Charles Coulston Gillispie

The edge of objectivity : an essay in the history of scientific ideas

From Galileos analysis of motion to the theories of evolution and relativity, Charles Gillispie takes us on a masterly tour of the world of scientific ideas. The history of modern science is portrayed here as the development of objectivity through the study of nature. In the mid-1950s, a young professor at Princeton named Charles Gillispie began teaching Humanities 304, one of the first undergraduate courses offered anywhere in the world on the history of science. From start to finish--Galileo to Einstein--Gillispie introduced the students to the key ideas and individuals in science. The Edge of Objectivity arose out of this course. It must have been a lively class. The Edge of Objectivity is pointed, opinionated, and selective. Even at six hundred pages, the book is, as the title suggests, an essay. Gillispie is unafraid to rate Mendel higher than Darwin, Maxwell above Faraday. Full of wry turns of phrase, the book effectively captures people and places. And throughout the book, Gillispie pushes an argument. He views science as the progressive development of more objective, detached, mathematical ways of viewing the world, and he orchestrates his characters and ideas around this theme. In the forty-five years since the publication of The Edge of Objectivity, historians of science have established a full-fledged discipline. They have focused increasingly on the social context of science rather than its internal dynamics, and they have frequently viewed science more as a threatening instance of power than as an accumulation of knowledge. Nevertheless, Gillispies book remains a sophisticated, fast-moving, idiosyncratic account of the development of scientific ideas over four hundred years, by one of the founding intellects in the history of science.

Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime

By the end of the eighteenth century, the French dominated the world of science. And although science and politics had little to do with each other directly, there were increasingly frequent intersections. This is a study of those transactions between science and state, knowledge and power--on the eve of the French Revolution. Charles Gillispie explores how the links between science and polity in France were related to governmental reform, modernization of the economy, and professionalization of science and engineering.

All scientists now : the Royal Society in the nineteenth century

List of illustrations Foreword Preface 1. The eighteenth-century legacy 2. Trial and error (1820-1830) 3. Reform and revision (1830-1848) 4. How reform worked: the running of the Society 1848-1899 5. The encouragement of science 6. Relations with Government 7. Relations with other societies 8. The encouragement of scientific exploration 9. The end of the century: a truly scientific society A note on sources Notes to the text Bibliography Index.

Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime

Of course, from childhood to forever, we are always thought to love reading. It is not only reading the lesson book but also reading everything good is the choice of getting new inspirations. Religion, sciences, politics, social, literature, and fictions will enrich you for not only one aspect. Having more aspects to know and understand will lead you become someone more precious. Yea, becoming precious can be situated with the presentation of how your knowledge much.

The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation 1783-1784: With a Word on the Importance of Ballooning for the Science of Heat and the Art of Building Railroads

This vividly illustrated book introduces the reader to the brothers Montgolfier, who launched the first hotair balloon in Annonay, France on 4 June 1783.Originally published in 1983.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Nature of Science Normal science is succeeded by a creative phase of revolution out of which new concepts emerge

It is not for a historian of science to pass judgment on the central critique of Kuhns essay, since that is directed to science itself. A few reservations may be ventured, however, of a sort which the author of so searching a discussion will certainly expect, the more so since, in his own terms, he proposes nothing less than a revolution in our concept of science, if not of nature. But it is not clear to me that anyone really holds the view of science which he would demolish. I for one find a great deal more in this book to agree with than might be expected in an exponent of a counterrevolutionary school. The argument depends very heavily on the viability of the terms—paradigm, normal science, revolution, anomaly, crisis, and the like. So it has been with many a philosophy of history from Comte to Toynbee. So it has been with many a chapter in the history of science—phlogiston, calorie, ether—and the student of either of these genres (which Kuhn, like Comte, combines) will have learned to be wary of mistaking the terms he gives his subject for its elements, the definitions for the happenings. The argument sometimes comes perilously close to circularity: that is, normal science does not aim at novelty, ergo what is novel is not normal science but an anomaly. On strictly historical grounds, moreover, strong cases might be made for considering books like Newtons Principia and Lavoisiers Trait� �l�mentaire as summaries of a heritage rather than as models shaping the future. The reader may be referred, for example, to E. J. Dikjsterhuiss treatment of Newton in his recently translated Mechanization of the World Picture, where it appears that Newton himself did not adumbrate the laws of motion in the sense in which they were fundamental to classical physics. For example, the proportionality of force to the product of mass into acceleration was imported into the second law in the development of analytical mechanics, not forced upon a school by a revolutionary law-giver. Newton was thinking of impact. Still, there are not many books which find one making eager jottings in the margin, nor fortunately need one act on these; one may instead, and indeed in candor must, await the full development that Kuhn intends to provide. Mean-while there can be only admiration for the erudition, the scholarship, the fidelity, and the seriousness that the enterprise reflects on every page. One is safe in predicting that whatever the final success, there will be no petty faults to find. Every historian, moreover, will surely applaud one recurrent and fundamental emphasis, which is that the development of science must be set into the context of a Darwinian historiography and treated as a circumstantial evolution from primitive beginnings rather than the ever closer approach to the telos of a right and perfect science. It is odd, and Kuhn is absolutely right about this, that by instinct scientists tend to see it the latter way. At least their students do, and who else could be responsible for that?.

On Principles in Sadi Carnot’s Thermodynamics

In 1824 Sadi Carnot published Reflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu in which he almost entirely founded thermodynamic theory. Two years after his death, his friend Clapeyron’ introduced the famous PV diagram to analytically represent the famous Carnot cycle , one of the main and crucial ideas presented by Carnot in his booklet. Twenty–five years later, in order to achieve the modern version of the theory, Kelvin and Clausius had to reject the caloric hypothesis, which had influenced a few of Carnot’s arguments. Relying on the possibility of studying the history of science by means of logical investigation, in this section we shall propose historical–epistemological research on Sadi Carnot’s original thermodynamic theory. In this theory, the French scientist presents more than two principles, all of which are expressed by double negative sentences (generally speaking) within non–classical logic.

History of the social sciences

RésuméComme prolègomène à toute historiographie future des sciences sociales, l’auteur soutient que le sujet ne saurait être traité comme la somme des développements parallèles dans des disciplines séparées, dont les états antérieurs ne sont considérés que relativement à leur état actuel. Les chercheurs seraient mieux inspirés de concevoir leur sujet comme un ensemble de questions sur le rôle historique de la systématisation et de l’institutionnalisation des connaissances sur l’homme en société. Des travaux portant sur des aspects plus particuliers de cette problématique globale seraient sans doute plus prometteurs que des histoires internes à chaque discipline destinées aux spécialistes de l’histoire actuelle.

Apologia pro Vita Sua

I HEN PRINCETON offered a graduate student at Harvard with the same name as mine an instructorship in 1947, no one in the History Department had the slightest idea that it was hiring a historian of science. My own sense of any such prospect was vagueness itself. That it so fell out is owing in the first instance to the liberality of my undergraduate alma mater, Wesleyan. Brought up during the Depression in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I rather thought that companies like Dupont looked to be a better bet than the steel company in which my father made his career, and I decided to major in chemistry. Even as a child, however, my favorite reading was history, or perhaps legend, starting with Howard Pyles quadrilogy telling of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Wesleyan had not only a fine chemistry department but an inspiring history department. Chemistry was my duty. I could do my duty and did. History was my joy, however, and I was allowed to write a senior thesis in that field, on Lloyd George of all people, and graduated A.B. in chemistry with distinction in history in 1940. As it happened, Gerald Holton was also at Wesleyan, class of 1941, but the science in which he graduated was physics, and in those days our paths seldom crossed. (See Figure 1.) A stint of chemical engineering at MIT in 1940-41 convinced me that it would be better to do what was pleasing, and I got in a semester of graduate study in history at Harvard before the draft reached down to me in 1942. The army in its wisdom was more impressed with my chemical background than with my sense of history. It put me straight into the Chemical Warfare Service and packed me off to Officer Candidate School after a period of basic training. Nothing could have been less pertinent than knowledge of chemistry to my duties as an officer in the 94th 4.2 Inch Chemical Mortar Battalion, wherein I served, first as a platoon leader, then as a company commander, in the XV Corps, 3rd Army. The weapons were designed to fire gas shells, of course, but they could also be served with ordinary explosive ammunition for bombardment or with white phosphorus for smoke screens and incendiary effect. The atomic bomb ended all that, to the inexpressible relief of those of us facing the prospect of another invasion. That was enough of duty for one lifetime, and happiness was finding myself back at Harvard just in time for the spring semester, 1946, there to luxuriate in the freedom afforded by the G.I. Bill. (In my admittedly biased view, the only comparably constructive piece of legislation enacted by Congress in the twentieth century was the New Deals Civilian Conservation Corps.) It seemed to me, even then, that it would be sensible and interesting to work out some combination of a background in science with an interest in history, but I had never read, or even heard of, a single work in history of science, and I

A Professional Life in the History of Science

It was with some compunction that I acceded to the flattering invitation from Donald Yerxa, editor of Historically Speaking, to write of a professional life in the field of my specialty. Reluctance was the greater in that I had already given an account of that career in Isis on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the History of Science Society in 1999.1 In all probability, however, there is little if any overlap between subscribers to Isis and those to Historically Speaking. That such should be the case is one of the situations discussed. Anyone who consults the earlier essay will find that it turns on personal and institutional factors. I tried not to repeat myself more than was necessary to make what follows intelligible, and ventured instead to offer some reflections on the context of my work in relation to the development of the historiography of science. First of all, a word about the subject. The generation to which I have the good fortune to belong is commonly said to have founded the history of science as a professional field of scholarship in the years after World War II. Marshall Clagett, I. Bernard Cohen, Henry Guerlac, Erwin Hiebert, Alistair Crombie, Giorgio di Santillana, Rupert and Marie Hall, Georges Canguilhem, Rene Taton, Thomas S. Kuhn-those are among the notable names. Having majored in some branch of science as undergraduates or the equivalent, and gone on to graduate school before or just after the war, all of us had somehow developed a strong ancillary taste for history. We came out of service of one sort or another in 1945, dazzled like everyone else by Hiroshima, the Manhattan Project, sonar, radar, penicillin, and so on. Independently of each other, or largely so, we each harbored a sense that science, even like art, literature, or philosophy, must have had a history, the study of which might lead to a better appreciation of its own inwardness as well as its place in the development of civilization. With a few stellar exceptions, the history of science until that time was the province either of philosophers-Condorcet, Comte, Whewell, Duhem, Mach-each adducing exemplary material in service to their respective epistemologies, or of elderly scientists writing the histories of their science, or sometimes all science, in order to occupy their retirement. Though not written in accordance with historical standards, neither of these bodies of literature is to be ignored. The one is always suggestive and sometimes informative, the other often informative, almost always technically reliable, and rarely of much interpretative significance. Of the two notable scholars who flourished in the 19205 and 19305, George Sarton was a prophet and scholarly bibliographer rather than a historian, while E. L. Thorndike was a devoted, learned antiquarian riding his hobby horse of magic and experimental science through the library of the Vatican. Though much and rightly respected, neither found a following. Nor did E. J. Dijksterhuis, whose The Mechanization of the World Picture (1950) is a classic that will always repay study. Anticipations of a fully historical history of science appeared in the work of Helene Metzger on 18th-century chemistry and Anneliese Maier on medieval science. Herbert Butterfields The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (1950) was a godsend both in itself and in that it was one of the few things one could expect undergraduates to read. The same was true of Carl Beckers Heavenly City of the i8th-Century Philosophers (1932), a supremely literate essay which (unfortunately in my view) has fallen into disfavor among students of the Enlightenment, and also of Arthur O. Lovejoys The Great Chain of Being (1936), a founding work in the modern historiography of ideas. Two ancillary masterpieces, one from the side of sociology, the other from philosophy, were still more inspirational in exhibiting respectively the social and the intellectual interest that the history of science may hold, namely Robert K. …