Much of the history of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century has been written with a sharp focus on a few key figures and a handful of notable events. Einstein’s Generation offers a distinctive new approach to the origins of modern physics by exploring both the material culture that stimulated relativity and the reaction of Einstein’s colleagues to his pioneering work. Richard Staley weaves together the diverse strands of experimental and theoretical physics, commercial instrument making, and the sociology (...) of physics around 1900 to present a complete view of the collective efforts of a group whose work helped set the stage for Einstein’s revolutionary theories and the transition from classical to modern physics that followed. Collecting papers, talks, catalogues, conferences, and correspondence, Staley juxtaposes scientists’ views of relativity at the time to modern understandings of its history. Ultimately, Einstein’s Generation tells the story of a group of individuals whose work engendered some of the most significant advances of the twentieth century—and challenges our celebration of Einstein’s era above all others. (shrink)

While the concept of “classical physics” has long framed our understanding of the environment from which modern physics emerged, it has consistently been read back into a period in which the physicists concerned initially considered their work in quite other terms. This essay explores the shifting currency of the rich cultural image of the classical/modern divide by tracing empirically different uses of “classical” within the physics community from the 1890s to 1911. A study of fin‐de‐siècle addresses shows that the earliest (...) general uses of the concept proved controversial. Our present understanding of the term was in large part shaped by its incorporation within the emerging theories of relativity and quantum theory—where the content of “classical” physics was defined by proponents of the new. Studying the diverse ways in which Boltzmann, Larmor, Poincaré, Einstein, Minkowski, and Planck invoked the term “classical” will help clarify the critical relations between physicists’ research programs and their use of worldview arguments in fashioning modern physics. (shrink)

This paper highlights the significance of sensory studies and psychophysical investigations of the relations between psychic and physical phenomena for our understanding of the development of the physics discipline, by examining aspects of research on sense perception, physiology, esthetics, and psychology in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and Ernst Mach between 1860 and 1871. It complements previous approaches oriented around research on vision, Fechner’s psychophysics, or the founding of experimental psychology, by charting Mach’s engagement (...) with psychophysical experiments in particular. Examining Mach’s study of the senses and esthetics, his changing attitudes toward the mechanical worldview and atomism, and his articulation of comparative understandings of sensual, geometrical, and physical spaces helps set Mach’s emerging epistemological views in the context of his teaching and research. Mach complemented an analytic strategy focused on parallel psychic and physical dimensions of sensation, with a synthetic comparative approach – building analogies between the retina, the individual, and social life, and moving between abstract and sensual spaces. An examination of the broadly based critique that Mach articulated in his 1871 lecture on the conservation of work shows how his historical approach helped Mach cast what he now saw as a narrowly limiting emphasis on mechanics as a phase yet to be overcome. (shrink)

This paper explores the kind of knowledge that partisans profess in order to contribute to our studies of what has usually been thought of as the “denial of science.” Building on the research of Robert Proctor, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, I show that the tobacco interests and climate science skeptics usually described as “doubt mongers” also purveyed forms of certainty and rested their arguments on three different registers of truth: that of narrowly defined “facts” that could sustain a controversy, (...) ideological commitments to free enterprise, and the truths of self‐conscious partisans engaged in battle. Thus, in many respects they have used elements of general knowledge, as well as social, economic and political commitments, to argue against specific scientific findings. Further, at least in the case of climate skeptics, this denial has been in the service of an image of the nature of science and its proper relation to politics. Analyzing significant dichotomies in debates that cross the terrains of science and politics, and knowledge and science, I will argue that a clear articulation of the relations amongst them will be critical to our work to understand the character of climate science denial, but also of the climate sciences themselves. (shrink)

Revisiting the history of relativity Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9466-4 Authors Lewis Pyenson, Department of History, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5242, USA Sean F. Johnston, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Glasgow, Rutherford-McCowan Building, Dumfries, Glasgow, Scotland G2 0RB, UK Alberto A. Martínez, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station B7000, Austin, TX 78712-0220, USA Richard Staley, Department of the History of Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 226 Bradley Memorial Building, 1225 Linden Drive, Madison, WI (...) 53706-1528, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796 Journal Volume Volume 20 Journal Issue Volume 20, Number 1. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines some of the ways that machines, mechanisms, and the new mechanics were treated in post-World War I discourse. Spengler's 1919Decline of the Westand Hessen's 1931 study of Newton have usually been tied closely to Weimar culture in Germany, and Soviet politics. Linking them also to the writings of Rathenau, Simmel, Chase, Mumford, Hayek, and others, as well as to Dada and film studies of the city will indicate central features of a wide-ranging, international discourse on the machine (...) and mechanization. I argue that machines were so thoroughly integrated into social and economic experience that we can treat this as a distinctive new phase in the cultural history of mechanics, what some contemporaries called the “machine age”: a period in which rather than the hand mill or steam engine, the city stands as an appropriate realization (and sometimes symbol) of the significance but also ambiguities and tensions of mechanical life; and concepts of mechanization were extended to encompass the economy and market mechanisms. (shrink)

Among the many tensions and oppositions in play in the early twentieth century, one—the divide between classical and modern physics—has retrospectively overshadowed our understandings of the period. This paper investigates when and why physicists first started using the term ‘classical’ to describe their discipline. Beginning with Boltzmann and ending with the 1911 Solvay Congress, on a broad scale this story constitutes a powerful instance of the circulation of a rich cultural image. First deployed in understandings of literature, music, art and (...) schooling, the concept of the classical within the physics community came to be invested with a highly specific meaning, which in turn formed the basis for the widespread popularization of a new physical worldview after World War I. But on a finer scale, displaying the diverse, contrasting and controversial concepts of classical theory invoked by different physicists around 1900, and charting the emergence of our present understanding with the rise of relativity and quantum theory, reveals significant tussles over the meaning and value of different intellectual approaches. Here I use these tensions to investigate the interrelations between research programs and the broader, framing concepts with which physicists describe their experience of disciplinary change.Keywords: Energetics; Statistical mechanics; Relativity; Quantum theory; Classical physics; Ludwig Boltzmann. (shrink)

Ernst Mach’s most well known critiques of mechanics concern mass, inertia and space and time. Conceptually motivated towards avoiding unnecessary assumptions and basing physical concepts on measured relations, they were first published in the years around 1870 (for mass and inertia) and in his well known 1883 book Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung historisch-kritisch dargestellt, later translated as The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development. Philosophical discussion of Mach’s critiques has reflected these conceptual concerns, connecting (...) them to Mach’s account of science as the economical description of phenomena. Yet manuscript records of his teaching in the 1870s show that Mach was also animated by psychophysics and the relations between inner and outer worlds. His publications attest to these broader interests as well. In the 1870s, for example, Mach developed physiological studies of the sense of motion. Soon after completing his critical history of mechanics he took up the relations between physiology and psychology in his 1886 Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen. By investigating Mach’s research across subject matter that has usually been treated separately, and integrating his teaching with his research, this chapter aims to offer a study of Mach’s philosophy as it is revealed in practice. Mach presents a highly unusual example of someone whose primary aim was to reform his own discipline of physics through the concerns of other disciplines, something he alluded to in 1886 when stating that he expected the next great enlightenments of the foundations of physics to come at the hands of biology. (shrink)