Shells and Pebbles
Interesting finds on the shores of the history of science and the humanities
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Virunga: Concession Politics
‘Who gives a fuck about a fucking monkey?’ The man talking is filmed by a hidden camera, and he presents himself as ‘maybe a mercenary’. He is in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a subcontractor to the British-based multinational oil company Soco. The ‘monkey’ the man refers to is the mountain gorilla, of which…
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Paul de Kruifs Microbe Hunters: “the making of” deel 2
Paul de Kruif was een Amerikaanse bacterioloog, die in 1922 besloot de medische wetenschapsjournalistiek in te gaan. Hij hielp Sinclair Lewis met het schrijven van Arrowsmith, een heel leerzaam proces. Ondertussen begon hij met zijn eigen project: het schrijven van een boek over de grote onderzoekers van infectieziekten, zoals we in deel 1 van dit…
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Pan or Midas? The historical challenge of interpreting visual evidence
In a recent article in Isis, historian Richard Serjeantson traces Francis Bacon’s coinage and usage of the phrase “interpreting nature”. Bacon, Serjeantson argues, was the first to come up with the notion of an “interpretation of nature”. The author delves into sixteenth century sources to find where the word “interpret” comes from. Apparently not from…
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Weinberg, Whiggism, and the World in History of Science
This year, Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg published a history of Western science up to Newton: To explain the World. The Discovery of Modern Science. Weinberg was an important player in the science wars, voicing his strong intuitions that genuine science transcended history and culture against what he perceived as subversive social constructivism. Now…
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How to Write a History of Scientific Expertise?
What is an expert? Is it someone who possesses specialized knowledge? Or rather someone who is qualified to make rational decisions on sensitive social issues, a technocrat perhaps? Is it someone with great technical skills, who uses these skills professionally? For historians, the different markers used to typify a class of ‘experts’ pose considerable difficulties.…
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The V-Files
In the classic 1990s television show The X-Files, the Federal Bureau of Investigation relegated files of mysterious cases to a backwater office to be investigated by a lonely pair of agents, forgotten by the rest of the world (except when they got into trouble). The Immanuel Velikovsky Papers, stored in the Department of Rare Books…
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The History of Mathematics in Economics: What we can learn about the crisis
This contribution is the final post in the four-part blog series on the history of mathematics in economics. For the first post on Philip Mirowski’s account of Irving Fisher, which also introduces the series, click here. For the second post on Marcel Boumans’s study of Jan Tinbergen, click here. For the third post on E.…
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Het trieste einde van Antoine Court de Gébelin
Antoine Court de Gébelin, koninklijk censor en geleerde sensatie van het late Ancien Régime, stierf in verdachte omstandigheden in Parijs op 12 mei 1784. In zijn laatste jaar had hij zich laten behandelen door de Weense wonderdokter Mesmer, en was uiteindelijk zelfs bij hem ingetrokken. Een mesmeristische behandeling houdt in dat het ‘dierlijk magnetisme’ van…
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Marginal signs: central for understanding early medieval thinkers
If you were asked to pinpoint a scientist in a crowd, how would you recognize one? Or if you were asked to identify a scientific publication among other books, how would you be able to do so? And what would you do if you were asked to identify scientists, scientific books and scientific institutions from…
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Paul de Kruifs Microbe Hunters : ‘the making of’ deel 1
Eerder schreef Noortje Jacobs een boeiend essay over de doktersroman Arrowsmith. Sinclair Lewis was de auteur, maar hij kreeg onmisbare steun van de bacterioloog Paul de Kruif, die kort daarvoor besloten had om wetenschapsjournalist te worden. Samen reisden ze in 1923 via de Caraïben naar London en bij aankomst was het skelet voor Arrowsmith klaar.…
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The tree of hell
Last summer I visited the UNESCO archives in Paris. Located at the far end of the Champ de Mars, right after the Eifel Tower and the École Militaire, the organization’s headquarter is a well-known and impressive building. Place de Fontenoy, however, is a place for diplomats and government-representatives. Historians interested in the past activities of…
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The History of Mathematics in Economics III: Debreu, or How the Truth is in the Mathematics
This contribution is the third post in the four-part blog series on the history of mathematics in economics. For the first post on Philip Mirowski’s account of Irving Fisher, which also introduces the series, click here. For the second post on Marcel Boumans’s study of Jan Tinbergen, click here. The previous contributions in the series…
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WIE HAALT UIT EEN RECENT PROEFSCHRIFT OVER SIMON STEVIN EEN PRACHT-ARTIKEL?
Ik begin deze oproep met een waar gebeurd verhaal. Op 5 juni 2013 promoveerde aan de Vrije Universiteit ir. Kees Schilt op een proefschrift met als titel Simon Stevin en het Hermetisme. De jonge doctor was toen 80 jaar oud en al zo doodziek dat de promotie bij wijze van hoge uitzondering niet op de…
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The History of Mathematics in Economics II: Jan Tinbergen, Paul Ehrenfest and Formal Analogies
This contribution is the second post in a four-part blog series on the history of mathematics in economics. For the first post, which also introduces the series, click here. My previous contribution on Mirowski painted a grim picture of the role of mathematics in economics: Irving Fisher, one of the saints of neoclassical economics, had…
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Harm Kamerlingh Onnes in Museum Boerhaave. Machine-esthetiek van een milde modernist
Onlangs verwierf Museum Boerhaave een collectie tekeningen van de Leidse kunstenaar Harm Kamerlingh Onnes (1893-1985), gemaakt rond 1920 in het natuurkundig laboratorium van zijn Nobelprijswinnende oom Heike. Voor het museum zijn deze tekeningen een welkome aanvulling op de verzameling: aantrekkelijke artistieke impressies van Heike Kamerlingh Onnes’ onderzoeksapparatuur uit het begin van de twintigste eeuw, die…
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Not so Jurassic a World as we might prefer
A big-budget film about dinosaurs will always make the headlines, particularly if it is the follow-up of Steven Spielberg’s wildly successful Jurassic Park, from 1991. Dinosaurs, at least those visible to us on cinema and TV screens, were never the same after that. But not all is well in the land of blockbuster dinosaurs. Paleontologists,…
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The History of Mathematics in Economics I: Mirowski, Fisher and the Conservation of Energy
As the dust settles in the aftermath of the economic crisis, we are left to contemplate the nature of the shock that hit us in 2008. Much of the initial debate concerned the ethics of the financial sector: many of the world’s most powerful institutions had been at best naïve and at worst thoroughly perverted…
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Mediating machines: a proposal for a big picture of the history of science
Over the last few decades there have been several calls for a ‘big picture’ of the history of science. The gradual fragmentation – or even dismissal – of older grand narratives, accelerated by the cultural turn, is increasingly seen as problematic. There is a general need for a concise overview of the rise of modern…
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The Rolduc Conference: A Postmortem
The fifth edition of the History of Science PhD-conference in Rolduc showed that projects currently carried out under the banner ‘history of science’ are remarkably diverse in character. Chronologically, participants covered the period between the Carolingian Renaissance (eight century) to the present, while subjects of research ranged from the work of Christiaan Huygens to the…
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Blackwell’s rag-bag, or the (in)fertility of hybrid texts. Intertextual patterns and methodological shifts in an 1847 re-re-re-re-edition of the Prose Edda
Historians of scholarship should love hybrid works. By ‘hybrid works’ I mean works that don’t fit neatly into a specific genre or format, but that combine the characteristics of different genres and information from disparate kinds of source material, often even texts from different authors. Historians should love such hybrid works for three reasons. First,…
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Visualization of dimensionality after the institutional separation of mathematics and physics
Dimensionality is one of those concepts which has reached a higher level of complexity after the emergence of mathematics as an institutional discipline. Until the institutional split dimensionality was perceived as it had been understood from Euclid’s time. Visualizing dimensionality from that point of view was not particularly challenging. This changed with the introduction of…
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Activist history of science and its philosophical implications
Hans Schouwenburg does not seem to be on his own in his ‘emotional call to arms’ for history of science activism. Although all participants took a plane to get to the latest meeting of the History of Science Society in Chicago (6-9 November, 2014), socially engaged history of science was a remarkably present theme. Several…
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Darwin op SBS? De burger en de wetenschap anno 2014
De afgelopen maand is er veel te doen over de rol van wetenschap in onze samenleving, en een goed gelezen contribuant aan deze discussie is Rob Wijnberg. Na ons eerder al op de Correspondent verteld te hebben hoe het opdoeken van de filosofiefaculteit aan de Erasmusuniversiteit het moment markeert waarop we als samenleving collectief gestopt…
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Dissecting the ‘Chain of Creation’: Edward Tyson and Anatomical Natural History
In 1698, Edward Tyson, an English anatomist, attempted to treat a sick chimpanzee. A group of sailors who had captured it in what is now Angola brought the young male chimp to Tyson after it developed an abscess in its mouth. Tyson referred to the chimpanzee as his “Pygmie” wondering if it should be classified…