McBombalds has spent a lot of time thinking about. Its team has produced an entire memo on the threat of igniting the Earth's atmosphere, for instance (though it concluded prior to testing that the likelihood was not high enough to warrant shuttering the project).
令人惊讶的是：曼哈顿计划团队曾认真研究过核试验可能点燃地球大气层的威胁，并撰写了完整备忘录。尽管最终认为风险不足以终止项目，但这一科学担忧的深度和广度令人震惊，显示了科学家对技术后果的前瞻性思考。
Oppenheimer (and other members of the McBombalds C-suite) are well integrated into bay-area culture, including ambiguous communist associations that they have downplayed since becoming primo defense contractors.
令人惊讶的是：奥本海默及其团队与湾区文化深度融合，甚至有着模糊的共产主义联系，但在成为主要国防承包商后却淡化这些历史。这一事实揭示了科学与政治意识形态的复杂交织，以及历史人物形象的多面性。
THE RELATION BETWEEN CLOCKWORK ANDORGANISM
historical evidence of the scientific shift from Newtonian clockwork physics into an underlying statical mechanical one
Interesting perspective as interpretation where Jack says at the moment the song says "Who made up words, who made up numbers? Who wrote the Bible, who wrote the Q'uran" it might not even be a call to reflect and think for yourself (although this is absolutely a recurring theme in the song) but maybe they are implying all the science traces back not to the West (Europe) but to the East (Egypt, Africa). This interpretation aligns with the album this song was produced in, which is about Africa.
Johns, Adrian. The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo183629196.html
Burke, Colin B. Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss. History and Foundations of Information Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262027021/information-and-intrigue/
annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:3ca2bc5e94d24cfc51c7b40b4ea7daf9
Kells, Lyman M., Willis F. Kern, and James R. Bland. K+E Slide Rules: A Self Instruction Manual. New York: Keuffel & Esser Co., 1955.
for: science and religion, flat earth misconception, DH, Deep Humanity - science and religion - historical relationship
summary
Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is notthe sum of all knowledge.
Note the use of the word "heresy" here, which is most often used in the framing of religion at a time when the establishment is moving from religion-based mechanisms into scientific based ones.
Chapter 39 of Zoonomia, “On Generation,” presents Erasmus’ ideas on competition, extinction, and how “different fibrils or molecules are detached from…the parent…to form” the child. The Temple of Nature goes even farther, declaring “all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality” in ancient oceans.
Interesting to contemplate the evolution of the idea of evolution through the Darwin family.
Charles would obviously have read his grandfather's book, but it also bears noting that he also had access to his grandfather's commonplace book (and likely his other papers).
Cosmos was unlike any previous book about nature. Humboldt took his readers on a journey from outer space to earth, and then from the surface of the planet into its inner core.
Could Alexander von Humboldt have been one of the early examples of a popular science writer?
Perhaps an early David Attenborough?
Hayton, Darin. “Washington Irving’s Columbus and the Flat Earth.” History of Science blog. Darin Hayton, December 2, 2014. https://dhayton.haverford.edu/blog/2014/12/02/washington-irvings-columbus-and-the-flat-earth/.
Within a decade, William Whewell had published his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) (online here). In a section on antipodes, he admitted that most people throughout history had known the earth was round.
Link to https://hypothes.is/a/hvDAtHT0Ee6_Z3em_Dz4bg (Columbus & Washington Irving)
These revolutions appear invisible in the history of science, Kuhn explained, because each successive generation learns science through the lens of the current paradigm.
As a result of Kuhn's scientific revolutions perspective, historians of science will need to uncover the frameworks and lenses by which prior generations saw the world to be able to see the world the same way. This will allow them to better piece together histories
How is this related to the ways that experts don't appreciate their own knowledge when trying to teach newcomers their subjects? What is the word/phrase for this effect?
the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa ("Incoherence of the Philosophers") is a landmark in the history of philosophy, as it advances the critique of Aristotelian science developed later in 14th-century Europe.[35]
1478-1518, Notebook of Leonardo da Vinci (''The Codex Arundel''). A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left), including diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes. The core of the notebook is a collection of materials that Leonardo describes as ''a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place according to the subjects of which they treat'' (f. 1r), a collection he began in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli in Florence, in 1508. To this notebook has subsequently been added a number of other loose papers containing writing and diagrams produced by Leonardo throughout his career. Decoration: Numerous diagrams.
One student’s rabbinical thesis, also completed that year,opened with the declaration: ‘We must not forget that History is a Science. Its facts cannever be doubted. One may indeed, differ as to the interpretation of facts but neverdispute the fact per se!’ (orig. emph., Holtzberg, 1916: Introduction).
Interesting to see this quote in light of the work of Ernst Bernheim and historical method.
At what point did history begin to be viewed as a science this way? (Did it predate Berheim?) Is it still?
the essay Of the Plurality of Worlds (1853), in which he argued against the probability of life on other planets
His best-known works are two voluminous books that attempt to systematize the development of the sciences, History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (1840, 1847, 1858–60). While the History traced how each branch of the sciences had evolved since antiquity, Whewell viewed the Philosophy as the "Moral" of the previous work as it sought to extract a universal theory of knowledge through history. In the latter, he attempted to follow Francis Bacon's plan for discovery. He examined ideas ("explication of conceptions") and by the "colligation of facts" endeavored to unite these ideas with the facts and so construct science.[11] This colligation is an "act of thought", a mental operation consisting of bringing together a number of empirical facts by "superinducing" upon them a conception which unites the facts and renders them capable of being expressed in general laws.[22]
He corresponded with many in his field and helped them come up with neologisms for their discoveries. Whewell coined, among other terms, scientist,[2] physicist, linguistics, consilience, catastrophism, uniformitarianism, and astigmatism;[3] he suggested to Michael Faraday the terms electrode, ion, dielectric, anode, and cathode.[4][5]
I attended this live this morning from 9:20 - 10:45 AM
important works like Galen’s On Demonstration, Theophrastus’ OnMines and Aristarchus’ treatise on heliocentric theory (which mighthave changed the course of astronomy dramatically if it hadsurvived) all slipped through the cracks of time.
Thus Paxson was not content to limit historians to the immediateand the ascertainable. Historical truth must appear through some-thing short of scientific method, and in something other than scien-tific form, linked and geared to the unassimilable mass of facts.There was no standard technique suited to all persons and purposes,in note-taking or in composition. "The ordinary methods of his-torical narrative are ineffective before a theme that is in its essen-tials descriptive," he wrote of Archer B. Hulbert's Forty- Niners(1931) in 1932. "In some respects the story of the trails can notbe told until it is thrown into the form of epic poetry, or comes un-der the hand of the historical novelist." 42
This statement makes it appear as if Paxson was aware of the movement in the late 1800s of the attempt to make history a more scientific endeavor by writers like Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos, and others, but that Pomeroy is less so.
How scientific can history be as an area of study? There is the descriptive from which we might draw conclusions, but how much can we know when there are not only so many potential variables, but we generally lack the ability to design and run discrete experiments on history itself?
Recall Paxson's earlier comment that "in history you cannot prove an inference". https://hypothes.is/a/LIWSoFlLEe2zUtvMoEr0nQ
Had enough time elapsed up to this writing in 1953, that the ideal of a scientific history from the late 1800s had been borne out not to be accomplished?
Helbig, Daniela K. “Life without Toothache: Hans Blumenberg’s Zettelkasten and History of Science as Theoretical Attitude.” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 1 (2019): 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2019.0005
A historical perspective on the sciencesbrings into view controversies, and some beliefs and methodological con-victions that retrospectively turn out to be false—among Blumenberg’scharacteristically colorful picks are Augustine writing that “the stars werecreated for the consolation of people obliged to be active at night,” and“Linnaeus’s opinion that the song of the birds at the first light of morningwas instituted as consolation for the insomnia of the old.”84
something poetic about these examples even if they're poor science...
In “collaboration with his Zettelkasten,”61 Blumenberg worked to por-tray these tensions between different and changing historical meanings ofscientific inquiry.
It is argued that Droysen, not Dilthey, is the true father of the method of historical understanding or Verstehen.
Who is the father of the method of historical understanding?
seventeenth century, “the century ofgenius,”
History and Foundations of Information Science
This series of books focuses on the historical approach or theoretical approach to information science and seeks a broader interpretation of what we consider as information (i.e., information is in the eye of the beholder, be it sets of data, scholarly publications, works of art, material objects, or DNA samples), and an emphasis upon how people access and interact with this information.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/history-and-foundations-information-science
Neurath claimed that magic was unfalsifiable and therefore disenchantment could never be complete in a scientific age.[18]
- Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 227. ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
Mechanical and vitalist systems existed concurrently, and although it might seem easy to distinguish them,when we come to look at most specific characters and their thought, the distinctions appear blurred
Mechanical philosophy and vitalism were popular and co-existed on a non-mutually exclusive spectrum in the seventeenth century.
Mechanical philosophy is a philosophy of nature which arose broadly in the 17th century and sought to explain all natural phenomenon in terms of matter and motion without relying on "action at a distance" or the idea of a cause and effect that occurred without any physical contact or direct motivation.
René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Marin Mersenne all held mechanistic viewpoints.
See also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_philosophy
Link to: - spooky action at a distance (quantum mechanics)
This perspective has been called an “emblematic worldview”; it is clearly visible in the iconography ofmedieval and Renaissance art, for example. Plants and animals are not merely specimens, as in modernscience; they represent a huge raft of associated things and ideas.
Medieval culture had imbued its perspective of the natural world with a variety of emblematic associations. Plants and animals were not simply specimens or organisms in the world but were emblematic representations of ideas which were also associated with them.
example: peacock / pride
Did this perspective draw from some of the older possibly pagan forms of orality and mnemonics? Or were the potential associations simply natural ones which (re-?)grew either historically or as the result of the use of the art of memory from antiquity?
Humanist critiques began to erode Pliny—the major source for natural history since antiquity—in the1490s. The lengthy critiques of Ermolao Barbaro (1454–1493) and Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524) were,however, based on Greek texts prior to Pliny, not on the natural world.
Pliny's work had been the standard text for natural history since antiquity. The early humanist movement including critiques by Ermolao Barbaro and Niccolò Leoniceno in the mid 1400s began to erode his stature in the area. Interestingly however, it wasn't new discoveries or science that was displacing Pliny so much as comparison of Pliny with even earlier Greek texts.
Whig history (or Whig historiography), often appearing as whig history, is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present".[1] The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy: it was originally a satirical term for the patriotic grand narratives praising Britain's adoption of constitutional monarchy and the historical development of the Westminster system.[2] The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (e.g. in the history of science) to describe "any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process".[3] When the term is used in contexts other than British history, "whig history" (lowercase) is preferred.[3]
Stemming from British history, but often applied in other areas including the history of science, whig history is a historiography that presents history as a path from an oppressive, backward, and wretched past to a glorious present. The term was coined by British Historian Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It stems from the British Whig party that advocated for the power of Parliament as opposed to the Tories who favored the power of the King.
It would seem to be an unfortunate twist of fate for indigenous science and knowledge that it was almost completely dismissed when the West began to dominate indigenous cultures during the Enlightenment which was still heavily imbued with the influence of scholasticism. Had religion not played such a heavy role in science, we may have had more respect and patience to see and understand the value of indigenous ways of knowing.
Link this to notes from The Dawn of Everything.
The term “scientist” is aneologism, coined jocularly by William Whewell in 1834.
"Scientist" is a neologism coined in 1834, by William Whewell and was originally meant tongue-in-cheek.
Who coined the word "scientist" in 1834? :: William Whewell
Chief among these is the need to understand scientific study and discoveryin historical context. Theological, philosophical, social, political, and economic factors deeply impact thedevelopment and shape of science.
Science needs to be seen and understood in its appropriate historical context. Modern culture (and even scientists themselves) often forget the profound impact of theological, philosophical, social, political, and economic factors on how science develops and how we perceive it.
Principe, Lawrence M. (2013, July 8). History of Science: Antiquity to 1700 (Vol. 1200) [.mp3]. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/history-of-science-antiquity-to-1700
Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.
Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".
Explore this area more deeply.
Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?
How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?
What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?
What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?
What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?
total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?
the going through abstraction and re-specification so i think i became interested in cetera carson also because i saw a lot of similarities 01:11:30 to what historians of science describe as experimental work in laboratories and that is especially in the field of science and technology 01:11:43 studies especially the work of hanzio greinberger he works for the max planck institute for history of science in berlin and the way he describes 01:11:55 um experimental work as a form of material deconstruction um is my blueprint for understanding 01:12:10 the work of lumen
Sönke Ahrens used Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's description of experimental work as a form of material deconstruction as a framework for looking at Niklas Luhmann.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (born 12 January 1946) is an historian of science who comes from Liechtenstein. He was director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from 1997 to 2014. His focus areas within the history of science are the history and epistemology of the experiment, and further the history of molecular biology and protein biosynthesis.
Jia, J. S., Yuan, Y., Jia, J., & Christakis, N. (2022, January 30). Risk perception and behaviour change after personal vaccination for COVID-19 in the USA. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/afyv8
A sense ofconnectedness is a unique part of Indigenous science. In Westernscience, knowledge is often considered separate from the people whodiscover it, while Indigenous cultures see knowledge as intricatelyconnected to people.
A primary difference between Indigenous science and Western science is the first is intimately connected to the practitioners while the second is wholly separate.
Would Western science be in a healthier space currently if its practice were more tightly bound to the people who need to use it (everyone)? By not being bound to the everyday practice and knowledge of our science, increasingly larger portions of Western society don't believe in science or its value.
Deepti Gurdasani. (2022, January 29). Going to say this again because it’s important. Case-control studies to determine prevalence of long COVID are completely flawed science, but are often presented as being scientifically robust. This is not how we can define clinical syndromes or their prevalence! A thread. [Tweet]. @dgurdasani1. https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1487366920508694529
Maxwell's advice was to read the four parts of the Treatise in parallel rather than in sequence.
reading the texts in parallel.
Peruvian letters which was supposedly the letters home by a captured Inca princess who's trapped in France and they're commenting on French society and this is later remembered it 00:50:03 comes out in his late 1740s um it's later remembered as the first book which suggested the idea of the welfare state
The 1747 book Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess, is remembered as the first book to suggest the idea of the welfare state.
The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).
This might be the case if the tools drove the people, but isn't it more likely the way in which different people use the tools?
Which direction gives rise to more complexity?
Scott Sampson has argued that we should subjectify nature rather than objectifying it. People are a part of nature and integral to it. We are not separate from it and we are assuredly not above it.
Can the injection of multi-disciplinary research and areas like big history help us to see the bigger picture? How have indigenous and oral cultures managed to do so much better than us at this? Is it the way we've done science in the past? Is it our political structures?
by the eighteenth century, suchchapters were being expanded into sizeable books that functioned primarily as natural historybibliographies in their own right. An early example of this practice was Johann JakobScheuchzer’s Bibliotheca scriptorium(1716).
ReconfigBehSci. (2021, January 18). Calling lawyers, historians, and political scientists. A thread on the value of life. I’m still stunned by Lord Sumption, ex-judge on UK’s Supreme Court, now anti-lockdown campaigner, publicly stating that the life of a woman with stage 4 bowel cancer was ‘less valuable’ 1/4 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1351118909886312449
Although Haldaneobserved thatthe progress of science had been staggeringly rapid in the last hundred and forty years, he considered it, “quite as likely as not that scientific research may ultimately bestrangled in some such way as this before mankind has learned to control its own evolution.”
Again considering Hall's Where Is My Flying Car? one could argue that this is exactly what has happened with respect to nuclear power and the original acceleration we were heading for that stalled in the 20th century.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was the son of the leading Scottish physiologist, John Scott Haldane, from whom J.B.S. learned “the fundamentals of science,”an education that began very early in his life.Throughout the younger Haldane’s youth, the pair undertook many “legendary and daring physiological experiments,”
Another father-son pair.
Το να πούμε, όπως λέχθηκε απ’ όσους υπέγραψαν την «Έκκληση της Χαϊλδεβέργης» (την οποία, από την πλευρά μου, μάλλον θα ονόμαζα Έκκληση της Νυρεμβέργης), ότι η επιστήμη και μόνο η επιστήμη μπορεί να λύσει όλα τα προβλήματα, είναι αποκαρδιωτικό.
COVID-19: The 9/11 Moment for Global Public Health? Dr. Richard Horton and Clive Cookson. (2020, September 1). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97iJIwBQ5qE&feature=youtu.be
Gauri, V. (2020 April 30). Behavioral Public Policy Faces a Crisis. Behavioral Scientist. https://behavioralscientist.org/behavioral-public-policy-faces-a-crisis/
Edelmann, A., Wolff, T., Montagne, D., & Bail, C. A. (2020). Computational Social Science and Sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 46(1), annurev-soc-121919-054621. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054621
Brown's Vulgar Errours.
Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths (1646), commonly known as Vulgar Errours, was an important text in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Browne, like Francis Bacon, argued that empirical evidence was necessary to support (or disprove) claims, so his "trial" here likely involved many bird dissections.
Browne is credited with introducing a number of words to the scientific discourse, including "electricity" and--interesting for our purposes--"computer" and "hallucination."
would owe their being to me
Victor appears so engrossed in his creation that he forgets his discoveries are predicated on the previous research of scientists and natural philosophers. He fails to acknowledge that he "stands on the shoulders of giants," to use the phrase from Sir Issac Newton (1642-1726), including his teachers, a shortcoming indicative of pride of ownership.
ethics of video games in archaeology
Reminds me of this historian’s talk at Pint of Science Montreal 2015. (Sadly, not finding online traces of the event apart from my own section.)
Initially, the digital humanities consisted of the curation and analysis of data that were born digital, and the digitisation and archiving projects that sought to render analogue texts and material objects into digital forms that could be organised and searched and be subjects to basic forms of overarching, automated or guided analysis, such as summary visualisations of content or connections between documents, people or places. Subsequently, its advocates have argued that the field has evolved to provide more sophisticated tools for handling, searching, linking, sharing and analysing data that seek to complement and augment existing humanities methods, and facilitate traditional forms of interpretation and theory building, rather than replacing traditional methods or providing an empiricist or positivistic approach to humanities scholarship.
summary of history of digital humanities
Beaver and Rosen (1978) have shown how the differentialrates of scientific institutionalization in France, England,and Germany are mirrored in the relative output of coau-thored papers.
bibliography tying rate of coauthorship to professionalisation of science
Before the precursors of today’s scholarly journals es-tablished themselves in the second half of the 17th century,scientists communicated via letters.
original form of scholarly comm was letters
p. v. Has an interesting idea that the real contribution of the long eighteenth century to information was the ordering and typology systems.
Site on pre-Renaissance Muslim contributions to knowledge. https://twitter.com/HeritageMuslim
The story of Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, whose theory of brain function was followed by John von Neumann's design for the stored program computer.
As mentioned above category theory has branched out into certain areas of scienceas well. Baez and Dolan have shown its value in making sense of quantum physics, itis well established in computer science, and it has found proponents in several otherfields as well. But to my mind, we are the very beginning of its venture into scientificmethodology. Category theory was invented as a bridge and it will continue to serve inthat role.
In 1980 Joachim Lambek showed that the types and programs used in computerscience form a specific kind of category. This provided a new semantics for talking aboutprograms, allowing people to investigate how programs combine and compose to createother programs, without caring about the specifics of implementation. Eugenio Moggibrought the category theoretic notion of monads into computer science to encapsulateideas that up to that point were considered outside the realm of such theory.
The paradigm shift brought on by Einstein’s theory of relativity brought on the real-ization that there is no single perspective from which to view the world. There is nobackground framework that we need to find; there are infinitely many different frame-works and perspectives, and the real power lies in being able to translate between them.It is in this historical context that category theory got its start.