The Non-introduction of Low-Temperature Physics in Spain: Julio Palacios and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

Relocating the History of Science

“…On April 18, Wr oblewski sent a cordial letter to Cailletet in order to thank him for the congratulatory letter he had received, and generously insisted that his own success should properly have been Cailletet's. 6 …”

“…It contributes to the clarification of mechanisms of appropriation of scientific ideas, instruments, and practices and of technological expertise. 6 Two years later on the Greek island of Aegina, the group worked on another aspect of the circulation of knowledge, this time textbooks as mediators between experts and lay people, in particular in "peripheral" countries. Departing from the work on chemical textbooks, which had been developed some years earlier as part of the aforementioned ESF project on "The Evolution of Chemistry in Europe" (Bensaude-Vincent and Lundgren 2000), the result after Aegina was a special issue of the journal Science and Education (Bertomeu-Sánchez et al 2006a) which included a selection of conference papers and again discussed mechanisms of knowledge transfer in specific local contexts and their actors, as well as their inevitable link to mainstream scientific knowledge and the standardization of academic disciplines and professions.…”

“…In John Whyte's illustrations to the Theodore de Bry edition of Thomas Harriot's Briefe and True Report of the New Found Lands of Virginia (1588), for example, images of the native inhabitants were juxtaposed to those of the British Picts as described by the Romans, suggesting that both peoples had been in similar situations of early cultural development. 6 Just as the ancient Britons had eventually matured into modern Elizabethans, so, hinted Whyte, the native Virginians might trace a similar arc of development. For Tournefort, however, the inhabitants of Crete had once been what he and other classically educated European savants still yearned to become: the likes of Theophrastus and Dioscorides, Hippocrates and Galen.…”

“…What made this possible is the availability and use of supercomputers 3 ; the strong coupling between applied mathematicians, computer scientists and the physicists and chemists using DFT methods 4 ; the production and the sharing of the computer codes using DFT by researchers making computations 5 in condensed matter physics, quantum chemistry, material sciences and in nuclear physics; and the needs of the pharmaceutical and chemical industries and companies developing new materials for use in aerospace, computing, building and other applications. 6 The interrelation between the various elements responsible for this dramatic transformation offers an interesting case study in "post-modern" science (Forman 2002(Forman , 2007(Forman , 2010. In Neither Physics nor Chemistry, Gavroglu and Simões stressed the impact of computing on quantum chemistry, and their book ends with a discussion of the 1970 Conference on Computational Support for Theoretical Chemistry (Gavroglu and Simões 2012, 237-243).…”

“…5 For the development of the RSPt code at Los Alamos see Wills et al (2010). 6 See for example Höltje and Folkers (2003). 7 We are using "modern" and "postmodern" in the sense introduced by Forman (2012).…”