Stefano Bordoni

New contents for new media: Pavia project physics

This hypermedial project deals with a historical and conceptual approach to physics. The “core” of the project is a certain number of “case studies”, namely problems or phenomena recounted together with their different interpretations. All case studies present two levels of investigation: the first level is devoted to high school students, the second level is devoted to university students and high school teachers. Our project is directed at a new and better understanding and appreciation of scientific culture.Our methodology is a historical methodology: teaching physics and the history of physics are fellow-subjects. We are not interested in adding the history of physics to teaching physics, as an optional subject: the history of physics is “inside” physics.Since textbooks usually give one and only one explanation of each physical phenomenon – the “true” explanation – we would like, on the contrary, to present the phenomena together with different interpretations that factually occurred in the history of physics. We offer four different approaches to the subject of the case study: “A. Phenomena”, “B. Textbooks”, “C. History” and “D. Maps”.The basic unit of the hypermedia is the presentation , namely a coherent set of information endowed with a definite and complete meaning. From the media point of view, a presentation consists of pictures and/or animations, key-words and/or key-sentences and a speaker explanation. Each approach consists of a certain number of “presentations”.

When Historiography Met Epistemology

In When Historiography Met Epistemology, Stefano Bordoni shows the emergence of sophisticated histories and philosophies of science in France after mid-nineteenth century. Since the 1860s, historical-critical reconstructions of scientific practice began to compete with naive scientism.

On the borderline between Science and Philosophy: A debate on determinism in France around 1880

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new interest in explosive chemical reactions, sudden release of energy in living beings, physical instabilities, and bifurcations in the solutions of differential equations drew the attention of some scholars. New concepts like triggering actions and guiding principles also emerged. Mathematicians, physicists, physiologists, and philosophers were attracted by this kind of phenomena since they raised a question about the actual existence of a strict determinism in science. In 1878 the mathematical physicist Joseph Boussinesq pointed out a structural analogy among physical instabilities, some essential features of living beings, and singular solutions of differential equations. These developments revived long-lasting philosophical debates on the problematic link between deterministic physical laws and free will. We find in Boussinesq an original and almost isolated attempt to merge mathematical, physical, biological, and philosophical issues into a complex intellectual framework. In the last decades, some philosophers of science rediscovered the connection between physical instabilities and determinism, both in the context of chaos theory, and in the debates on the Norton dome. I put forward a consistent historical reconstruction of the main issues and characters involved.