HISTORY OF SCIENCE: The U.S. in the Rebuilding of European Science

Science ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 317 (5842) ◽  
pp. 1173-1174
Author(s):  
J.-P. Gaudilliere
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
European Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

‘At the Expense of Human Values’

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Joshua Grimm
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Mad Scientist ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

Ex Machina plays against type extremely well, and it is, in part, particularly effective because of the genre tropes are relatively consistent. There’s really only one term to cinematically describe a reclusive, temperamental genius working on a project he hopes will change humanity: the mad scientist. In the history of science fiction film, the mad scientist has traditionally either been directly responsible for a crisis (potential or realized) by creating the problem, or indirectly responsible by trying to control something so powerful that no one could possibly control it. The latter was used largely in the 1950s and 1970s by reflecting the two perceived threats during those eras: atomic/nuclear power and pollution, respectively. But in these films, the extent of the power being studied must be balanced against what that scientist is trying to accomplish. In Ex Machina, Nathan’s portrayal is a fascinating one, embodying the Silicon Valley, “work hard, play hard” bro-culture we see in the U.S. tech industry, and he’s able to completely detach his own actions/desires from his work, a cognitive dissonance that allows him to create a line of slaves at the same time he tries to reproduce artificial intelligence. This chapter will place Nathan within the larger context of science fiction’s history of mad scientists, analyzing similarities and determining what those differences mean.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
María del Pilar Blanco ◽  
Joanna Page
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
North America ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
European Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Life

The transnational transfers of ideas, technologies, materials, and people that have shaped the history of science in Latin America are marked, as in any region, by asymmetries of power. These are often replicated or even magnified in the narratives we have forged about that history. The journeys to Latin America of some of Europe’s most famous naturalists (Humboldt and Darwin, for example) are often depicted as the heroic overcoming by European science of savage local terrains and ways of life. Those epic explorers are recast, in other narratives, as the forerunners of (neo)colonial exploitation in the history of the ransacking of Latin America’s mineral riches to pay for European imperial ventures, repeated in the often-illegal plundering of the region’s dinosaur fossils to swell museum collections in Europe and North America. In such accounts, Latin America becomes the arena for European adventures, the testing ground for new scientific theories, or the passive victim of colonial profiteering, but rarely a place of innovation. It is certainly the case that over the centuries the flow of natural resources, data, and expertise from Latin America to more developed regions has generally been to the benefit of those regions and has not reduced an imbalance of power that dates back to the colonial period.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Jason W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Science Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Naval Officers ◽  
The U.S

The introduction established the main argument of the book, which is that the U.S. Navy’s charts and its chart-making throughout the nineteenth century were integral to the expansion of American oceanic empire even as such effort exposed the limits of science practice, seafaring, and war-making in a dynamic, dangerous marine environment. The Navy and the broader American maritime world’s encounter with the ocean, mediated through science, was integral to the way mariners, navigators, and naval officers thought of an emerging maritime empire first in commercial terms and, by the late nineteenth century, in new geo-strategic terms. The introduction also places the larger work within the historiographies of military, maritime, and naval history as well as environmental history and the history of science and cartography, seeking to establish historiographical and methodological bridges among these sub-fields.

History of Science During the Cold War Under the Microscope

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Dalia Báthory ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
East European ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
European Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West ◽  
Ideological Context

The general post-communist perspective of historiography on the Cold War era is that the world was divided into two blocs, so different and isolated from one another that there was no interaction between them whatsoever. As revisionist literature is expanding, the uncovered data indicates a far more complex reality, with a dynamic East-West exchange of goods, money, information, human resources, and technology, be it formal or informal, official or underground, institutional or personal. The current volume History of Communism in Europe: Breaking the Wall: National and Transnational Perspectives on East-European Science tries to confer more detail to this perspec­tive, by bringing together research papers that focus on the history of science during the Cold War. The articles cover a wide range of subjects, from biology to philosophy and from espionage to medical practices, all sharing an ideological context that continuously impacted and molded the professional relations among scholars from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The Peculiarities of the Americans or Are There National Styles in the Sciences?

1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Reingold
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Styles ◽  
The U.S ◽  
National Style

The ArgumentOver the years national styles have been invoked or denigrated in the writing of the history of science. This paper is an attempt to give the concept of national style a degree of precision and clarity enabling scholars to understand when and how it may be invoked and when and how its use would be dubious or even forbidden. The example of the United States of America is used because the history of the sciences in the United States was often written loosely in terms supposedly conducive to national style analyses. We first discuss the problem of commonalities, factors widely present within all countries in the Western tradition, which, by definition, cannot be exclusive national attributes. Here the problem is to somehow determine whether the supposed national style attribute is a case of a significantly different degree of intensity than some presumed norm in the Western tradition.The principal thesis advanced is that pre-existing historiographic assumptions largely determine whether or not a scholar finds or does not find a national style. This is discussed in terms of some examples for the U.S. case. More particularly, a number of examples are discussed from the three principal genres or schools in current writing in the history of science: the knowledge-centered; the doing-science; and the context-oriented. Based on the analysis of the examples, an attempt is made to sketch an approach to a more rigorous use of the concept of national style.

scholarly journals Éloge to Robert Fox

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 21-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efthymios Nicolaidis ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
European Society ◽  
International Conference ◽  
European Science ◽  
History Of

The 20th Alexandre Koyré Medal awarded since 1968 to prominent historians of science was awarded to Robert Fox, leading historian of European science of the period from the 18th to the beginnings of the 20th century. The Medal was presented to Robert Fox during the 7th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, Prague, 23 September 2016, and the Éloge describes his career and work.

History of science and technology in education and training in europe

2001 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-146
Author(s):  
Claude Debru
Keyword(s):  
European Commission ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Education And Training ◽  
Technology In Education ◽  
International Union ◽  
European Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
And Training

On 25–26 June 1998, 180 participants from 26 European countries met in Strasbourg for a conference on ‘The History of Science and Technology in Education and Training in Europe’. The conference was organized by the University Louis Pasteur on behalf of the ALLEA (All European Academies) network, within the framework of the European Science and Technology Forum (DG XII, European Commission), and in collaboration with the Division of History of Science of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science. The conference aimed to foster use of the growing wealth of knowledge in the field of history of science and technology by potential users in universities, schools and secondary education.

scholarly journals Kleist vs. Musschenbroek – trudna droga do prawdy

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 275-340
Author(s):  
Jerzy Sawicki
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Experimental Physics ◽  
New Device ◽  
European Science ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

On October 11, 1745, a German scientist Ewald Georg (Jürgen) Kleist in Cammin in Pommern (today Kamień Pomorski) discovered both the phenomenon of storing electricity in a glass vessel with water, and a new device – an electric capacitor. Kleist quickly and correctly announced his discovery to the scientific community. The greatest help in confirming the discovery and its publication was received by Kleist from Daniel Gralath who was active in the first Polish Society for Experimental Physics Societas Physicae Experimentalis in Gdańsk. At the beginning of 1746, in the Dutch Leiden, in the workshop of the famous professor Pieter Musschenbroek, an experiment was conducted similar to the one in Cammin. The information about the Leiden experiment quickly reached Paris, the centre of European science of that time, and which lead to a proclamation of a new, very important physical discovery. The experiment gained wide publicity in Europe thanks to numerous public repetitions. The French promoter of the Leiden experiment was physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet. The discoverer’s fame was unjustly attributed to Musschenbroek and Leiden, although Daniel Gralath reported Nollet’s letter about Kleist’s priority. From the moment of discovery to modern times, scientific publications in the field of physics and history of science often misrepresent the person of the discoverer, the place of discovery and its name. The aim of the article is to present a broad overview of the reports, descriptions and opinions contained in scientific publications about the discovery. In the review presented in the article, 117 books are divided by country of issue, language and time of publication. The most frequent errors were classified and assigned to the analyzed publications. The result turned out to be surprising, as only 6 items were free of errors, and in the remaining, 254 errors were found. Unfortunately, in both former and contemporary publications, Kleist is sometimes ignored, and even if noticed, his discovery is usually depreciated in various ways. It may come as a surprise that the first two works on the history of electrical research written in the eighteenth century by Daniel Gralath and Joseph Priestley correctly and profoundly convey the course of events and the priority of Kleist’s discovery. It turns out that the French untrue version of the history of this finding is still alive, especially in European countries, so that pupils, students and physics enthusiasts receive a false message about this important discovery. In the circle of reliable researchers in the history of science, the priority of Kleist’s discovery is widely recognized, but even they have a problem with naming the electric capacitor discovered by the Cammin physicist differently than the Leiden jar. One of the reasons for the poor knowledge of Kleist and his experiment is scant scientific literature on the subject and the ignorance of the source texts written by the Cammin explorer. This gap is bridged by a scientific monograph written by the author of the present article. The text of this paper complements the information presented in the author’s book entitled Ewald Georg Kleist – Wielki odkrywca z małego miasta (A great discoverer from a small town): Kamień Pomorski 1745 (Warszawa: Instytut Historii Nauki PAN, Stowarzyszenie Elektryków Polskich, Zachodniopomorski Uniwersytet Technologiczny w Szczecinie, 2018).

scholarly journals Greek Astronomers and Their Neighbours

1987 ◽  
Vol 91 ◽  
pp. 63-73
Author(s):  
Olaf Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
European History ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Ideal Model ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
European Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Characteristic Features

In Europe it has been customary to regard the ancient Greeks as our intellectual ancestors. Greek science was seen as the fountainhead from which modern European science ultimately derived both its existence and its characteristic features. This was not a completely empty idea. Each time a modern astronomer mentions a planet, the perigee and apogee of its orbit, its periods and their various anomalies, he is using so many Greek words. Moreover, until about a hundred years ago the extant works of the Greeks were the earliest scientific texts known to European scholars so that Greek science acquired a unique position in the European mind,and that ancient Greek culture in general became ‘classical’ and thus an ideal model or pattern for civilization as such. In consequence, the traditional European History of Science became an account of how science arose among the Greeks, how it penetrated into other cultural areas, and how it was sometimes eclipsed and again reborn in one of the so-called ‘renaissances’ of which European historians are so fond to speak.

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