Peter Galison

The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power

Contributors Introduction: the context of disunity Part I. Boundaries: 1. The disunities of the sciences Ian Hacking 2. Styles of reasoning, conceptual history, and the emergence of psychiatry Arnold I. Davidson 3. Metaphysical disorder and scientific disunity John Dupre 4. Computer simulations and the trading zone Peter Galison 5. The unity of science: carnap. neurath, and beyond Richard Creath 6. Talking metaphysical turkey about epistemological chicken, and the poop on pidgins Steve Fuller Part II. Contexts: 7. From relativism to contingetism Mario Biagioli 8. Contextualizing the canon Simon Schaffer 9. Science made up: constructivist sociology of scientific knowledge Arthur Fine 10. From epistemology and metaphysics to concrete connections David J. Stump 11. The care of the self and blind variation: the disunity of two leading sciences Karim Knorr Cetina 12. The constitution of archaelogical evidence: gender politics and science Alison Wym Part III. Power: 13. Otto neurath: politics and the unity of science Jordi Cat, Nancy Cartwright, and Hasok Chang 14. The naturalized history museum Timothy Lenon and Cheryl Lynn Ross 15. Beyond epistemic sovereignty Joseph Rouse 16. The dilemma of scientific subjectivity in postvital culture Evelyn Fox Keller 17. Modest witness: feminist diffractions in science studies Donna J. Haraway 18. Afterword: new directions in the philosophy of science studies David J. Stump Notes Select bibliography Index.

Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science

Introduction: dynamincs all the way up / M. Norton Wise 1 Part I Mathematics, physics, and engineering Elementary particles? 1. Mirror symmetry: persons, values, and objects / Peter Galison 23 Nonlinear dynamics and chaos 2. Chaos, disorder, and mixing: a new fin-de-siecle image of science? / Amy Dahan Dalmedico 67 3. Forms of explanation in the catastrophe theory of Rene Thjom: topology, morphogenesis, and structuralism / David Aubin 95 Coping with complexity in technology 4. From Boeing to Berkeley: civil engineers, the cold war, and the origins of finite element analysis / Ann Johnson 133 5. Fuzzyfying the world: social practices of showing the properties of fuzzy logic / Claude Rosental 159 Part II The organism, the self, and (artificial) life Self-Organization 6. Marrying the premodern to the postmodern: computers and organisms after World War II / Evelyn Fox Keller 181 Immunology 7. Immunology and the enigma of selfhood / Alfred I. Tauber 201 8. Immunology of AIDS: growning explanations and developing instruments / Ilana Lowy 222 Artificial Life 9. Artificial life support: some nodes in the Alife ribotype / Richard Doyle 251 10. The word for world is computer: simulating second natures in artificial life / Stefan Helmreich 275 11. Constructing and explaining emergence in artificial life: on paradigms, ontodefinitions, and general knowledge in biology / Claus Emmeche 301 Afterword 327 Contributors 333 Index 337

Atmospheric flight in the twentieth century

Introduction A. Roland, P. Galison. Part I: Understanding Flight. An Accident of History P. Galison. Aerospace in Adolescence: McCook Field and the Beginnings of Modern Flight Research P.L. Jakab. The Changing Nature of Flight and Ground Test Instrumentation and Data: 1940-1969 F. Suppe. The Emergence of the Turbofan Engine G.E. Smith, D.A. Mindell. Engineering Experiment and Engineering Theory: The Aerodynamics of Wings at Supersonic Speeds, 1946-1948 W.G. Vincenti. Part II: International Comparisons. Wooden Airplanes in World War II: National Comparisons and Symbolic Culture E. Schatzberg. American Aviation Technology: An International Heritage R.E. Bilstein. The Wind Tunnel and the Emergence of Aeronautical Research in Britain T. Hashimoto. The Evolution of Aerodynamics in the Twentieth Century: Engineering or Science? J.D. Anderson Jr. Part III: Flight, Economics and Culture. Airframe Manufacture and Engineering Exchange R.G. Ferguson. Blaming Wilbur and Orville: The Wright Patent Suits and the Growth of American Aeronautics T.D. Crouch. Who Designs Airports... Engineers, Architects, or City Planners? Aspects of American Airport Design Before World War II D.G. Douglas. Pools of Invention: The Role of Patents in the Development of American Aircraft, 1917-1997 A. Roland. Epilogue D. Bloor. Contributors.

Large weak isospin and the W mass

A variation of the usual SU(2)L × U(1)Y weak interaction theory is proposed in which strongly coupled scalars φ transform as NNs of SU(2)L and as an (N, N) of a global SU(N)L × SU(N)R. The gauge group is embedded in the global group so that when SU(N)L × SU(N)R breaks down to SU(N)V it breaks SU(2)L × U(1)EM. This scheme preserves the tree-level relation MZMW = 1/cosθW. Radiative corrections (ΔMW) to MW are then discussed and it is found that (a) the screening theorem holds, i.e. ΔMW2 ∼ αMW2 ln ξ not αMH2ln ξ where ξ ≡ MH2MW2 and MH = scalar mass ∼ 1 TeV. A simple symmetry argument accounts for this. (b) Radiative corrections increase with the size N of the weak multiplet as N4. If we demand MWtheor < (MWCERN + 3 standard deviations) then N < 5 (MWCERN is as reported from the UA1 pp experiment and we take ξ ∼ α−1). The model may be interpreted as an effective theory for an underlying renormalizable technicolor theory.

A questionnaire on materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

Marietta Blau: Between Nazis and Nuclei

At first sight, nothing could be simpler than nuclear emulsions, those thin strips of film designed to trap the tracks of passing charged entities—nuclei, protons, electrons and the other objects that inaugurated the field of particle physics. But the methods seeming simplicity hides a complex history. Scientifically, emulsions posed myriad problems and required years of effort by a dedicated corps of emulsion physicists and chemists, who had to learn how to make the film sensitive to minimally ionizing particles, and how to store, process, dry and ultimately analyze the ramified skein of tracks. Developed in the 1930s by Marietta Blau, an Austrian physicist who fled her homeland following the Anschluss in March 1938, the nuclear emulsion method was taken over by Cecil Powell, who transformed it during the 1940s into a cottage industry, with female “scanners” and an international team of physicists and chemists. From Powells laboratory in Bristol, England, the method migrated to the burgeoning, industri...

The Journalist, the Scientist, and Objectivity

This essay relates the history of objectivity in journalism to the historical development of objectivity in the sciences as worked out by Daston and Galison (Objectivity, Zone Books, New York, 2007/2010). While the nineteenth century history of journalism in America increasingly focused increasingly on facts, in the twentieth century, especially after World War I, it became clear that while objectivity was both a moral imperative and an epistemic ideal, objectivity would not always lead to truth. More recently, as this work argues, objectivity in science and in journalism have developed in parallel, at a time when both face major challenges in the ethics and epistemology of the digital image and its manipulation.

Re-Reading the Past from the end of Physics: Maxwell’s Equations in Retrospect

For the working physicist, the past and future of physics are thoroughly intertwined. With each set of goals the discipline has posed for itself comes a new gloss on prior accomplishments. As a result there is no unique or simple fashion in which the history of physics (as viewed by physicists) is related to their research priorities. In this brief essay I would like to illustrate some examples of the many ways in which the past is re-read, and then to speculate on some of the functions this constant reinterpretation plays.

Epistemic Virtues and Leibnizian Dreams: On the Shifting Boundaries between Science, Humanities and Faith

The following discussion considers three aspects of the Sciences-versus-Humanities divide: (1) the historical evolution of disciplines in the modern period through the beginning of the twenty-first century; (2) the epistemology of the sciences versus that of the Humanities as defined and practiced in that same period; and (3) the ways in which the two cultures interact with each other and with religion and faith today. It finds that while it may feel ancient and natural, the historical divide between what are called the Humanities and the Sciences is really quite new and contingent; that no single “scientific” epistemology exists but rather many “epistemic virtues” replace each other over time, often overlapping between the Sciences and Humanities, and that, finally, as the Humanities/Sciences divide increasingly weakens or becomes complicated, as is happening today, knowledge and faith are juxtaposed to a greater degree.

Letters from a hero

What made Richard Feynman so much more than a Nobel prizewinning physicist?