guide to new notions about time, space, and simultaneity. Primary sources about the route to relativity are few, and historical interpretations are many. (For an introduction to the historiography, see David Cassidy, "Understanding the History of Special Relativity," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 16, no. 1 [1986]: 177-95, and his reading list at http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/einlinks.htm.) It is likely that the history will never be recounted in quite the same way again now that Peter Galison has written this book. Like Einstein in search of a unifying theory, Galison suggests a way to connect seemingly separate "empires of time" in the realms of physics, philosophy, and the material world's standardized time zones and ubiquitous electrically synchronized clocks. He joins those who argue that relativity theory originated not just in pure thought but also in real-world experience. Galison's easy familiarity with turn-of-the-century physicists is evident, although uninitiated readers may lose their way from time to time in his descriptions of their work. The book's strongest parts are Galison's absorbing portraits of the title figures and his analysis of how Einstein's ideas about relativity prevailed and those of French mathematician Henri Poincaré did not. The reader meets Einstein as a brash youngster working in the Swiss patent office in Bern. Far from the iconic ivory-tower genius of his later years, this Einstein is immersed in the electromagnetic technologies of his day, a "tinkerer, souping up homebuilt instruments in his Kramgasse apartment, . . . riveted by the design of machines and the analysis of patents" (p. 46). And, most critical for Galison's argument about Einstein's ideas of simultaneity, this Einstein knows Bern's rail, telegraph, and electrically synchronized clock network. The clocks of the book's title occupy key positions both in Einstein's relativity thought experiments and in his street scene. Galison imagines that Einstein sees clocks at the train station, on his route from home to work, all around him in Bern, a clock-conscious city in a country passionate about watches. Readers hoping to learn about turn-of-the-century electrically synchronized clocks and their repeated failure, by the way, will be disappointed. The book claims that such clocks were an important part of the landscape, but engages with their technical and social history only lightly. In a sympathetic portrait of Poincaré, Galison builds a convincing case that the Sorbonne professor was no isolated academic either. He was, instead, engaged in practical concerns aimed at furthering the ends of the French empire. Early in his career he was an expert mining engineer. Later he headed the Bureau des Longitudes, where he focused on matters of earthly time and space. Poincaré's maps are more than eponymous mathematical constructs in topology. They are the material results of the bureau's scientific cartography that helped claim and maintain distant colonies and synchronized them with the mother country. [End Page 242] Galison offers an original and provocative interpretation of the route to relativity in an extended account of international time reform at the turn of the twentieth century. Time reformers in Europe and North America coordinated their efforts to introduce global time zones and synchronize the world with time signals sent telegraphically and by radio. Readers will find, for example, a...

Removing Knowledge

Removing Knowledge

Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: An Interview with Peter Galison, Part II

January 2004 · Historically Speaking Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps:An Interview with Peter Galison, Part Il Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa /N A RECENT New York Review of Books essay Freeman Dyson, one ofthe mostprominent physicists ofourtime, notes that "{a}monghistorians ofscience during the last half-century, there have been twopredominant schools ofthought. The leaders ofthe two schools have been Thomas Kuhn and Peter Galison. " For Kuhn science is typified byperiods ofrelativestability wherein a dominant orthodox theory reigns because ofits ability to explain observedphenomena. But at rare moments "normalscience" undergoes transformation as new discoveries andespecially new ideas overthrowprevailing notions in a scientific revolution. In contrast to Kuhn's idea-driven view of scientific progress, Galison has emphasized the importance oftools. Dyson claims that "{h}istorians trained in theoretical science tend to be Kuhnians, while those trainedin experimentalscience tendto be GaIisonians . " Moreover, hesuggests that in Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps Galison "is telling us that hestillbelieves in theprimacy oftools, but not to the exclusion ofeverything else. " In this second installment ofa two-part interview, Peter Galison , the Mallinckrodt Professor ofthe History of Science and ofPhysics at Harvard University, explores the utility ofthe notion ofscientificrevolution andthe question ofheroicstanding in the history ofscience with Donald Yerxa. Theirconversation took place in Galison's Harvard office on September 29, 2003. Yerxa: Why is it that the names of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein have achieved such heroic standing, whereas Hooke, Owen, and Poincaré have not? Or perhaps to get at this another way, what sets Einstein apart from all other physicists and mathematicians of his time and context, including Poincaré? Galison: Let me start with the limited question and then move to the more general one. And the limited question is why has Einstein become the most famous human being of the century, the man of the century for Time magazine? His picture is on advertisements , and the last time I checked there were about 3 million Einstein sites on the Web. There is no limit to his fame. Yet outside of France (where he still carries a cultural legacy) and mathematics departments (where his works are still venerated) Poincaré is not a household name. There are many reasons for this. Einstein is a generation younger than Poincaré (in 1905 he was twenty-six whereas Poincaré was fifty-one). From the time Einstein came ofage, he saw himselfas an outsider . He fought with his teachers, argued fiercely with his family, friends, and parents, and rebelled against Prussian militarism. During World War I he was one of the few people in Germany who signed pacifist-oriented petitions. He was a dissenting voice in the run up to Nazism; and in the U.S. after World War II he made no bones about his unhappiness with McCarthyism, nuclear stockpiling, and many other pillars ofestablished politics. Einstein clearly loved to identify himself with dissenting stances inside physics and outside. I think that there is something in this triumphant dissent that appeals widely to people in many walks of life. Add to this appeal the enormous attraction many people have to the particular kinds ofproblems with which Einstein grappled— the nature ofspace, the meaning oftime, the origin ofthe universe, its fate, its structure. These were questions that make easy contact with broadly cultural, religious, and philosophical issues that have troubled people for centuries. The confluence of these various public personas is irresistible, creating a figure ofEinstein that carries a limitless iconic draw. Poincaré was a very different figure. In many ways he was a symbol of a progressive , late 19th-century French establishment. He was somebody, I argue in the book, who should not be seen, as he so often is, as a reactionary , as someone who merely joined the backward-leaning, anti-relativity crowd. True, Poincaré objected to certain commitments ofEinstein, but it wasn't because Poincar é was trying to restore a Newtonian classical order. He was a progressivist in many respects, politically, technologically, scientifically , as well as philosophically. He was for altering things, but it was by repair, by a kind of intervention to fix things that were wrong—an engineer's progressivism rather than a rebel's sense ofneeding to upend. But Poincaré's meliorism...

Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: An Interview with Peter Galison, Part I

November 2003 · Historically Speaking experienced the interwar servant crisis with such a shock. When his own servant—Mr. Bam—beganto ape hissocialbetters andpaint pictures, Keynes prompdysacked him. The servant crisis ofthe English middle classes had both a beginning and an end.Just as it began when the First World War made servants more scarce and less deferential, it ended when the Second World War made them almost extinct. Afewverywealthypeople still employed servants—when the British Prime Minister Harold MacmiUan received the Freedom ofthe City ofLondon in 1961 he took twelve servants, including his head gardener and head forester, as his guests. However, industrial employment increased again during and immediately after the SecondWorldWar , whileupperand middle class incomes were sharply reduced by the taxation ofthe firstAdee government. The huge success of cookery books written by EUzabeth David (theimpoverished and bohemian daughter of a conservative baronet) during the 1950s signaled the fact that well-bred ladies had finally accepted that they would have to cook their husbands' dinners. Richard Vinen teaches history atKing's College London. His most recent book isA Historyin Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Da Capo, 2001). 1 John Stevenson, British Society, 1914-1945 Q?enguin , 1984), 34. 2 SusanPedersen,Family, Dependence,andthe Origins ofthe Welfare State: Britain andFrance, 1914-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 91. 3 Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1930-1939, ed. Nigel Nicolson (Collins, 1967), 109. 4 Robert Skidelsky,JohnMaynardKeynes. The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1931 (Penguin, 1994), 11. 5 LeonardWoolf, BeginningAgain:AnAutobiography ofthe Years 1911 to 1918 (Peter Smith, 1964), 51: "the following letter from Sophie to Virgina . . . shows inaninterestingwaythe curious psychology ofthese devoted servants to die families for whom they worked—sometimes without exorbitant récognition—in the 19th century." 6 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf, 2 vols. (Hogarth, 1972), 2: 56. 7 Skidelsky,John MaynardKeynes, 8. 8 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences ofthe Peace (Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920), 9. Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps:An Interview With Peter Galison, Part I Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa Albert Einstein has becomean icon of20th-century science; indeed, he may wellstandas thesymbolfor the entire century. How do historians explain the importance ofpivotal breakthroughs ofa theoretical nature—like Einstein's work on relativity— that seemingly change how we view the world? Are these theoreticaladvances essentially theproduct ofthegenius andcreativity ofheroic individuals ? Certainly it is an article ofhistoricalfaith that context matters. But how much? In the case ofEinstein,for instance, does his work in the Bern patent office have anything more than coincidentalbearing on his thinkingabout timeandspace? Peter Galison's latest book, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps (Norton, 2003), explores these themes insightfully and in illuminating detail. Galison, the MallinckrodtProfessoroftheHistory ofScience andofPhysics at Harvard University, argues thatpaying attention to the material context ofthe worlds that Einstein and Poincaré inhabited deepens our appreciationfor their significant theoretical work. Donald Yerxa interviewedGalison in his Harvardoffice on September 29, 2003. Weprovide the interview in two installments, thefirstfocusing on theparticulars o/Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps; thesecondon how historians ofscienceaccountforhowscience has workedin thepast. Donald Yerxa: What prompted you to write Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps? Peter Galison: For many years I have been captivated by the question ofhow abstract issues in theoretical science connect to concrete circumstances—machines, laboratories , instruments. I am fascinated by the way people bring ideas into contact with the physical and completely material world. Einstein, for instance, spent some of his formative scientific years working in the patent office—six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. And yet during this period he wrote some of the most important scientific papers of his day in quantum mechanics, relativity, and atomic theory. Were these connected? Was it just a day job that Einstein had? In a broader sense, beyond the purely biographical , what connection does the development of relativity theory have to the world out ofwhich it came? This mirrors the historian's eternal question: why did this happen then and there? What I am Historically Speaking · November 2003 trying to do in the book is to address that question. Why does relativity happen in different forms, in different ways in Paris and Bern at the turn ofthe century? Yerxa: Can you speak...

An Epistemology of the Clinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s Phenomenology of the Other

160 The writing of this paper was made possible by the support of an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in Science and Technology Studies based at Boston University’s Center for Philosophy and History of Science. I am indebted to Dr. Dieter Binswanger for giving me access to Bellevue’s patient records and the University Archive in Tubingen, especially Irmela Bauer-Kloden, for help locating source material. I am also grateful for critical commentary from Arnold Davidson, the members of the editorial board at Critical Inquiry, and to Anne Harrington, Peter Galison, Alfred Tauber, Bettina Bergo, Debbie Weinstein, and Bruce Fischl. All translations, unless otherwise cited, are my own. 1. The passage continues, “For the mental datum present to the individualmust not only be identifiable throughout a multiplicity of acts on his own part, but by many other people as well” (Max Scheler,The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath [NewHaven, Conn., 1954], p. 221). See also Scheler, “Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis,”Abhandlungen und Aufsatze, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1915), 2: 3–168. 2. WilhelmDilthey and those in the hermeneutic traditionmade a concerted effort to formulate a methodological basis for the human sciences based in great part on a psychology of understanding (Verstehen).Dilthey’s classic work on a descriptive psychology that employed the method ofVerstehen in distinction to an analytic psychology utilizing explanationwas originally published in 1894; seeWilhelmDilthey, “Ideen uber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,”Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Karlfried Grunder and Frithjof Rodi, 23 vols. to date (Stuttgart, 1961–), 5:139–240. See alsoMichael Ermarth,WilhelmDilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago, 1978), pp. 171–76. An Epistemology of the Clinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s Phenomenology of the Other

Nanobiochemiophysic: A Conversation with Peter Galison

October 01 2019 Nanobiochemiophysic: A Conversation with Peter Galison Peter Galison, Peter Galison Peter Galison is the Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. In 1997, he was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; in 1999, he was a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Jennifer Ferng Jennifer Ferng Jennifer Ferng is currently a Ph.D. student of History, Theory, and Criticism in the Department of Architecture at MIT. She received her M.Arch from Princeton University and B.Arch from Rice University. She has formerly taught at the Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Peter Galison Peter Galison is the Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. In 1997, he was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; in 1999, he was a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung. Jennifer Ferng Jennifer Ferng is currently a Ph.D. student of History, Theory, and Criticism in the Department of Architecture at MIT. She received her M.Arch from Princeton University and B.Arch from Rice University. She has formerly taught at the Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design. Online Issn: 2572-7338 Print Issn: 1091-711X © 2003 Peter Galison and Jennifer Ferng2003Peter Galison and Jennifer Ferng Thresholds (2003) (27): 27–31. https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00338 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Peter Galison, Jennifer Ferng; Nanobiochemiophysic: A Conversation with Peter Galison. Thresholds 2003; (27): 27–31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00338 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThresholds Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2003 Peter Galison and Jennifer Ferng2003Peter Galison and Jennifer Ferng Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION: Clifford Geertz School Building: A Retrospective Preface PART ONE: Blurred Genres: Reflections on Disciplinary Practices 13 CHAPTER 1: Quentin Skinner Political Theory after the Enlightenment Project 15 CHAPTER 2: Wolf Lepenies Twenty-five Years of Science and Change: A Personal Memoir 25 CHAPTER 3: Gavin Wright Economic History as a Cure for Economics 41 CHAPTER 4: Judith Butler Can the Other of Philosophy Speak? 52 CHAPTER 5: Renato Rosaldo Reflections on Interdisciplinarity 67 PART TWO: The State of the Art: New Methods and New Questions 83 CHAPTER 6: Joan W. Scott After History? 85 CHAPTER 7: Anna Tsing The Global Situation 104 CHAPTER 8: Charles Taylor Modernity and Identity 139 CHAPTER 9: Kaushik Basu The Role of Norms and Law in Economics: An Essay on Political Economy 154 CHAPTER 10: Peter Galison Material Culture, Theoretical Culture, and Delocalization 179 CHAPTER 11: Andrew Pickering Science as Alchemy 194 PART THREE: Thick Description: Field Overviews and Institutional History 207 CHAPTER 12: William H. Sewell, Jr. Whatever Happened to the Social in History? 209 CHAPTER 13: Nicholas B. Dirks Postcolonialism and Its Discontents: History, Anthropology, and Postcolonial Critique 227 CHAPTER 14: David E. Apter Structure, Contingency, and Choice: A Comparison of Trends and Tendencies in Political Science 252 CHAPTER 15: Mary Poovey Interdisciplinarity at New York University 288 PART FOUR: The World in Pieces: Political Philosophy and World Governance 313 CHAPTER 16: Jean Bethke Elshtain Political Theory and Responsibility 315 CHAPTER 17: Jane Mansbridge A Moral Core Solution to the Prisoners' Dilemma 330 CHAPTER 18: Michael Rustin Reinterpreting Risk 348 CHAPTER 19: Istvan Rev Retrotopia: Critical Reason Turns Primitive 364 CHAPTER 20: Michael Walzer International Society: What Is the Best that We Can Do? 388 AUTHOR NOTES 403

Making stars: projection culture in nineteenth-century German astronomy

The introduction into the laboratory of the magic lantern and the arts of projection marked a change from putatively individual and mechanical to obviously collective and skillful perception in nineteenth-century German sciences. In 1860 Karl Friedrich Zöllner introduced an astro-photometer to astronomers who, by practising with it, became aware of their own tacit and ubiquitous skills. Zöllner was a showman who was aware of the personal skills involved in magic-lantern projection. Like showmen, nineteenth-century astronomers could also control and calibrate their vision with this instrument. Photometrists such as Zöllner were not only aware of subjectivity, but developed techniques to manipulate, control and to employ it in scientific judgements. This view stands in contrast to that of the scientists described by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, for whom ‘machines offered freedom from will – from the willful interventions that had come to be seen as the most dangerous aspects of subjectivity’. But with Zöllner's successful programme of instrumental subjectivity, acts of willful intervention were at the very centre of astronomical judgement.