Silvan S. Schweber

Darwin and the Agronomists: An Influence of Political Economy on Scientific Thought

The Origin of Species was the culmination of Darwin’s theorizing of the previous twenty years. Its unique role in delineating the subsequent debates over all aspects of evolution accounts for an enduring interest in the construction of the Origin and in the intellectual and social factors that helped shape its final form.1 Of especial theoretical importance are the dynamical explanations that Darwin advanced in the Origin. These can be traced back at least to January 1839, when, in his fourth notebook on the transmutation of species, the E notebook, Darwin expressed a view of dynamics based on his notion that nature’s dynamical equilibrium maximizes the amount of life per unit area and that diversity is a way of accomplishing such maximization. One of the sources of this approach was the literature on scientific agriculture, which for the social scientists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries formed an important part of or adjunct to the subject of political economy.

That Which We Call Reality

In Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe Roger Penrose presents an overview of the new knowledge that has been created over the past half century to comprehend Big Bang cosmology. Big Bang cosmology attempts to “explain” how our universe came to be as inferred from its subsequent history, a history that is based on empirical evidence and the most “foundational” theories extant.1 This cosmology has led to conjectures about possible prior histories of the universe (or universes) and its (possible) ultimate state. And Big Bang cosmology and black holes have made general relativity and its singularities central concerns. The properties of black holes in turn indicated a deep connection between the quantum theory and general relativity’s interpretation of gravitation. What this connection might imply for a future theory that successfully synthesizes the quantum theory and general relativity is the broader aim of Penrose’s book. General relativity has been a predominant and crucial aspect of all of Penrose’s researches in physics, and his contribution to the elucidation and advances in the field have been enormous. And indeed, the lion’s claws are recognized by the exposition in the book.2 But Penrose’s approach to these problems is “conservative” in the sense that he critically analyzes the structure of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and general relativity and assumes that what we understand by present day space and time will be clarified once a consistent unification of the quantum theory and gravity will be achieved. Readers will learn much about the geometry of general relativity, black holes and their entropy, the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, and about the astonishing long range correlations possible among the microscopic entities making up a system now dubbed “quantum entanglement” but originally called “spooky action at a distance” by Einstein. However, readers will not be exposed to some of the recent developments that have introduced new ideas from information theory into “fundamental” physics, whose point of departure was John Archibald Wheeler’s famous 1990 conjecture: “It from bit.” By “It from bit” Wheeler claimed “that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very

Aloof from the horrors of Hiroshima and the bomb

The generation of theoretical physicists who were born in the first decade of the century are passing from the scene. They came of age with the advent of quantum mechanics and rode the crest of its successes. Theoretical physics became a professional path open not only to those of the stature of Dirac, Heisenberg and Pauli, but also to those at the next level of ability. Robert Serber was among these.

Essay review; early Victorian science: science in culture.

During the nineteen sixties a group of young historians of science undertook a fresh study of Victorian science. They immersed themselves in the primary sources the voluminous public and private records and in the economic, political, and social history of the period. The result was a lively, seminal, and important reassessment of Victorian science. Surely Cannons articles on early Victorian science, those of Rudwick, Hooykaas, and Coleman on geology, and those of R. Youngs on Darwinism I have secured a permanent place in the historical studies of that period. Cannons essays on the Cambridge intellectual network, on Herschel, on the interpretation of miracles in the 1830s, on the uniformitarian -catrastophist debate, on Darwin, are among the most stimulating and insightful articles dealing with Victorian science that have been written during the past two decades.2 Cannon has amalgamated the content of these articles into a book,Science in Culture,3 which not only addresses the subjects previously dealt with, but contains much new material on the sociology of science the formation of the British Association