As a master narrative for understanding the emergence of the modern world, the concept of a seventeenth-century scientific revolution has been central to the history of science. It is generally believed that this key analytical framework was created in Europe and became widely used for the first time during the Cold War through the writings of Herbert Butterfield and Alexander Koyré. This view, however, is mistaken. The scientific revolution is largely a product of debates about social reconstruction in the United (...) States in the aftermath of World War I. Promoted in a pioneering book by the Austrian immigrant Martha Ornstein, highlighted in a provocative bestseller by the historian James Harvey Robinson, the scientific revolution was taught in thousands of interwar high schools and colleges. Based on John Dewey’s advocacy of “the scientific method” and on evolutionary psychology and anthropology, the concept underpinned campaigns for women’s rights, racial equality, secular humanism, and global peace. These progressive political ambitions were abandoned after World War II, when the scientific revolution became fundamental not only to forging the history of science as a discipline but also to redefining what it meant to be “modern” during an era of decolonization and the consolidation of global capitalism. (shrink)

Open Court began publishingThe Monistin 1890 as a journal“devotedto the philosophy of science”that regularly included mathematics. The audiencewas understood to be“cultured people who have not a technical mathematicaltraining”but nevertheless“have a mathematical penchant.”With these constraints,the mathematical content varied from recreations to logical foundations, but every-one had something to say about non-Euclidean geometry, in debates that rangedfrom psychology to semantics. The focus in this essay is on the contested value ofmathematical expertise in legitimating what should be considered as mathematics.While some mathematicians urgedThe (...) Monistto uphold disciplinary standards ofgeometrical reasoning, authors opposed tonon-Euclidean geometry aligned theirreasoning with practical applications, universal know-how, and nonhierarchicaldemocracy. As one contributorinquired,“How isthe professional expert betterfit-ted to see more lucidly in dealing with the elements of geometry than any otherperson of good geometric faculty?”. (shrink)

Since the early nineteenth century a membrane or wall has been central to the cell’s identity as the elementary unit of life. Yet the literally and metaphorically marginal status of the cell membrane made it the site of clashes over the definition of life and the proper way to study it. In this article I show how the modern cell membrane was conceived of by analogy to the first “artificial cell,” invented in 1864 by the chemist Moritz Traube (1826–1894), and (...) reimagined by the plant physiologist Wilhelm Pfeffer (1845–1920) as a precision osmometer. Pfeffer’s artificial cell osmometer became the conceptual and empirical basis for the law of dilute solutions in physical chemistry, but his use of an artificial analogue to theorize the existence of the plasma membrane as distinct from the cell wall prompted debate over whether biology ought to be more closely unified with the physical sciences, or whether it must remain independent as the science of life. By examining how the histories of plant physiology and physical chemistry intertwined through the artificial cell, I argue that modern biology relocated vitality from protoplasmic living matter to nonliving chemical substances—or, in broader cultural terms, that the disenchantment of life was accompanied by the (re)enchantment of ordinary matter. (shrink)

In the late 19th century, the questionnaire was one means of taking the case study into the multitudes. This article engages with Forrester’s idea of thinking in cases as a means of interrogating questionnaire-based research in early American psychology. Questionnaire research was explicitly framed by psychologists as a practice involving both natural historical and statistical forms of scientific reasoning. At the same time, questionnaire projects failed to successfully enact the latter aspiration in terms of synthesizing masses of collected data into (...) a coherent whole. Difficulties in managing the scores of descriptive information questionnaires generated ensured the continuing presence of individuals in the results of this research, as the individual case was excerpted and discussed alongside a cast of others. As a consequence, questionnaire research embodied an amalgam of case, natural historical, and statistical thinking. Ultimately, large-scale data collection undertaken with questionnaires failed in its aim to construct composite exemplars or ‘types’ of particular kinds of individuals; to produce the singular from the multitudes. (shrink)

To those not engaged in the practice of scientific research, or telling the story of this enterprise, the image of empirical observation may conjure up images of boredom more than anything else. Yet surprisingly, the profoundly uninteresting nature of research to many science workers and readers in history has received little attention. This paper seeks to examine one moment of encroaching boredom: nineteenth-century positional astronomy as practised at leading observatories. Though possibly a coincidence, this new form of astronomical observation arose (...) only a few decades before the English term ‘boredom’, for which theOxford English Dictionaryhas no record prior to 1850. Through examining forms of observatory labour and publications, I offer in this paper an example of how boring work and reading helped shape a scientific discipline. (shrink)

ArgumentBetween 1878 and 1880, Switzerland, Italy, and Japan initiated the world's first national earthquake commissions, but only the Swiss made ordinary citizens a vital part of this undertaking. This paper examines the texture of communication between Swiss scientists and lay observers and traces the development of a language for seismology that was simultaneously scientific and vernacular. This is the story of an aborted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk, an alternative abandoned on the way to the (...) increasingly technical science of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper looks at a genre of meetings that, while neither purely ‘scientific’ nor ‘diplomatic’, drew on elements from both professional spheres and gained prominence in the interwar decades and during the Second World War. It proposes to make sense of ‘technical conferences’ as a phenomenon that was made by and through scientific experts and politicians championing the organizing power of rationality, science and liberal internationalism. Against the background of swelling ranks of state-employed scientists, this paper documents the emergence of (...) technical conferences as the forums where they got down to work. To make this case the paper traces the influence of a new way of thinking about the function and organization of conferences, originating in the time around the First World War, on one international organization in particular: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), as a new hub of scientists and technicians. (shrink)

ABSTRACT For some years now, the history of modern mathematics and the history of modern science have developed independently. A step toward a reunification that would benefit both disciplines could come about through a revived appreciation of mathematical practice. Detailed studies of what mathematicians actually do, whether local or broadly based, have often led in recent work to examinations of the social, cultural, and national contexts, and more can be done. Another recent approach toward a historical understanding of the abstractness (...) of modern mathematics has been to see it as a species of modernism, and this thesis will be tested by the raft of works on the history of modern applied mathematics currently under way. (shrink)

I propose we abandon the unit concept of "the evolutionary synthesis". There was much more to evolutionary studies in the 1920s and 1930s than is suggested in our commonplace narratives of this object in history. Instead, four organising threads capture much of evolutionary studies at this time. First, the nature of species and the process of speciation were dominating, unifying subjects. Second, research into these subjects developed along four main lines, or problem complexes: variation, divergence, isolation, and selection. Some calls (...) for 'synthesis' focused on these problem complexes (sometimes on one of these; other times, all). In these calls, comprehensive and pluralist compendia of plausibly relevant elements were preferred over reaching consensus about the value of particular formulae. Third, increasing confidence in the study of common problems coincided with methodological and epistemic changes associated with experimental taxonomy. Finally, the surge of interest in species problems and speciation in the 1930s is intimately tied to larger trends, especially a shifting balance in the life sciences towards process-based biologies and away from object-based naturalist disciplines. Advocates of synthesis in evolution supported, and were adapting to, these larger trends. (shrink)