While the concept of "classical physics" has long framed our understanding of the environment from which modern physics emerged, it has consistently been read back into a period in which the physicists concerned initially considered their work in quite other terms. This essay explores the shifting currency of the rich cultural image of the classical/ modern divide by tracing empirically different uses of "classical" within the physics community from the 1890s to 1911. A study of fin-de-siècle addresses shows that the earliest general uses of the concept proved controversial. Our present understanding of the term was in large part shaped by its incorporation (in different ways) within the emerging theories of relativity and quantum theory--where the content of "classical" physics was defined by proponents of the new. Studying the diverse ways in which Boltzmann, Larmor, Poincaré, Einstein, Minkowski, and Planck invoked the term "classical" will help clarify the critical relations between physicists' research programs and their use of worldview arguments in fashioning modern physics.
This paper examines the relations between John Heilbron's argument that fin de siècle physicists adjusted the image and substance of their discipline to cultural concerns, and Paul Forman's approach to acau-sality in the Weimar period. In addition to their focus on representation rather than truth, adherents of the "descriptionist" epistemologies that Heilbron identified also promoted an emphasis on method, statistical rather than causal explanations, historical understandings of epistemology, and stressed the relations between physics and other disciplines. Their views provide an intellectual context--within the physics discipline--for at least some part of what Forman had described as a capitulation to the hostile social environment expressed in Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes.
Somewhere between science and technology, between theory and experiment, between research, development and production, integral to all these activities but rarely highlighted by the categories through which we approach them, scientific instruments often slip through the cracks of science studies. This book joins recent calls to recognize the independent and generative rôle of instruments, and focuses attention on a particularly elusive facet of modern instrumentation. 1 Its quarry are 'researchtechnologies' and the figures who have created them. Building on Terry Shinn's use of the concept in earlier studies, here Joerges and Shinn highlight the significance of a kind of instrumentation that emerges at the interfaces of science and industry. Research-technologies are devices that are designed to be generic, able to be invested with new functions and used by different groups. Facilitating both the production of science and the production of other goods, they are potentially lucrative both cognitively and commercially. If the instruments are fruitful on several fronts, and thereby capable of sustaining significant developmental enterprise, the people who design and promote them are also likely to follow career paths and publication strategies that cross disciplines and switch between academic and industrial or commercial contexts. Jesse Beams and his ultracentrifuges -bringing new techniques within the reach of a great range of physical and biological investigations -are models of this kind of career and instrument. 2 The present volume explores the emergence of specific research-technologies in a number of contexts and scientific fields, but is also animated by the broader tasks of developing an adequate sociological characterization of the endeavour, and of describing the historical emergence of a research-technology movement. Of course, it is not unusual to regard boundary-crossing to be an essential feature of much innovative
This paper highlights the significance of sensory studies and psychophysical investigations of the relations between psychic and physical phenomena for our understanding of the development of the physics discipline, by examining aspects of research on sense perception, physiology, esthetics, and psychology in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and Ernst Mach between 1860 and 1871. It complements previous approaches oriented around research on vision, Fechner's psychophysics, or the founding of experimental psychology, by charting Mach's engagement with psychophysical experiments in particular. Examining Mach's study of the senses and esthetics, his changing attitudes toward the mechanical worldview and atomism, and his articulation of comparative understandings of sensual, geometrical, and physical spaces helps set Mach's emerging epistemological views in the context of his teaching and research. Mach complemented an analytic strategy focused on parallel psychic and physical dimensions of sensation, with a synthetic comparative approach - building analogies between the retina, the individual, and social life, and moving between abstract and sensual spaces. An examination of the broadly based critique that Mach articulated in his 1871 lecture on the conservation of work shows how his historical approach helped Mach cast what he now saw as a narrowly limiting emphasis on mechanics as a phase yet to be overcome.
Ernst Mach's most well known critiques of mechanics concerning mass, inertia and space and time were conceptually motivated by the aim of avoiding unnecessary assumptions and basing the concepts of physics upon measured relations, and they were first published in the years around 1870 (for mass and inertia) and in his well known 1883 book Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung historisch-kritisch dargestellt. Philosophical discussion of them has reflected these conceptual concerns, and related Mach's critique to his emphasis on the economy of thought. Yet manuscript records of Mach's teaching in the 1870s shows that his approach was animated also by the concerns of psychophysics and the relations between inner and outer worlds, and his publications attest to these broader interests also. In the 1870s, for example, Mach developed physiological studies of the sense of motion, and soon after his critical history of mechanics was published in 1883, his 1886 Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen was intimately concerned with the relations between physiology and psychology. By investigating Mach's research across subject matter that has usually been treated separately, and seeking to integrate his teaching and research also, this paper aims at offering a study of Mach's philosophy as it is revealed in practice. Indeed, Mach offers a highly unusual example whose primary aim was to reform his own discipline of physics through the concerns of other disciplines, something he alluded to in 1886 when stating that he expected the next great enlightenments of the foundations of physics to come at the hands of biology.
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