Massimiliano Badino

An Application of Information Theory to the Problem of the Scientific Experiment

There are two basic approaches to the problem of induction:the empirical one, which deems that the possibility of induction depends on how theworld was made (and how it works) and the logical one, which considers the formation(and function) of language. The first is closer to being useful for induction, whilethe second is more rigorous and clearer. The purpose of this paper is to create an empiricalapproach to induction that contains the same formal exactitude as the logical approach.This requires: (a) that the empirical conditions for the induction are enunciatedand (b) that the most important results already obtained from inductive logic are againdemonstrated to be valid. Here we will be dealing only with induction by elimination,namely the analysis of the experimental confutation of a theory. The result will bea rule of refutation that takes into consideration all of the empirical aspect of theexperiment and has each of the asymptotic properties which inductive logic has shown tobe characteristic of induction.

The Discreet Charm of Ontology

Taking a second look at a classic work of your discipline is often a tricky business. At first sight, it is almost impossible to avoid the impolite impression that some of its key questions are old fashioned and some of its answers trivial. This impression might in turn generate a condescending attitude toward the author, which inevitably persuades us of our superior wisdom. But as the reading continues and the cultural context of the book delineates itself, it becomes increasingly clear that it is because of that book—and others of its ilk—that those questions have become old fashioned and those answers trivial. For a classic does not merely disclose new mental spaces; it makes them look familiar, natural, and even comfortable. Enrico Bellone’s Il mondo di carta is no exception. The book was published in 1976 by the publisher Mondadori, based in Milan. Both the time and the place of its publication are meaningful. Dominated for half a century by Benedetto Croce’s and Giovanni Gentile’s idealism, Italian philosophical culture was slow to react to the developments of philosophy of science. It was only in the late 1960s that the ideas of logical empiricism—as well as those of its critics—made their way to the academic world of the peninsula. Key to this process was Ludovico Geymonat. A charismatic figure and an original thinker, Geymonat occupied the first Italian chair in philosophy of science at the University of Milan. During the social and generational turmoil of the 1970s, his multidisciplinary approach, blending logic, philosophy of the physical sciences, and history of science within a Marxist framework, attracted a substantial group of young scholars eager to break with traditional culture. More important, Geymonat, a mathematician by training, was able to bridge disciplinary gaps and to recruit junior scientists who were looking for a career outside the lab. Enrico Bellone, who had just graduated in physics at Genoa, was among them. The spirit of that pioneering period still emanates from the pages of Il mondo di carta. The two introductory chapters are impregnated with the philosophical debates of those years. The issues dear to Bellone’s heart are the defense of rationality against Paul Feyerabend’s methodological anarchism, the search for a middle way between naive continuity and T. S. Kuhn’s drastic incommensurability, the taming of Karl Popper’s methodological imperialism, the definition of a role for history vis-à-vis Imre Lakatos’s provocative notion of rational reconstruction, and—perhaps most important of all—the overcoming of the distinction between internalism and external-

Using, Abusing, and Perusing the Past

Historians’ neglect of the imagined past is particularly surprising when one considers that, oftentimes, the process of constructing an imagined past is an interesting story in its own right. This essay argues that part of the reason for the scarce attention paid to science’s imagined past is the fact that the very existence of an imagined past questions the foundations of history writing. The remedy to the flaws of history is, the essay suggests, simply more history. We do not need to sweep the imagined past under the rug but, rather, to understand its dynamics as a genuinely historical process.

What Have the Historians of Quantum Physics Ever Done for Us

Once one of the main protagonists of history of science, the historiography on quantum theory has recently gone through a process of reconfiguration of methods, research questions and epistemological framework. In this paper, I review the recent developments and propose some reflections on its future evolution.

The Problem of Heat Radiation

This chapter summarizes the problem of heat radiation in the second half of the nineteenth century. For most physicists, this problem amounted to finding the explicit form of the radiation law. In the first phase, experimental research and general thermodynamical arguments imposed some constraints on the form of this law. One of the great conundrums of the final decades of the nineteenth century was to discover a plausible derivation of the exponential term revealed by the experiments. Here, I pay special attention to Wien’s research program. Wien combined electromagnetic theory, kinetic theory, and thermodynamics in a very creative—and sometimes opportunist—manner. More importantly, for Wien the black-body problem was a window on the study of more intricate forms of interaction between radiation and matter. Planck’s program, as we will see in the next chapters, had a totally different agenda.

In the Theoretician’s Workshop: Notes for a Historical and Philosophical Analysis of Theories

This chapter sets the historiographical framework for the rest of the book. I claim that philosophy and historiography of theories are currently utterly separated and this situation is detrimental to both. The reason of this separation, I argue, is that philosophy of science has maintained an intellectualistic stance toward scientific theories. In the course of time, this attitude has crystallized in three theses or dogmas about what a theory is, how it works, and how we should approach it. These dogmas have hindered a reconciliation between the analysis of the internal structure of theories and their being historical-cultural objects. In the final part of the chapter, I propose my view. By systematically turning the dogmas upside down, I argue that we should use reflectively our theoretical knowledge to shed light on theories as knowledge-production devices. I distinguish between the representational, the transformational, and the explanatory dimension and I argue that a theory produces knowledge through the epistemic cooperation of these dimensions. On the historiographical side, this approach entails that we have to pay more attention to the mathematical practices and to the way in which they shape the physical representation of phenomena.

Planck’s Theory of Radiation

In this chapter I explore Planck’s radiation theory from his preliminary studies (1896) through his more mature Pentalogy (1897–1899). Planck viewed the problem of the black-body radiation very differently from Wien and the majority of his contemporaries. In particular, Planck was not primarily interested in deriving a radiation law. Instead, he considered heat radiation as an ideal case to support his strict view of thermal irreversibility. He wanted to prove that electromagnetic radiation in a cavity, when suitably stimulated, reaches irreversibly a form of stable thermal equilibrium. Initially, Planck thought that this statement could be demonstrated as a consequence of the electromagnetic features of the problem. Boltzmann jumped in and showed that this could not possibly be the case. In the second part of the Pentalogy, Planck changed strategy. He modified the morphology of his theory to accommodate new resources and gave a more central role to some symbolic practices, notably Fourier series. The central move of the reorganization of his theory was the introduction of the hypothesis of natural radiation as a way to draw a divide between the macroscopic and microscopic state. Planck obtained his argument for irreversibility, but he had to pay a prize for it: his entire program depended essentially on the validity of Wien’s law.

Das Verfolgen einer Idee : Plancks Theorie idealer Gase

Der Beitrag befasst sich mit einem bislang weitgehend unbeachteten Aspekt von Plancks quantentheoretischen Arbeiten: seine Theorie der Quantengase aus den Jahren 1910 und 1924. Obwohl die Theorie kompliziert und zuweilen sogar eigenwillig ist, spielte sie im Prozess des Ubergangs von der fruhen Quantentheorie zur Quantenmechanik eine wichtige Bedeutung. Es wird gezeigt, dass Plancks ursprungliche Forschungen auf diesem Gebiet jenen Pfaden folgen, die bereits seine Untersuchungen zur Thermodynamik und Warmestrahlung pragten. Mit dieser Perspektive wird das komplexe Zusammenwirken von Konzepten und Analogien analysiert, das Plancks Konzept ununterscheidbarer Teilchen zugrunde liegt.