Establishing and Consolidating a Research Field

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-150
Author(s):  
Eugenio Bertozzi
Keyword(s):  
Particle Physics ◽  
History Of Physics ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Cloud Chamber ◽  
Particle Accelerator ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Tight Connection ◽  
The 1960S

This paper retraces the biography of a milestone instrument in the history of physics—the cloud chamber—introduced by Charles Thomson Rees Wilson in 1911 and vastly adopted in successive studies on particle physics. It offers a comprehensive reading where the development of the instrument is kept in tight connection with the knowledge of microphysics from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s: it shows how the inception of the Wilson instrument of 1911, even in its smallest constructive details, can be seen as strongly influenced by the physics discoveries through the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The confirmation of preliminary observations obtained with early versions of the cloud chamber drove, as in the case of the positron, further evolutions of the instrument into a “golden age” of the apparatus within particle physics research. The “sunset” will see the attempt to overcome the limitations of a fully developed apparatus by flexibly intervening in the geometry of the experiment, moving it up to the mountains or at different distances from the particle accelerator by stressing at maximum, and then exhausting, the generation of new knowledge from it. In doing so, the paper brings into light original aspects not yet explored in historical studies on the cloud chamber, such as Wilson’s contribution to the field after 1911.

Poverty Knowledge and the History of Poverty Research

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Democracies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Official Declaration

This article examines the history of poverty research and the evolution of the practice of gathering knowledge about the poor. It distinguishes between poverty research and poverty knowledge, suggesting that the convergence of the two was a historically specific development that first began to gain wide currency in the late nineteenth century in response to the vast and increasingly visible disparities of industrial capitalism in Western Europe and the United States. It also situates poverty research within the politics and social organization of knowledge and considers the influence of broader contextual factors, such as the creation, expansion, and subsequent restructuring of welfare states in Western industrial democracies; the geopolitical imperatives of empire, decolonization, and the Cold War; and the official declaration of the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Finally, it explores how poverty knowledge was reshaped by the economic, political, and ideological transformations associated with the rise of neoliberalism.

Women in science: Breaking out of the circle

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-182 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Women In Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Secondary Sexual Characteristics ◽  
Sexual Characteristics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Mind

Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Women in science, antiquity through the nineteenth century . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986. Pp. xi 4- 254, £24.75. ISBN 0-262-15031-X Margaret Alic, Hypatia's heritage: a history of women in science from antiquity to the late nineteenth century . London: The Women’s Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 230, £4.95. ISBN 0-7043-3954-4 Londa Schiebinger, The mind has no sex? Women in the origins of modem science . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989. Pp. xi + 355, £23.50. ISBN 0-674-57623-3 Patricia Phillips, The scientific lady: a social history of woman's scientific interests 1520-1918 . London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. Pp. xiii + 279, £25.00. ISBN 0-297-82043-5 Uneasy careers and intimate lives: women in science, 1789-1979 . Edited by Pnina G. Abir-Am & Dorinda Outram. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 365, £11.00. ISBN 0-8135-1255-7 Women of science: righting the record . Edited by G. Kass-Simon & Patricia Fames. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 398, $39.95. ISBN 0-253-33264-8 Not long ago women were largely absent from the histories of science, even from social histories of science. With the 1960s came the questions: where were the women? how to do them justice? were there so few? why so few? Several books have now addressed these difficult questions. Charles Darwin gave an answer to the last question, by including ‘the intellectual powers of the sexes’ with the secondary sexual characteristics discussed in The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex .

Archaeocyaths—a history of phylogenetic interpretation

2001 ◽  
Vol 75 (6) ◽  
pp. 1065-1078 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Schools ◽  
New School ◽  
Calcareous Sponges ◽  
Extant Species ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Submarine Cave ◽  
The 1960S

Archaeocyaths are calcareous, conical, Cambrian fossils with a long history of phylogenetic uncertainty and changing interpretations. The history of phylogenetic interpretation of archaeocyaths reveals five distinct schools of thought: the coelenterate school, the sponge school, the algae school, the Phylum Archaeocyatha school, and the Kingdom Archaeata school. Late nineteenth century and early twentieth century paleontologists worked within a paradigm of inexorably increasing diversity through time, and they did not believe in the concept of extinct phyla. Consequently, prior to about 1950, archaeocyaths were bounced around from coelenterates to sponges, to algae. By the 1930s, after considerable study, all workers agreed that archaeocyaths were sponges of one type or another. In the mid-twentieth century a significant paradigm shift occurred in paleontology, allowing the viability of the concept of a phylum with no extant species. Correspondingly, two new schools of thought emerged regarding archaeocyathan taxonomy. The Phylum Archaeocyatha school placed them in their own phylum, which was inferred to be closely related to Phylum Porifera within Subkingdom Parazoa. A second new school removed archaeocyaths and some other Paleozoic problematica from the animal kingdom and placed them in Kingdom Archaeata (later Kingdom Inferibionta). The Phylum Archaeocyatha school was the mainstream interpretation from the 1950s through the 1980s. However, the widespread use of SCUBA beginning in the 1960s ultimately led to the rejection of the interpretation that archaeocyaths belong in a separate phylum. SCUBA allowed biologists to study deep fore-reef and submarine cave environments, leading to the discovery of living calcareous sponges, including one aspiculate species that is morphologically similar to archaeocyaths. These discoveries in the 1960s and 1970s stimulated a re-examination of sponge phylogeny generally, and comparisons between archaeocyaths and sponges in particular. The result was the abandonment of the Phylum Archaeocyatha school in the 1990s. Present consensus is that archaeocyaths represent both a clade and a grade—Class Archaeocyatha and the archaeocyathan morphological grade—within Phylum Porifera.

scholarly journals Cloud geographies

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Amoore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cloud Computing ◽  
Particle Physics ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Cloud Chamber ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Algorithmic Techniques ◽  
Border Controls ◽  
Data Centres

The architecture of cloud computing is becoming ever more closely intertwined with geopolitics – from the sharing of intelligence data, to border controls, immigration decisions, and drone strikes. Developing an analogy with the cloud chamber of early twentieth century particle physics, this paper explores the geography of the cloud in cloud computing. It addresses the geographical character of cloud computing across two distinct paradigms. The first, ‘ Cloud I’ or a geography of cloud forms, is concerned with the identification and spatial location of data centres where the cloud is thought to materialize. Here the cloud is understood within a particular history of observation, one where the apparently abstract and obscure world can be brought into vision and rendered intelligible. In the second variant, ‘ Cloud II’ or the geography of a cloud analytic, the cloud is a bundle of experimental algorithmic techniques acting upon the threshold of perception itself. Like the cloud chamber of the twentieth century, contemporary cloud computing is concerned with rendering perceptible and actionable that which would otherwise be beyond the threshold of human observation. The paper proposes three elements of correlative cloud reasoning, suggesting their significance for our geopolitical present: condensing traces; discovering patterns; and archiving the future.

Queering Brighton

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Local History ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The 1960S

Every place has its local history of queerness, as shown in this chronicle of queerness in Brighton, England. The author sketches an account of Brighton’s non-normative sexual practices and sexually dissident residents and visitors, especially from the late nineteenth century on. The discussion identifies many gay clubs and other sites of queer community. Two examples illustrate aspects of mid-twentieth-century queer culture: the 1960s radio comedy “Round the Horne,” rich in camp humor and using the queer underground language Polari; and a recent poem by Brighton poet John McCullough that shows nostalgic affection for Polari. The author includes information about her own initiation into the gay world of Brighton. The queer culture of Brighton has produced extensive historical and present-day local self-documentation on websites, which provides much of the information for this discussion.

Shaping Vulnerable Bodies at the Thin Boundary between Environment and Organism: Skin, DNA Repair, and a Genealogy of DNA Care Strategies

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-464
Author(s):  
Alexander von Schwerin
Keyword(s):  
Dna Repair ◽  
Molecular Level ◽  
Uv Light ◽  
Research Field ◽  
The Body ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Radiation Research

ArgumentThis paper brings together the history of risk and the history of DNA repair, a biological phenomenon that emerged as a research field in between molecular biology, genetics, and radiation research in the 1960s. The case of xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), an inherited hypersensitivity to UV light and, hence, a disposition to skin cancer will be the starting point to argue that, in the 1970s and 1980s, DNA repair became entangled in the creation of new models of the human body at risk – what is here conceptually referred to as the vulnerability aspect of body history – and new attempts at cancer prevention and enhancement of the body associated with the new flourishing research areas of antimutagenesis and anticarcinogenesis. The aim will be to demonstrate that DNA repair created special attempts at disease prevention: molecular enhancement, seeking to identify means to increase the self-repair abilities of the body at the molecular level. Prevention in this sense meant enhancing the body's ability to cope with the environmental hazards of an already toxic world. This strategy has recently been adopted by the beauty industry, which introduced DNA care as a new target for skin care research and anti-aging formulas.

scholarly journals Eco-Warriors: The Environmental Movement and the Growth of Ecological Wisdom, 1960s–1970s

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy L. Caradonna
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
Sustainable Living ◽  
The Public ◽  
General Terms ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Sustainability Movement ◽  
The 1960S

One of the marks that distinguishes sustainability from classic environmentalism is the former’s cheery optimism. Indeed, reading side by side the 2005 guidebook Green Living—a fairly typical how-to for sustainable living—with, say, Paul Ehrlich’s doleful Population Bomb (1968) offers a case study in contrast. Green Living is constructive and buoyant whereas Population Bomb is frenzied and cynical. Yet it’s striking how much Green Living takes its inspiration not only from Ehrlich but from other titans of mid-century environmentalism—albeit with a noticeable shift in tone. Paul and Anne Ehrlich are cited approvingly in the opening pages of the book. The epigraph comes from the still-very-active David Suzuki. There are also references to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, which, of course, is named after the esteemed Aldo Leopold. But gone is the gloomy tone, replaced instead by a heartening “You can do it!” attitude. This brief observation illustrates how much the modern sustainability movement owes to the critics, intellectuals, and protestors of the 1960s and 1970s who raised awareness about environmental problems, advocated for social justice, and defended the rights of the oppressed. While the three Es of sustainability were rarely paired in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the basic concepts that shaped sustainability were clearly articulated before the 1980s. This chapter should not be taken as a comprehensive look at the environmental movement, about which there is reams more to say. Instead, it will examine in general terms some of the disparate sources that contributed to the holism of sustainability. Particular emphasis will be laid on the key ideas, associations, and scholars who developed the environmental movement and the success that environmentalists had in getting politicians, economists, and the public at large to think in ecological terms—a singular achievement that continues to inform the world of sustainability. It is important to note that the reason that this book jumps from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s is not because the era of the two world wars has nothing to do with the history of sustainability.

scholarly journals No reserved communication lanes for high energy

2006 ◽  
Vol 05 (02) ◽  
pp. E
Author(s):  
Nico Pitrelli
Keyword(s):  
Particle Physics ◽  
Linear Collider ◽  
International Linear Collider ◽  
The United States ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Particle Accelerator ◽  
High Tech ◽  
Accelerator Facility ◽  
Superconducting Super Collider ◽  
History Of

The American particle physics community is in jeopardy and may end up drowning in a boundless sea trying to grasp at non-existing funds, dragging US physics and science as a whole to the bottom. This is a price the most powerful and high-tech country of the world cannot afford, as warned by the editors of a report published in late April by the National Academy of Sciences1. Behind so much alarm is the International Linear Collider (ILC) – a large particle accelerator facility which, according to the report, should be built on American territory, if research on the elementary constituents of nature is to survive in the United States. The ILC will probably cost a total of five hundred million dollars in the first five years, whereas billions will have to be invested in the subsequent seven years. Hardly impressive, however, if compared with the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the biggest and costliest machine ever conceived in the history of science. Devised to describe the first instants of the universe, as many will recall, the SSC project was severely hampered by political and bureaucratic plots in 1993, when the Clinton administration decided to halt work on the accelerator, after ten years and approximately two billion dollars already spent.

scholarly journals Gracanica and the cult of the Saintly Prince Lazar

2007 ◽  
pp. 465-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Slobodan Curcic
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Original Function ◽  
General Relevance ◽  
Historical Accuracy ◽  
South Wall ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Being Moved ◽  
The Church

The article explores a virtually unknown episode in the history of Gracanica Monastery, a late nineteenth-century restoration of the monastery church. The results of this undertaking were still visible during the conservation of the church conducted in the 1960s and early 1970s. At that time the nineteenth-century interventions were only partially recorded before some of them were removed and permanently lost. The nineteenth- century refurbishing of the frescoes in the main dome was signed by one Mihail Iourokosk Debrel and is dated 1898. More significant, now lost and hitherto unpublished, was the refurbishing probably by the same Mihail, of an arcosolium in the south wall of the church. This arcosolium, whose original function is unknown, was painted and inscribed with a lengthy inscription indicating that the remains of Prince Lazar (who died in the Battle of Kosovo, on June 15, 1389) was temporarily deposited in this tomb before being moved to the monastery of Vrdnik - Ravanica on Fruska Gora. While the content of the inscription is a total fabrication, its implications are nonetheless interesting in several ways. The mastermind behind the project was probably the Metropolitan of Ra{ka - Prizren, Dionisije, who died on Dec. 5, 1900. In accordance with his own wishes, he was buried in the very arcosolium identified as the ?temporary burial place? of Prince Lazar. The rising importance of the cult of the Saintly Prince Lazar around 1900 provides the background for this historical fabrication whose construction was actually made up of several disparate elements, each marked by a degree of historical accuracy in its own right thus collectively contributing to its general relevance.

Ordered to Disarm, Encouraged to Rearm: Japan’s Struggles with the Postwar

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-160
Author(s):  
Garren Mulloy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Institution ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

In the fall of 1945, the Japanese military institution’s end was sudden and final, one of the central ordering institutions of East Asia since the late-nineteenth century disappeared. Or did it? As Garren Mulloy shows, the Japanese imperial military institutions – its ethos, cultures, and personnel – were recast and reinvented in the Cold War as the United States sought to transform Japan into a key ally. In a detailed historical examination of the imperial roots of the SDF, Mulloy examines how the military institution of the fallen empire was sustained and then reconfigured to serve the new era of democracy and an international order dominated by the United States. In the process he recasts Japanese post-1945 security in a new postimperial key, focusing on the first two decades of security transformation, and showing how once imperial officers latched onto the Cold War help to reinvent the Japanese military as a territorially bound Self Defense Force. In the process he revises the familiar story of demilitarization and pacifism into a more complicated and ambivalent history of transwar martial cultures and practises which continued to flourish deep into the 1960s.

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