It is well recognized that early modern physics represented a "geometrization" of nature. Considerable effort has been put forth in the endeavor to explicate the exact characteristics and extent of the contribution of geometry to the early development of physics. Nonetheless further investigation of this development is in order. / In this dissertation I fix the source of geometric influence on early modern physics in Book 5 of Euclids Elements, where the Eudoxian theory of proportion is developed for magnitudes in general. It is argued that it is the concept of magnitude in general, intuitively grounded in geometric magnitude in particular, which develops into the concept of physical magnitude or physical variable. Distinct but intimately intertwined and parallel to this development is the generalization of the theory of proportion, first to the theory of equations (functions) and finally into the experimental method. / A third element which contributes to the geometrization of nature in early modern physics is the geometrical method of analysis. This method, stated very briefly, works backward from that which is already known. This method was generalized by simply introducing variables for unknowns in solving equations. The geometric method of analysis may be further generalized to become the core of the experimental method: where the known quantities become the independent variables and the unknowns the dependent. / The philosophical lesson I draw from the geometrical contribution to early modern physics concerns theory-ladenness. What has been lacking in recent discussion of theory-ladenness is concrete, historical instances of it. It seems to me that the geometrical contribution to early modern physics provides and important and clear instance. To achieve this end I take a careful and rather detailed look at four important figures in early modern physics (1) Nicole Oresme, (2) Galileo Galilei, (3) Rene Descartes, (4) Isaac Newton. Special attention is given their experimental methodology. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-10, Section: A, page: 4558. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.

This interdisciplinary study addresses the relationships between science and religion. It examines three modals of science: (1) the present paradigm of conventional science which is materialistic, mechanistic, reductionist, positivistic, and behaviorist; (2) the 'hyperphysics' of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin S. J. (1881-1955); and (3) the New Science, especially relativity theory and quantum theory. / Teilhard's basic assumptions about the nature of reality, especially on the role of consciousness in the physical world, anticipated directions of thought and theory building which are emerging at the frontier of conventional science. As more of these parallels and correspondences with Teilhard's thought emerge from a variety of the natural sciences, it is increasingly evident that Teilhard's remarkable prescience is being affirmed by a growing number of eminent modern scientists, including several Nobel laureates. / Developments emerging at the frontiers of contemporary scientific thought are discussed. These are linked to the six premises forming the basis for Teilhard's thought: that we live a thinking, unifying, dynamic, ordering, convergent, personalizing universe. This study presents Teilhard's basic assumptions within an updated scientific context in order to better appreciate the nature and direction of his thought as a scientist and his place in modern intellectual history. / Chapter 1, "Introduction and Background," introduces the theme of convergence and establishes the basis for a comparison. / Chapter 2, "Teilhard de Chardin, Scientist-Priest," provides a bibliographic summary of his life. / Chapter 3, "Conventional Science," summarizes the historical and philosophical origins of conventional science, including the conventional scientific view of consciousness. / Chapter 4, "Teilhard's Hyperphysics," characterizes his proposal that a new physics include the phenomenon of man, that is, the role of consciousness in the physical world. / Chapter 5, "The New Science," discusses the place of consciousness in the physical world, including the little known "mentalist" revolution occurring in the mid 1970's in behavioral and medical sciences dealing with the human brain. / Chapter 6, "The Convergence of Science and Religion," compares convergent themes common to both hyperphysics and the New Science as revealed by the thought of individual scientists. A summary and conclusions section follows. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-01, Section: A, page: 0294. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1985.

No description available.

Recent historical interest in science in the Old South inspired this biography of mycologist Henry Ravenel (1814-1887). Prior writing on antebellum southern science was done without the benefit of strong monographs on southern scientists or institutions. Writing done in such a vacuum was necessarily very general and distorted in its perspectives. T. Carey Johnson exaggerated the importance of southern science, while Clement Eaton denigrated it, attributing the South's supposed lack in scientific contributions to the effect of two of her major institutions: slavery and religious orthodoxy. Henry Ravenel, though a South Carolina slaveholder and a devout Episcopalian, was also one of a small group of leaders in antebellum American botany. He was a familiar correspondent to such other top American botanists as Asa Gray, Edward Tuckerman, William Sullivant, Moses Ashley Curtis and Alvan Wentworth Chapman. He also corresponded with a number of European scientists, particularly Miles Joseph Berkeley. To Berkeley he sent specimens of fungi together with detailed notes and descriptions. Berkeley would examine his collections and name new species, sometimes sharing authorship with Ravenel. Between 1852 and 1860 Ravenel published a five volume fungus exsiccati, or collection of dried plants. During this early period of his career, Ravenel's residence in the South, ownership of slaves and religious piety presented no impediment to his pursuit of botany. Civil War nearly bankrupted the once-wealthy man. Ravenel returned to botany after the Civil War to earn money by selling collections. He no longer had time to study the theoretical foundations of taxonomy nor the money to purchase botanical books. In addition, for the first time Ravenel suffered some discrimination from northern botanists. The postbellum period, then, is revealed as the time when residence in the South first became a liability to Ravenel's pursuit of botany.

THIS DISSERTATION EXAMINES the evolution of representations of technology in France between 1750 and 1850. It proposes a history of ways of representing technology and of inscribing technical objects within texts and especially images. The periodization that I introduce starts in the mid-18th century, with the publication of the Encyclopédie and of the Description des arts et métiers, which were the first large-scale attempts to collect, codify and systematize technological knowledge in France. It ends in the mid-19th century, with the blossoming of a specific engineering culture and the triumph of a new patent system. Instead of investigating the traditional sites of technological knowledge, such as the Academy of Sciences, the École Polytechnique, and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, I adopt an oblique perspective and successively look at five different ways of not only thinking about, but also of interacting with, technology: judging, classifiying, owning, rationalizing and imagining. This dissertation argues that, during this century, a new language for technology emerged, which is indicative of changing conceptions, or epistemes, of technology. Representations of technical objects moved from humanist to geometric, from realist to schematic, and from reproductive to generative. By the mid-nineteenth century, texts and images no longer represented technical objects, but directly produced them. / History of Science

This dissertation examines the material culture of quantum theoretical work from 1911 to 1927. It argues that the writing practices and the editorial rules Niels Bohr used in his own work and enforced at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen shaped the culture of theoretical physics and quantum theory itself. Each chapter uses oral histories, archived drafts, photographs, and personal and professional correspondence to reconstruct the writing practices of quantum physicists -- dictation, drawing, revising, and reading. Examining the contributions made in writing and editing work foregrounds different historical actors and scientific sites than those privileged within previous histories of quantum theory. It reveals the importance of Margrethe Bohr, Niels Bohr’s wife and amanuensis, and of his secretary Betty Schultz, to the creation of quantum theory. It also emphasizes that domestic spaces including the Bohr family home and summer vacation cottage were significant sites where scientific theories were disciplined. Chapter 2 addresses Bohr’s practice of using dialogue with a non-scientist to produce first drafts. These dictation/dialogue practices co-evolved with Bohr’s ideals for scientific communication and underscored the value Bohr placed on communicating to non-experts. Bohr’s dictation practices are particularly visible in how he defined the responsibilities of authors and readers in the creation of the meaning of a text. Chapter 3 reconstructs Bohr’s revision practices and the revision and editorial practices he enforced at his institute, especially those surrounding the 1913 article “On the Constitution of Atoms.” It uses theoretical tools from literary theorists, scholarly editors, and historians of science to argue for a new, cinematic way of reading scientific writing, which privileges neither the published version nor the original moment of discovery, situating the meaning of a work in the process not the final product. By examining the reception of Bohr’s theories, Chapter 4 reveals the importance of informal networks in the spread of quantum theory. Bohr’s use of interleaved pages to record feedback on published work suggests a writing process that does not stop at publication. The completed work, instead of remaining a fixed text, immediately becomes basis of a new draft. / History of Science

The dissertation asks how social science and its tools—especially those associated with the precise measurement of attitudes, motivations and preferences—became a pervasive way of knowing about and ordering the world, as well as the ultimate marker of political modernity, in the second half of the twentieth century. I explore this question by examining in detail the trials and tribulations that accompanied the indigenization of scientific polling in 1950s Israel, focusing on the story of Jewish-American sociologist and statistician Louis Guttman and the early history of the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research, the survey research organization he established and ran for forty years. Along with a wave of scientist-explorers who traveled to the postcolonial areas in the early Cold War, Guttman set out to the Middle East, leaving a secure academic position and settling in Jerusalem on the eve of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The inventor of cumulative scaling (known today as “Guttman scaling”)—a method of measurement first developed and used in The American Soldier, the classic World War II study of soldiering—Guttman sought to test in Israel the applicability of cutting-edge socio-psychological research techniques to the problems of a new state. With these objectives in mind, he established a small volunteer-based research unit within the Haganah, the largest among the paramilitary Zionist organizations in British Palestine, which then became part of the nascent Israeli Army. By the late 1950s, the military unit had evolved into a successful national research organization—the first of its kind outside the United States—that employed over two dozen workers and carried out studies on all aspects of social life for government offices, the military, and clients in the private sector. Joining others who have rejected Basalla’s diffusion model, my dissertation shows there was nothing inevitable about the spread of these statistical methods and tools. Rather, they traveled and took root through an active, engaged, and directed process, which required the entrepreneurial initiative and cultural labor of individuals, and depended in turn on the institutional experience and habits of mind they brought with them, their embodied skills, relationships and personal virtues. More concretely, I argue that the eventual institutionalization of this scientific practice and its attendant rationality in Israel was due primarily to Guttman’s ability to recreate the conditions of knowing by rendering social science expertise intelligible in the vernacular, and to make an “ecological niche” for scientific claims and methods to feel at home away from home. Yet, while Guttman was successful in recreating some of the conditions of social scientific knowing, conducting large-scale survey research in a “hostile,” or error generating environment – whether shortage of trained workers, resistant subjects and dismissive decision-makers, competing epistemic values, or the strains of war and state building – often engendered local adaptations. Highlighting the “iterability” of science in translation, I also show that behavioral concepts and claims embedded in the ‘deliverables’ produced by Guttman were often reframed, modified, and infused with local modes of reasoning and understanding as they were vernacularized. The dissertation thus serves to illuminates both the processes that governed the global circulation of scientific ideas and tools in the postwar period and the central role this knowledge migration played in shaping the history of the modern social sciences. / History of Science

Abstract Not Available.

Drawing material from news media, organizational archives, medical journals, governmental and legislative documents as well as oral history interviews, this study examines the introduction and development of acupuncture in Canada covering the period from 1970 to 1996. It is a social professional and legislative history with an analytical narrative approach. The knowledge transfer of acupuncture from China to Canada and its cultural adaptation were part of the ongoing holistic health movement and results of new public policies in diplomacy, immigration, culture and health care. Medicalization of acupuncture was the response of the Canadian medical profession to gain control of the practice of acupuncture. Its tactics included: claiming acupuncture as a medical act, simplifying acupuncture to a technique, and subordinating and excluding traditional acupuncturists. In practice, brief training sessions were provided to a large number of physiotherapists and physicians. The study also notes the changing attitude of orthodox medicine toward acupuncture. The thesis focuses on the intricate relations of the acupuncturists, the medical establishment, the government, the judicial system and the public. The conflicts and frictions among these parties are illustrated. Rival acupuncture groups were created in Quebec in the 1970s and a united front was formed at the end of 1980s. The Acupuncture Association of BC had directed the acupuncture movement in that province since 1974. Organizational activities started in Alberta and Ontario in the early 1980s. The acupuncturists' strategies for professionalization are described and analyzed. Acupuncturists had struggled in a very challenging environment created by the medical establishment and the existing legislative framework. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, acupuncturists were prosecuted in Quebec and BC. The courts in Alberta (1979) and Ontario (1980), however, interpreted the law in favor of non-medical acupuncture. The connection of new health policies to the emergence of acupuncture as a professionalized health care system is depicted and explained. By the mid-1990s, traditional acupuncture had obtained public recognition and political endorsement in BC, Alberta and Quebec with Ontario following suit. In short, this thesis shows how the acupuncturists' struggle plus the changing societal attitudes brought about the legitimacy of acupuncture in Canada at the end of the 20th century.

Abstract not available.