You can read her full recap here.

Visiting Composer Nico Muhly.

CCM’s Café MoMus: Contemporary Music Ensemble presents the music of celebrated composer Nico Muhly at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 10, in UC’s Patricia Corbett Theater. Featuring guest artists Tatiana Berman, violin, and Grant Knox, tenor, the performance is presented in conjunction with the Constella Festival of Music and Fine Arts. Admission to the concert is free.

Led by music director and conductor Aik Khai Pung, the concert’s program features a variety of Muhly’s works for a wide range of instruments, including Honest Music for violin and tape (2003), Three Songs for tenor and violin (2012), Step Team for strings and winds (2007), and more. Also on the program will be Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments, an intricate composition employing the twelve-tone technique.

About Nico Muhly
Nico Muhly has composed a wide scope of work for ensembles, soloists and organizations including the American Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony, countertenor Iestyn Davies, violinist Hilary Hahn, choreographer Benjamin Millepied, New York City Ballet, New York Philharmonic, Paris Opéra Ballet, soprano Jessica Rivera and designer/illustrator Maira Kalman.

Among Muhly’s most frequent collaborators are his colleagues at Bedroom Community, an artist-run label headed by Icelandic musician Valgeir Sigurðsson. Bedroom Community was inaugurated in 2007 with the release of Muhly’s first album, Speaks Volumes. In spring 2012, Bedroom Community released Muhly’s three-part Drones & Music, in collaboration with pianist Bruce Brubaker, violinist Pekka Kuusisto and violist Nadia Sirota. Muhly has also lent his skills as performer, arranger and conductor to Antony and the Johnsons, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Doveman, Grizzly Bear, Jónsi of the band Sigur Rós and Usher. Muhly’s film credits include scores for Joshua (2007), Margaret (2009) and Best Picture nominee The Reader (2008).

Born in Vermont in 1981 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Muhly graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature. In 2004, he received a Master’s in Music from the Juilliard School, where he studied under Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano. His writings and full schedule can be found at www.nicomuhly.com.

About the Constella Festival of Music and Fine Arts
The Constella Festival was created to showcase the depth and breadth of musical and artistic life in Cincinnati. The festival presents unique collaborations between international artists of the highest caliber in partnership with local performing arts organizations, enabling a position of shared intent and strengthening the future of the arts in Cincinnati. This season, the festival presents 37 events in 38 days, including concerts by Lew Soloff, Anne Akiko Meyers and Jean-Yves Thibaudet. More information about the Constella Festival can be found at www.constellafestival.org.

Performance Time
8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10

Location
Patricia Corbett Theater, College-Conservatory of Music
University of Cincinnati

Admission Information
Admission to Café MoMus’ Oct. 10 concert is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required.

Parking and Directions
Parking is available in the CCM Garage (located at the base of Corry Boulevard off Jefferson Avenue) and additional garages throughout the UC campus. Please visit uc.edu/parking for more information on parking rates.

For directions to UC’s campus, visit uc.edu/visitors.html.

CCM Season Presenting Sponsor: The Otto M. Budig Family Foundation

This collection is the second in the Peregrine and Blade series of heroic fantasy. One of them I’m especially happy with, even though it involves no fighting, no treasure and only four people in it. For me it is an unusual story, but one I enjoyed writing.

I hope to have it all up and ready to go very soon, barring emergencies cropping up. And they do like cropping up…

This one is only on Amazon as I’m trialling out the new KDP Select offer. In addition, for 5 days, until the 13th, it is available for free to download.

In a world ancient with civilisations, where ruins and mysteries and monsters abound, the adventurous thrive.

Assassins, sorcerers, corsairs, the undead and more, all are but a few of the obstacles they face in their search for wealth and glory. Success is hard won, and oft times fleeting.

I’m already working on the next collection of three stories, with notes for more beyond that.

The link to Amazon is here.

In all I managed about 18-19K, well short of the target amount. I still blame Skyrim for that.

I did at least finish the first planned novelette, which came to around 10.5K in the end. The second novelette did get some rough ideas noted down, and the novella too up the rest (8K odd.) So progress, but not as much as I had hoped.

Interestingly that first novelette is now one of four that I’m sitting on that is finished but not yet released. The other three are part of a planned anthology that are waiting for two more planned stories to get finished so they can all be released at once – I may end up just going ahead with the first three by themselves at this rate.

Once done it will still need a bit of polishing, and I do mean to make a few adjustments to Obadiah when that happens as well. I came to the idea that I’d like him to be a purveyor of innocent snark – by that he makes comments that are on the surface innocent enough but in a different tone could be snarky. The idea came from a comment he made at one point which fitted that concept – “A most novel solution, sir,” Obadiah said, “But I do trust that it has not caused us an impediment to getting out, should the need arise.”

And now for a short extract (which still needs polishing up), of the opening passage of the first novelette, which goes by the working title Hammer of the Pygmies.

The room shuddered in accordance with the muffled explosion that sounded from outside. The fine crystal chandelier swayed, while upon the table porcelain and silverware rattled.

The characters of the stories are;

Sir Richard Hammerman; Gentleman-Explorer. A typical reserved, stiff-upper-lip gentleman of Albion, unflappable in the face of danger.

Obadiah Crabb; Sir Richard’s loyal and dependable manservant.

Doctor Hamilton Gooding; Scientist, naturalist, explorer and inventor from Scotti.

Captain Archibald Hammerman; Sir Richard’s genial brother and somewhat the back sheep of the family. They bought him a commition in the army to keep him out of trouble.

Lady Adeline ‘Ada’ Redsmith; A daughter of an old friend of Sir Richard and Captain Archibald’s father. Raised in the colonies and as such is a more adventurous and outgoing woman than the genteel society ladies of Londinium.

Hammer of the Pygmies
Sir Richard and Doctor Gooding set forth from Cape Colony into the wilds of Africus, into pygmy territory, seeking a lost temple. The region is fraught with peril as it is said that the pygmies have discovered a means by which to animate the bodies of their fallen foes to fight for them.

Hammer and the Captain
Doctor Gooding’s research into some recently discovered ancient stone tablets is interrupted by agents of the Frankish Sun King. It is up to Sir Richard and Captain Archibald to recover both the good doctor and the tablets before they can be spirited away back to Eupora.

Hammer of the Skies
Travelling back to Albion via airship and escorting the Lady Adeline Redsmith is no easy task when pterodactyl riding pygmies, djinn dervishes and Transylvanian sky-pirates all seek to thwart the journey of Sir Richard, Captain Archibald and Doctor Gooding.

This isn’t the only blog I keep either – my far older one is over and Mist and Shadows – while it is mostly about writing as well, other subjects do crop up from time to time, and unlike this one it isn’t exclusively about short stories and novellas.

The funny thing is, despite having known about it for years, last year was the first time I attempted it – and never completed it. I got some 17,000 words in and decided that I shouldn’t be working on a new project when old ones still remained to be finished. So it got set aside, as often happens. At least this time the projects I returned to did get finished. In part that is why I like short stories – after 10-15,000 words you are generally finished.

This year I am contemplating doing it again – but not with a novel, as is the norm. Instead I am thinking of doing an anthology of short stories. The question is which, as I have a few planned.

The first is one I’ve already written six short stories for and was planned to be one of the next things finished after the re-editing and new covers were done for the previous stories. There are three more stories planned for the anthology, though I am not sure if they can be stretched to 50,000 words between them.

The second only has one story written so far – and another half done. It had been planned as a novella but may end up being a bit longer, given it is already 40,000 words in length. Four novelettes and a novella are planned to finish of that anthology, so it could easily hit the 50,000 word mark.

The third is a anthology of pulp style sword and sorcery fantasy stories – three have been written (but not yet published) with a number more planned. The good thing about them is that they are fairly fun and easy to write and don’t require a huge amount of planning.

The last one is an anthology I’ve been wanting to write for a long time but never gotten around to it – a steampunk series set in a fantastical alternative Earth, following the exploits of a gentleman-adventurer and his companions as they battle pterodactyl-riding pygmies while travelling aboard airships, find lost treasures in hidden temples in the deep jungles, get caught up in the politics of the Immortal Queen Victoria of Albion as she seeks to defend the Empire against her foes in Europa and all the weird science and outlandish steampunk contraptions that go along with it.

I still have a few weeks to go luckily before a choice needs to be made.

At one stage the fantasy I wrote was mostly of your fairly standard pseudo-medieval European inspired style. Like most fantasy in fact. Then, a few years back, I was musing about how fantasy so often gets locked in a medieval stasis, where nothing changes for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It got me pondering about what would happen if things did continue to change and advance. At the time I was reading a lot of books set in the Napoleonic War period – C. S. Forester, Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O’Brian – and wondered what a fantasy world would be like with that level of technology. So I took my world, advanced it four hundred years, gave it gunpowder technology and started writing some stories.

The Tomb of the Tagosa Kings was the first one I did – a short story to explore how it might work and to introduce a couple of characters who were to be prominent in later stories. It is still to date one of my favourite short stories I have written. (Sadly, the only review for it so far is from someone who ‘didn’t get it’ – which is a bad way to review a story.)

Here is the blurb for the story;
In the depths of arid country, the adventurer and historian Professor Halir and his escorts, men of the Queen’s Own Iskaeri Light Infantry, find themselves under attack by fierce Nacatori raiders as he seeks to unlock the secrets of a long lost tomb. What lies within the tomb may be of a much bigger threat than that posed by the raiders.

The Tomb of the Tagosa Kings is available for free at Smashwords.

Most of what I write is fantasy, though I have, and will continue to dabble with other genres. Of that, a lot of it takes places in a setting that has been developing over a number of years, one that, like a lot of fantasy, does take place across more than one world, though the most detail has gone into one core world. The stories I write take place over a large sweep of time, ranging from simple stone age times, through the bronze age, to more traditional fantasy time frames and on into gunpowder fantasy. Writing short stories allows me to explore all this more readily.

The Bronze Man, shockingly, takes place in the Bronze Age era of the setting, the first planned story in a collection recounting the deeds of the great heroes and kings of the past. The story is inspired by, in part, Homer’s Illiad and the tales of the ancient Celts, of great heroes who rode into combat on chariots and challenged other heroes to duels.

Here is the blurb for the story;
Fierce Chelosian sea-raiders descend upon the simple bronze-age village of Rath Arn and the villagers there are left with a stark choice – die free or live as slaves. But Rath Arn is the home of the mighty hero Awn the Red, and he leads the villagers in seeking to delay the far more numerous foe until help arrives.

The Bronze Man is available for free at Smashwords.

The current is a list of what exactly I am working on at the moment.

Firstly I am doing a re-edit of all my old stories.  My editing skills have improved remarkably and it is time I went back and fixed up all the errors I missed when I wrote them.  Included in the re-edit is fixing the covers.  I can’t afford to have them all done professionally, but at least I can improve on early attempts.  So far I have done 3 out of 16, the stories ranging from a mere 1000 words all the way to one of 15,000.

Beyond that I am working on seven, yes seven, novelettes, though there are more planned and set aside.  The first two are in the final polish stage and form the third duo of stories in The Chronicles of the White Bull, an ongoing series following the adventures of a minotaur who once was a slave-gladiator seeking the way home through a dying world.

The other five range from just needing a final polish to still being in plotting, and form a new series I am working on, a pulp style sword and sorcery series inspired by my enjoyment of Robert E Howard and others of his ilk.

I do keep myself busy.

The Adventures of Ray the Robot are two short stories I wrote a couple of years back, and are the first of my collection that I have re-edited and re-released.

Both revolve around the robot Ray, and his human master Brian, and are sci-fi on the more humourous side of things. The first story, Ray and His Human, I wrote in my head while driving to spend Christmas 2008 with my parents – maybe not the safest thing to be doing, but by the time I arrived the story was there. The second, Ray and the Alien Princesses, followed a few months later when I decided I’d like to further explore the adventures of the pair.

Here is the blurb for the stories;
Ray the possibly malfunctioning robot has his work cut out for him with a master like Brian, a man prone to putting his foot in it and who attracts trouble like a magnet. Ray is forced time and again to bail Brian out of his predicaments; whether it is naval press-gangs or green alien princesses. Whatever it is, you can be sure Ray has a cutting word or two to say about their adventures.

Ray is available at Smashwords for free.

Newcastle Sixth Form College is the city’s first specialist facility developed to serve the needs of young people wishing to study.  This builds on the college’s success as the best performing general FE college in the country for level 3 achievement for 16-18 year olds.

The building, which will open in 2013, represents the college’s continued commitment to re-invest in learning and provides world-class facilities for GCSE, A Level, AS Level and International Baccalaureate students.

The 11,000sqm sixth form college includes state-of-the-art practical and learning environments, incorporating the latest technologies to assist the college in increasing participation and driving up success. Students within Newcastle Sixth Form College achieve year on year success creating increasing demand for 16-19 provision, including the International Baccalaureate (IB). Newcastle College is the only IB World School in Tyneside.

Located at the college’s Rye Hill Campus, only a five minute walk from Newcastle Central Station and in close proximity to Newcastle city centre, the building is easily accessible and will continue the regeneration of the area.

Newcastle Sixth Form College has been designed by international architects RMJM. The college has also worked with consultant Turner Townsend as well as main contractor, BAM North East.

Bev Robinson, Principal of Newcastle College, said: “We are delighted to announce our plans for Newcastle Sixth Form College. The college’s long standing commitment is to re-invest in learning which serves the needs of our students, industry partners and the wider community. Through the development of this specialist building our 16-19 students will have access to state-of-the-art facilities and a wide range of courses that will provide them with routes in Higher Education or employment.

“Newcastle College has been ranked as the best performing general FE college in England for level 3 achievement for the second year running and this dedicated facility will help us to build on this success and create long term opportunities for students and staff.”

RMJM Studio Director, Conor Pittman said: “The new college will be a fantastic facility for learning and will help enhance its excellent reputation in the North East of England. This is one of a number of educational projects which our studio is currently involved in and we’re delighted to be associated with this development.”

BAM Construct intends to use as many local suppliers as possible on the project. Construction Director Andrew Warwick is also in talks with bosses at the National Construction Academy (NCA) over plans to create “as many work experience places as practical” on the college scheme.

Mr Warwick said: “Our approach is always to try to bring local economic and social benefits through our work.

“We certainly intend to use as many local firms as possible on Newcastle Sixth Form College, and are talking to NCA about using as many apprentices as we can.”

Jon Wray, Project Manager at Turner & Townsend, said: “We are proud to have supported the College in the development of the Rye Hill Campus over a number of years and are delighted to be involved in the delivery of the new Sixth Form which will provide the College and the City with a landmark building.”

AUTUMN TERM

LECTURE 1. Course Overview & How to Argue Historically

LECTURE 2. Scholastic Philosophy and the Medieval Cosmos

LECTURE 3. Renaissance Challenges

LECTURE 4. Philosophical Reformers

LECTURE 5. Experimental Philosophy/The Place of Isaac Newton

LECTURE 6. Alchemy, Matter Theory, and Chemistry

LECTURE 7. The Enlightenment

LECTURE 8. The Spirit of Improvement and Specialised Science

LECTURE 9. Natural History, Natural Philosophy, and Mathematics in the 1700s

LECTURE 10. Making Sense of the Earth: Life and Geology

SPRING TERM

LECTURE 11. Science, Religion, and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century

LECTURE 12. Darwin and His Place in the Sciences

LECTURE 13. Laboratories and Universities

LECTURE 14. The New Physics and Engineering

LECTURE 15. The Social Sciences

LECTURE 16. Origins and Facets of Twentieth-Century Biology

LECTURE 17 Industry and the Expansion of Science

LECTURE 18. Twentieth-Century Politics of Science and Technology

LECTURE 19. Calculation, Modelling, Simulation, and Artificial Intelligence

LECTURE 20. Review

Part 2 emphasizes the importance of logical or argumentative space in economic thought, as exemplified by — but by no means limited to — mathematical inquiry.  I want to argue that economics continued to adhere to the argumentative strategy of system-building familiar from 18th-century natural and political philosophy.  Meanwhile, though, most natural sciences took a separate path toward argumentative rigor applied to a tightly constrained space of argumentation, such as that defined by laboratory phenomena.  Political economists were deeply influenced by the natural sciences’ newly enhanced commitment to rigor, but interpreted that commitment in novel ways within the relatively unconstrained argumentative space of political economy.

In the 18th century, mixed mathematics (or rational mechanics) developed a deeply nuanced methodology, which, attached only to Newton’s three laws, attained a new level of predictive mastery over celestial phenomena.  Most historians no longer pay much mind to celestial mechanics, perhaps because the high bar mathematical astronomy set for scientific advance was for too long seen as a paradigm of scientific method, thus making it an imperative to study everything else.

This blog advocates that even if a topic appears to be tapped out (though I doubt many topics in the history of science actually are), it is nevertheless wise to continually refresh our interest in it, lest our appreciation of its nuances erode.  In particular, it is important to keep in mind that the success of celestial mechanics was quite singular, and that other areas of rational mechanics, such as hydrodynamics, remained — and would remain — analytically detached from most experiment.

Mathematics, circa 1800, remained a subject more closely attached to argumentative rather than predictive precision.  By 1900, (advanced) optics, electromagnetism, and heat were all combined into a body of precision-tested, mathematically defined knowledge grounded in basic principles.  At that time, mathematics was only beginning to make its way into economic thought.  This era is a staple of the history of economics literature: E. Roy Weintraub’s How Economics Became a Mathematical Science (2002) does not provide a complete account of the transition, but it’s a good place for the novice to start.

The intervening period of the 19th century provides an enormously rich vein of scientific practice, political thought, and epistemological debate, which needs to be taken seriously to understand why economic thought developed in the ways that it did.  As late as the middle of the 19th century, mathematics, as applied to physics, still mainly connoted clarity of argument.  Stating a physical argument in mathematical terms allowed one to explore the logical consequences of a set of assertions, and to distinguish possible implications so as to parse whether one or another explanation for a phenomenon was preferable.

My favorite discussion of this use of mathematics remains Jed Buchwald’s account of the importance of Fresnel’s rigorous mathematical arguments as the basis for presenting a clear preference for the wave theory of light as an explanation for certain polarization phenomena.  The wave theory would be held up as an analytical triumph by proponents of the reform of mathematical education at Cambridge, including Charles Babbage, John Herschel, George Peacock, and George Airy.  However, while the mathematical wave theory’s success was tied to its ability to describe precision experiment, physical experiment would not itself be emphasized at Cambridge until much later in the century.

A key aspect of a mathematical education, I would argue, was the skills it fostered in approximation and legitimate idealization in reasoning and argumentation — a point that may be intuitive to those who have studied physics, though it is rarely emphasized.  Nineteenth-century mathematics education at Cambridge has been analyzed at length by Andrew Warwick.  Many questions on Cambridge’s mathematical tripos exam involved deriving results related to decidedly obscure mechanical arrangements.  Such argumentative forms would be used in the latter half of the century by physical theorists, for example, to interject their thermodynamical knowledge into geological discussions about the age of the sun and earth — a topic most extensively studied by Crosbie Smith.

However, the mathematical tripos was considered appropriate beyond the education and epistemic elevation of future mathematicians and physicists (an increasingly used term).  It was also thought to have virtue as a general form of elite education.  See John Gascoigne’s 1984 discussion “Mathematics and Meritocracy” (paywall), which focuses on the emergence of the tripos as a dominant part of Cambridge education.  The first part of the tripos was taken by all Cambridge students.  Much later economists Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) and John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) were actually among the wranglers (the top finishers) in the mathematical tripos examination.  Some economists actually took their models directly from physical theory: Philip Mirowski has traced the very direct links between thermodynamics and the economic theory of value.

This is not simply about economics impersonating physics.  The point should prompt a deeper consideration of what such an impersonation would and would not imply about the presumed epistemology of a mathematical economics circa 1900.

I believe the crucial point to keep in mind when considering the historical epistemology of economics is that political and economic phenomena will be talked about.  Therefore, the question is not so much: how can you talk about complicated and undetermined economic systems at all, or with certainty? but: what ways of talking about these systems are to be preferred in comparison to others?

Calls in that era to raise political economy to the level of science in this context should not necessarily be considered equivalent to a call to reduce political economy to a laboratory science.  The most important thing in the arena of a self-proclaimed scientific political economy was to avoid specious argumentation.  Specious argumentation allowed any conclusion to be (apparently) justified by recourse to accepted principles.  Avoiding speciousness could be achieved by ensuring that conclusions followed from presuppositions.  Logic and mathematics stood (as they long had) as ideal forms of argument in this respect.

However, mathematics aside, there were a number of other candidates in the nineteenth century for ways of speaking scientifically about social and economic phenomena.  Karl Marx, for an important instance, grounded his thinking in the belief that society occupied certain definable states, which, due to internal contradictions or instabilities, would — like arguments themselves — resolve themselves by proceeding to a new state.  However, this was not simply a feature of communist thought: see also many of Chris Donohue’s posts on this blog about the theories of society and civilization that were prevalent in this period.

A little later, in Austria and Germany, Carl Menger, who had a legal education, confronted Gustav Schmoller’s “Historical School” over the legitimacy of abstracting more localized economic behavior from a more complete understanding of culture.  Their arguments revolved around whether or not a historically rich understanding of differences in national cultures was a preferred means of analyzing and prescribing economic policy.  (The story goes that the Historical School’s inability to give concrete advice in World War I led to their political marginalization.)  Max Weber’s understanding of his brand of sociology, grounded in “ideal types” as a means of analyzing empricial observations, drew heavily on Menger’s arguments for the legitimacy of economic theory.

Whether we are discussing mathematical models or ideal types, I think the specific connections between scientific and economic (not to mention legal) thought, which are in the most need of renewed study, are the epistemological affinities and differences between different cultures of theory.  Although analytic philosophy, mathematical and statistical thought, the philosophy of experiment design, economic theory, social science, anthropology, cognitive psychology, computation, evolutionary theory, genetics, and the search for axiomatic foundations in science all have their historians, I would like to see both a deeper exploration of what appear to be labyrinthine connections and tensions between these areas, as well as a conscientious comparative description of the various intellectual projects involved.

In most the accounts I know of, critical characterizations of theoretical projects are often grounded in polemics historically hurled between proponents of these projects, which unfortunately obscures the methods, goals, and ambitions of each project’s proponents.  As with “Newtonianism” it is important to distinguish programs from the polemical labels that have been affixed to them.

Of course, in a post-Latour science studies, it has become especially difficult to separate actual historical methods of theorizing from the ubiquitous historical accusations of rationalism applied to them by, say, Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek (or even by someone as close to us as Karl Popper).  It appears as though the possibility of a polemic of rationalism is thought to have only become available with the 1970s-era overturning of historical ideas about a culture-free access to nature and truth.  Therefore, it is too often assumed that historical projects can be sufficiently described as rationalistic, because rationalism would have been understood as a legitimate intellectual strategy in the pre-1970s era, without taking seriously the point that that was a label applied by critics at the time.

(Incidentally, obtaining such an understanding is also useful in appreciating points such as that, in yesterday’s column lauding a “new humanism”, conservative NYT columnist David Brooks is essentially the latest figure to recycle 200-year-old conservative polemics, complete with a stab at the French Enlightenment, to explain whatever political evils happen to be prevalent in any day and age.)

In my limited forays into this area, I have found that theorists usually pursue particular problems because of their peculiar intellectual interest, which perhaps has a loose connection to, and thus no direct implications for, real policy problems.  Theories are valued in terms of their contribution to an existing body of theory; thus their legitimacy is judged not in terms of its truth as a sort of principle of nature, but in comparison to the contents of existing theory.

Further, if we want to understand, for example, why theoretical economics is chock-full of things like existence and uniqueness proofs, it is because economic thought is grounded in a long tradition where the ability to speak coherently about a subject is deeply valued, and where logical-mathematical argument is viewed as the basis of argumentative coherence.  Again, it is coherence between axioms and conclusions that fuels the claim that economic ideas are universal and objective.

Does this theoretical coherence rationalize political authority?  Contrary to received notions in science studies, I have seen no indication that it did or does.  This particular story is not about trust in numbers.  In fact, theoretical concerns have usually been sufficiently arcane to arouse political suspicions when they come into too close contact.  Economists themselves make clear distinctions between positive and normative economics.  (I have, by the way, intentionally left positivism out of my brief account of the 19th-century for no good reason except that this post is too long anyway.)  Some economists’ much-noted confidence in political advocacy often seems to be based more in the idea that, when compared to the intellectual content of competing policy arguments, their arguments take additional points into account, which suggests a preference for their arguments over the competing arguments.

However, the more general point here is that there is a profound need to distinguish between cultures of theory and cultures of advice, and to understand the distinct forms that ideas take within each culture, to investigate the sources of these ideas as well as the sources of the distinct etiquettes that govern each culture, and the social and intellectual ways in which ideas have and have not flowed between them.

Einsteins’ Generation works as scholarship in subtle, but, I think, significant ways that will not necessarily be apparent at first reading, so I want to use this post to try and unpack this book’s argumentative strategies and analyze their power.  The first thing I want to note is that the book doesn’t follow a “sandwich” strategy: asserting a central argument in the introduction and  conclusion, and then offering a series of cases, or a long narrative, that bolsters that argument.

There are hints of a centralized anti-straw-man argument, which deflates the view of a single, radical break between a “classical” physics based dogmatically on Newton’s foundation, and a “modern” physics based on relativity and the quantum, but I don’t think this is Staley’s main intent.  More to the point, I think what Staley is trying to do is use a certain style of narrative and historical analysis to create a new view of cutting-edge physics around the turn of the century, which builds on prior scholarship while departing from it in important ways.

What are these ways?  In his back-cover blurb, Harry Collins claims that the accomplishment of the book is to move away from a ”history of great men and women”, but this surely misses the mark.  Einstein’s Generation is hardly a “working-class” vision of turn-of-the-century physics.  Even most of the assuredly elite figures on the book’s cover—a famous photograph taken at the 1911 Solvay conference—do not warrant more than a mention in the book, if that.  The closest thing we have to that broad of a view is Paul Forman, John Heilbron, and Spencer Weart’s  special 1975 issue of Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, “Physics circa 1900: Personnel, Funding, and Productivity of the Academic Establishments” (which was an important demorgraphic and institutional, not intellectual, study).

Staley is not so much trying to get away from greatness as he is trying to redefine it by keeping Einstein and relativity from being the singular paragon of physics progressiveness, which he accomplishes by making sure the narrative is never built entirely around relativity, whatever the book’s subtitle might have you believe.

This is an important historiographical move.  A generation ago, the historian’s task would almost inevitably have been to investigate the origins of and influences on Einstein’s work.  In 1992 Andrew Warwick helped revolutionize “reception studies” by framing the reaction to relativity at Cambridge in terms of its relevance for their work, rather than in terms of their success or failure in properly understanding Einstein’s vision of relativity (“Cambridge Mathematics and Cavendish Physics: Cunningham, Campbell, and Einstein’s Relativity 1905-1911, Part I: The Uses of Theory” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 23: 625-656.)  In Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003), Peter Galison queried the techno-cultural context of relativity, depicting general technological and intellectual environments in which Einstein and Henri Poincaré each lived, emphasizing, among other things, the differences between querying what it meant to coordinate networks of clocks versus arriving at agreed-upon conventional standards of measurement.

In all these cases, the subject matter is always relativity itself: its origins, its reception, its contexts.  Staley, on the other hand, uses the well-worn question of relativity as a pivot point or base camp from which to survey not only relativity, but the diverse concerns of the physics surrounding relativity.  Doing this, one makes a broad gain simply by becoming more aware of this “other” physics, but one also makes the specific gain of using the broader understanding to revise professional understanding of the relativity narrative.  Staley accomplishes this through a narrative and methodological fidgetiness, which involves revisiting familiar historical milieus with new concerns in mind, but also making unconventional choices in selecting the next step in the narrative.

This methodology reminds me of another book that I’m fond of, Bruce Wheaton’s The Tiger and the Shark (1983), which departs from conventional narratives of the origins of quantum mechanics by departing from the conventional story of quantum mechanics in the 1910s revolving around trying to puzzle out the structure and behavior of the atom, and investigating instead neglected research on cathode ray tubes and x-rays in the same period.  This, it turns out, was an alternative path to wave-particle duality.  Reading that book, one gains a broad understanding of that neglected research, but one also establishes a more coherent historical explanation for elements previously included in the quantum mechanics narrative rather arbitrarily.  As Thomas Kuhn put it in his introduction to the book, “Dr. Wheaton’s is the first account of quantum theory known to me in which Louis de Broglie appears less as a surprising intruder than as a person with just the background required to play the role for which he is known.”

In Staley’s book, the strategy works similarly.  The book begins by revisiting Albert Michelson’s precision experiments, first to measure the speed of light, then to detect the movement of the earth through the luminiferous ether.  Michelson’s failure to detect the ether was traditionally cited as a problem for which relativity was the elegant answer.  The historiography, led by Gerald Holton, has now long since emphasized that Einstein was personally motivated by theoretical-conceptual incongruities rather than by Michelson’s experimental result.

Staley, though, is interested in Michelson’s work in its own right, and, following Michelson’s most precise null measurements with Edward Morley in 1887, Staley sticks with the Michelson story into the 20th century to discuss how the development of precision optical interferometry, which had numerous (albeit more mundane) practical and experimental applications, became Michelson’s contemporary claim to fame.  Highlighting the importance of interferometry, Staley also charitably reinterprets Michelson’s famous claim that further advances in physics would be in the decmial places to mean that new physical problems (such as the Zeeman effect) could only be found through precision measurement (p. 129).

Staley’s emphasis on the independent history of Michelson’s instrumentation is a self-conscious extension of 1980s-era historiography, which emphasized the importance of material culture.  The decision to stick with interferometry is not unlike Peter Galison’s strategy in Image and Logic (1997).  In that book, Galison stressed the need to follow more natural continuities of practice, rather than to follow a disjointed progress-of-knowledge narrative where experiment begets theory, or, alternatively, theory is confirmed by experiment.  His approach depended on keeping a steadily fixed viewpoint that refused to be budged by orthodox theory-driven narratives, perhaps to the neglect of the history of high-energy-physics practices that resolve instrumental, experimental, and theory-building practices (but, for a case study on this, see chapter 4 of his How Experiments End).

Staley, however, comes back to the familiary territory of Lorentz, FitzGerald, Poincaré, and other assorted proto-Einsteins successfully identified by prior historiography.  This captures the theory-experiment back-and-forth that is surely still necessary for the telling of any fully coherent history of science.  Yet the time spent with instrumentation provides Staley with a fuller set of analytical resources with which to address the theory side of history.

Analyzing Lorentz, Poincaré, and others, an Einstein-centric account here would emphasize the futility of Lorentz-FitzGerald length-contraction hypothesis to explain the Michelson-Morley results, because of the instabilities it would introduce in the electron.  Staley digs deeper, emphasizing the importance of the physics of the electron (and its association with precision measurement), the perceived failures of Einstein’s relativity to solve the problem of the electron, and Einstein’s own admission of this point.  Again, accepting the broad argument of the importance of electron physics, one can also make a whole series of specific gains within the existing historiography, such as explaining Paul Ehrenfest’s initial rejection of Einsteinian relativity, previously subsumed historiographically by emphasis on Ehrenfest as the early champion of Einstein he would soon become.

Staley’s book is so full of halting forays into unexplored territories and minor revisions to existing pictures that, combined with the lack of a strong overall argument, it could be easy to miss his book’s subtler qualities.  These result in a broader and firmer understanding of a community of elite physicists’ immediate motivations, the highlighting of the existence of under-analyzed research programs, and, by extension, the assembly of a better explained, more coherent history of physics, which can be the only real test of historiographical progress.

Absent a full survey—an intellectual version of Forman-Heilbron-Weart—which might not even be possible in a non-reference-book format, I feel Staley’s approach may pack as much argument, big and small, into 422 pages as is realistically possible.  Given the engagement of the relativity history community within itself, I have no doubt Staley’s book will be recognized for its specific accomplishments, but I hope attention will also be paid to his craft, and the attention and argumentative maturity he expects of his audience.

Go to Pt. 2

Arriving in this position, one must resolve the absurdity by asking: what sorts of things can be the subject of historiography?  I would reply that science studies has successfully argued that traditions of practice constitute the possible objects of historical inquiry.  If definable physical conditions can persist through history (mountains are a nicely tangible example), then certain definable practical reactions to those conditions can also persist (climbing the mountain, digging mines, etc…).  Such practices can be broken down into analytically useful categories: technology, technique, tactic, policy, arguments and knowledge claims, rhetoric, imagery, etc.  Properly characterized varieties of these practices can be given useful labels (e.g. “empire-building” as a national policy).

Specific choices  concerning how to deploy these practices in varying situations are informed by the history of ideas.  Ideas may be decoded through a careful analysis of how practices are selected based upon historical appreciations of the character of situations faced (“imperialism” suggests territorial acquisition as a response to international economic and military competition).  The outcome of choices is indeed contingent and local, but traditions in practice and the ideas that inform choices of practice may be traced, often for very long periods.

An understanding of practices, therefore, precedes a history of ideas, even if these practices are as cerebral as philosophical argumentation.  Practices, unlike ideas, but like physical conditions, can be identified by their material characteristics.  These characteristics can be obviously material (the design of automobiles through history), or materiality can be argued to inhabit even something like philosophy, through similarities in stock arguments, stock examples, lexicon, and grammar.

As I have suggested, in the historiography of science Peter Galison has offered both one of the best articulations of these methodological points and one of their best deployments.  If he left How Experiments End (1987) with a vision of a local and contingent world where explanations of sequences of events could only be parsed by the historian—not the philosopher or the sociologist—by Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1997), he had developed a set of ideas about how constructive historiography could be assembled.  I want to highlight three main ideas.

1) Mesoscopy (p. 61), the persistence of traditions that nevertheless do not philosophically transcend history: “This book is a brief for mesoscopic history, history claiming a scope intermediate between the macroscopic (universalizing) history that would make the cloud chamber illustrative of all instruments in all times and places and the microscopic (nominalistic) history that would make Wilson’s cloud chamber no more than one instrument among the barnloads of objects that populated the Cavendish Laboratory during this century.”

2) Materiality (p. 435), a quality that identifies mesoscopic traditions and allows for their persistence and replication: “From the Latin for ‘handing down’ or ‘delivery’, the term tradition had, by the Renaissance, an interlinked set of connotations.  First was the handing over of material, as in the delivery of goods.  But there is also an early notion of tradition as a set of practices, customary behaviors that may or may not have the force of law….  ‘Handing down’ in the material culture of the laboratory has, I have argued, taken on many forms…  It can be as literal as the passing on of laboratory equipment…  It can be partial, as in the ‘cannibalization’ of instrument parts from one experiment to another…  But the transfer can also be of a more subtle kind… [Here Galison talks about material 'bricolage', a term tracing its tradition to Lévi-Strauss].”

The concept of materiality has been imported into studies of the history of cerebral things like scientific theory and calculation.  Of course, persisting with the physical connotation of materiality, the term “paper tools” has had some appeal.  See especially David Kaiser on Feynman Diagrams and Andy Warwick on the written Cambridge mathematical tripos exam.  Importantly, both scholars have been centrally concerned with pedagogy, a key issue in explaining the intergenerational persistence and spread of materially related practices.

3) Intercalation (pp. 781-803), the weakness of interaction between materially distinct traditions.  “…I want to reflect … on a description of physics that would neither be unified nor splintered into isolated fragments.  I will call this polycultural history of the development of physics intercalated because the many traditions coordinate with one another without homogenization.  Different traditions of theorizing, experimenting, instrument making, and engineering meet—even transform one another—but for all that, they do not lose their separate identities and practices” (p. 782).

Distinct traditions may define sub-communities within a larger community, and individuals can bear multiple traditions for the same or separate communities.  A tradition of practice can be singled out from other traditions by the material continuity it exhibits across discontinuities experienced in other traditions.  Wholesale transformations in one tradition may have an impact in other traditions, but they do not presage the wholesale transformation of other traditions.  I would argue that, in addition to the actual physical conditions of the world, distinct traditions practiced by others define part of the “physical conditions” toward or within which one must use one’s ideas to decide how to deploy the traditions of practice at one’s disposal (“resources” in Simon Schaffer’s lexicon)—they represent likely counterarguments, accusations, or other forms of socio-intellecutal resistance.

In Image and Logic Galison articulated a historiographical position that I would argue had been possible at least since the 1980s when narrating the history of scientific practices began to challenge a preoccupation with the establishment of a stock of transcendent theoretical and metaphysical ideas to which the history of experiment and instrumentation were always subservient.  Historians could now attempt a difficult and laborious task: to characterize the features of pertinent traditions and identify periods and constituencies within which they were carried, and thus identify the ideas governing their historical deployment.  Historians could also characterize and narrate important changes in both practice and ideas, as well as narrate the results of specific deployments of practices and ideas.

The chronological synthesis of the resultant narratives would constitute the primary historiographical problematic that consolidated historiographical knowledge and generated historiographical debate concerning proper characterization of practices, ideas, constituencies, and periodizations, and the manner of their effects and the ways in which they can change.  For reasons I will attempt to uncover in subsequent posts, this task never became an imperative within the professional history of science.

Methodological sophistication is important.  It has only been methodological reflection that warns us against, for example, necessarily regarding “religion” as a “constraint” on “science”, when, for example, theological issues might have been a “resource” in a natural philosophical cosmology.  Or, we can now appreciate that the world did not “resist” Einstein’s relativity for some years, but rather that different communities did not understand it as important or germane to their physical projects (following Andrew Warwick on Cambridge physicists, or Peter Galison on Poincaré).

In my opinion, though, methodologically we are generally pretty sound, and have been for at least two decades, if not longer.  To continue to act as though methodology were still our most pressing problem is to ignore the question of how we might attain and retain understanding through better historiographical craft.  In this respect, there are some areas where we are doing very well, which need to be highlighted for those not working in them, and there are areas where we seem to be actually losing knowledge (as a community, anyway).

Rather than go into specific examples in this post, I would like to lay out what I view as the essential problems of good historiographical craft—the charting of the relationship between historical projects, “problems” in those projects, and the proper handling of the nature and role of context.

The historical “project” is what we can view as the thing that our historical actors are motivated to do, and is essentially connected to what ideas historical actors hold.  In their system of ideas there will be certain “problems” that they wish to address, and they will have certain sets of intellectual, physical, and social resources for addressing them.  The attempt to address a problem is a kind of historical event, while the project is the most immediate and important (but not only) context for deciphering their understanding of the problem.

Now, there are also certain philosophical problems that appear in multiple historical projects, and some of which even appear to be transhistorical—the “mind-body” problem, for example.  Traditionally, historians of philosophy have been interested in addressing work on these problems “from Plato to NATO”, as the saying goes.  This has often extended likewise to the history of science—the “problem of the ether”, or “the atom” for example.

Conscientious historians of science have long noted that historical actors have not always addressed these general philosophical and scientific “problems” within the context of the same project (even though actors have sometimes imagined themselves as doing so!), and that the effort to imagine them as such creates an incoherent understanding of history.  What is the central objective of one project might be a side-issue in another project.  To bring in historical actors only as they address the problem we wish to understand their position on robs us of historical understanding.  Importantly, “Whig” history is simply a subset of this larger issue where we wish to understand historical actors only as they address themselves with respect to the knowledge, ideas, and values we hold in the present.

A particularly useful historiography is one that charts historical projects and their relationships with each other.  How do certain problems and resources become transformed when adopted into the context of a different project?  What happens when different projects address the same problem in the same place—do they clash, do they negotiate a solution, or do they agree to disagree (a result that I think is common, but is generally undervalued in a historiography preoccupied by conflict and the resolution of conflict)?  What happens when individuals adhere to multiple projects (e.g., a political one and a scientific one)?

The epistemic and sociological study of these encounters has long been a subject of intense fascination for historians, to the point that the inevitable answer—projects must be reconciled in messy and highly localized ways—has become a staple of scholarship.  A localization-focused historiography insists that the particulars of encounters can only be achieved by analyzing history one brick at a time (albeit in a “quasi-Aristotelian” mode where essential practices taken on “accidental” local valences).

The localism of history may be true in a strict sense, but historians who have studied long-term trends also understand that while particulars are always messy, and history never strictly determined, important insights on historical developments can be achieved by properly characterizing historical projects (or traditions) and the encounters between different projects as they address related problems.

To understand history from this perspective requires not an unusual level of methodological sophistication—merely the patience to survey large groups of actors and their work, and to characterize the subtle differences between contemporaneous or sequential projects, and how different projects deal with common problems, leading to a good historiographical craft.  Such an approach is essential to understanding, for example, Jed Buchwald’s work.

Of course, the rationally motivated project has rightly been the subject of sustained criticism.  From the fatalism of aspects of political economy, to the localism of Tolstoy, to the dialectical materialism and false consciousness of Marxist historiography, to the fetishism and subconscious motivation of Freudian psychology, to structuralist anthropology, and to the post-structural power-knowledge discourses of Foucault, the importance of unmotivated and uncontrolled “projects” (if you will) has been repeatedly emphasized.

Even in very wonky histories such as Buchwald’s, the unmotivated has a place.  Importantly, Buchwald emphasizes the importance of differences in scientific methodologies of which the actors themselves were not fully conscious.  David Brewster, for instance, imagined himself as working in the same project of optics as Fresnel, but did not appreciate that the differences in their methodologies places them on inevitably different projects, which caused them to develop their projects in different ways—one successfully, the other not.

What delineates a craftsman such as Buchwald from historians focusing on overarching epistemic, social, or cultural problems, is that Buchwald closely identifies specific historical developments that he wishes to explain, and concerns himself with actors whose project(s) specifically addressed the topic.  Those concerned with either historicized epistemology or unmotivated epochal narratives, place themselves necessarily in the same position as the Whig historian or the traditional historian of philosophy—ignoring the particularity of the motivated project in an effort to isolate the hidden power of the unmotivated.

The problem for historical craft, of course, is that the unmotivated cannot be isolated.  Like a transhistorical philosophical problem, the unmotivated plays different roles in differently motivated projects.  The unmotivated should be characterized, but it cannot be analyzed in its abstracted state (this would be the analysis of a historiographical “chimera”), let alone lead to an understanding of its history or any other.

These issues will come to the fore when we look at Martin Kusch’s review of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity from the latest Isis.

First off, while I’ve sometimes characterized conference presentations here as working along a “colloquium-journal-edited volume” axis of disconnected scholarship, this is more a general criticism of the form.  I think it’s OK to pick apart Isis articles from time to time, since it is the flagship journal of the history of science, after all.  But picking apart conference talks seems unfair to the tentative nature of the conference talk form, so we won’t be doing that.  I will, however, just briefly mention as a lowlight the weirdly rude non-reception given to the welcoming speech by Pitt’s provost.  What was up with that?

On highlights, the first thing I want to throw out there is the co-location with the Philosophy of Science Association conference.  I think it’s fair to say that for the past two or three decades, the history of science has been much more closely connected to the sociology of science than the philosophy of science, and I think it’s a good project to try and bring the philosophers back in.

I dropped in on some PSA sessions.  At a glance, I like the way the philosophers talk and argue: their linguistic precision and the degree to which they engage with problematic issues in a constructive fashion is something from which historians could learn.  I don’t think I’d want to be a philosopher, though.  One reason I think we lost touch with them over the years is that the theories serve more to dissect the structure of arguments than to illustrate or explain historical practice.  It’s also interesting what a motley group the philosophers are.  Some philosophers’ work seemed familiar enough, while others’ looked more like the operations research work I study (Bayesian decision processes and such) rather than the historiography I practice.  It’ll be worth throwing some further speculation about the relationship between philosophy, sociology, and history on the long-term agenda for this blog.

My favorite sessions were probably those dedicated to the history of physics, a traditionally much-loved, recently little-loved field, which seems to be gaining a new methodology.  On Friday, there was a good session on “Divergent Struggles in the Evolution of Relativity” with Alberto Martinez, Scott Walter, and Daniel Kennefick, with commentary by Richard Staley.  Martinez’s talk gave a broad outline history of 19th-century kinematics, which really functioned along the lines of what I’ve been calling a “fluid taxonomy”—lots of actors, lots of variations on an intellectual theme, veering from practical engineering to the abstract theorization on the relativity of motion that Einstein picked up on.  This is historical work at its most useful, in my opinion, charting out little-known, but probably very important territories.

Walter’s work focused on the reception of relativity research enlivened in the 1990s by Andy Warwick.  This was less expansive than Martinez’s talk, but still focused on the content of scientific oeuvres rather than the creation of specific works, which is an important trend on the rise in the history of science.  I also liked the challenge to some of Warwick’s more particular conclusions about the pre-1918 “understanding” of relativity in Britain.  Kennefick’s talk was also good, as was Staley’s commentary, which focused on historiographical method.  Staley has a forthcoming book called Einstein’s Generation, which promises further focus on community and oeuvres.  We are scheduled to review it here.

On Sunday, there was also a good Heisenberg session with Suman Seth, Kristian Camilleri, Cathryn Carson, and David Cassidy, whose Uncertainty biography is a touchstone in the Heisenberg studies subfield.  I’m of the opinion that the historiographical balance is already pretty heavily weighted toward Heisenberg, but these talks show that there continues to be new questions to be asked, new methods to apply, and new material to be examined.  As Carson mentioned to me, there is a strong new emphasis on characterizing the day-to-day practice of physics and overall oeuvres (her talk had an interesting take on the “philosophical” nature of Heisenberg’s methodology).  This is methodologically complementary with say, Walter’s take on relativity, mentioned above.

I missed Seth’s talk, unfortunately, because I was dropping in on Princeton grad student Lindy Bowles’ talk on the history of the journal Nature.  I’ve seen a little of her work before from the Princeton-Harvard “PhunDay” workshop, and I like the way it’s shaping up as an examination of the evolving function of Nature in the scientific community.  Again, an emphasis on communities of actors where the details matter—as with Martinez’s talk, it needed a guide to the actors to keep things straight, which is the way things should be.

When I pick this post up in Pt. 2, I’ll give a quick shout-out to some work pertinent to my own interests before moving on to a session on 18th-century scientific spectacles. which I attended because of the reading on Schaffer I’ve been doing for this site.  I’ll also offer a few quick thoughts on Steven Shapin’s distinguished lecture, which will serve to open up a longer discussion of his work on this blog, including a book club series on his latest.

The Cambridge Senate House

The expansion in the population of calculus-users was made possible by new methods of mathematical training.  At Cambridge University, the center of new physics developments in England, the mathematical “tripos” examination, taken in the Cambridge Senate House at the end of students’ course of studies, shifted from an oral examination to a written one in the late 1700s, and began adopting Continental mathematics in the early 1800s.  Exam results were listed in an “order of merit” with the “wranglers” at the top (the “senior wrangler” being the highest rank), down through senior and junior “optimes” to the unranked “hoi polloi”.  The competitiveness of these exams, and the sophistication of response that could be recorded on paper, allowed the exams to become unprecedentedly difficult over the course of the 19th century, often including cutting edge results.

To cope with the difficulty of these exams, students preparing for the tripos had to undertake continual study, not only to absorb the mathematics, but to train their abilities to use it appropriately.  College lectures proved sorely inadequate for the task.  Students instead turned to private tutors, or “coaches”.

The term coach came from the speedy horse-drawn coaches that could, in the decade or so prior to the widespread use of the train, transport wealthy students between London and Cambridge (about 60 miles) in just four or five hours.  Cambridge mathematical coaches, likewise, provided students with the best route to a good examination performance.  Typically meeting in small groups in the coach’s private quarters or in a lecture hall (if coaches were also college lecturers), students would be taught useful methods and typical applications to different kinds of problems, including cutting-edge shortcuts that represented significant contributions to the mathematical literature when published.  Of course, students were expected to work diligently on prescribed exercises on their own, as well.

The university allowed students to use private tutors throughout their three-year exam preparation beginning in 1824.  The first coach to make a lifelong occupation from private tutoring was William Hopkins, seventh wrangler in the 1827 examination, who (ineligible to take a position at Cambridge because he was married) also became the dominant Cambridge coach of his generation, training the bulk of senior and upper-level wranglers.  Others were part-time coaches who were also fellows of one of Cambridge’s colleges.  By the 1850s, Hopkins began to lose his dominance to a new generation, including Percival Frost (senior wrangler 1839), Stephen Parkinson (senior wrangler 1845, beating out William Thomson), Isaac Todhunter (senior wrangler 1848), William Besant (senior wrangler 1850), William Steele (second wrangler 1852), and Edward Routh (senior wrangler 1854, beating out James Clerk Maxwell).  Todhunter, Steele, and Routh were themselves coached by Hopkins.

Edward Routh (1831-1907)

Edward Routh became far and away the dominant coach at Cambridge between about 1860 and the mid-1880s.  Of 990 wranglers graduating between 1862 and 1888, 48% were coached by Routh, including 26 senior wranglers; 80% of the top three wranglers between 1865 and 1888 were his (Warwick, p. 233).  Teaching more students more difficult material than ever before, Routh devised a regimented mathematical pedagogy with specialized material for students at various stages of their study and at various levels of ability.  The very best students would be given specialized instruction.

Routh and his students worked from early morning hours until late at night pausing largely only for meals and vigorous exercise, which was considered necessary to the maintenance of mental faculties.  Neither “teaching to the test” (as we would say now), nor providing a well-rounded liberal education, Routh and other coaches made their students live mixed mathematics, becoming masters of its tools and their proper application, which would allow them to perform well no matter what appeared on the test.  Students were run ragged by their mathematical instruction, but most developed a lasting affection for their coaches.  Coaches’ instruction established not only a lasting pedagogy of physics at Cambridge, it was the foundation of the culture of 19th and early 20th-century British physics theory.

The syllabi, problems, and pedagogical methods developed by Routh and other Cambridge coaches soon spread elsewhere as graduates of the tripos took up teaching positions outside of Cambridge.  The coaching system itself fell apart early in the 20th century after the order of merit was discontinued in 1909 and university lecturers began to adopt many of the methods pioneered in the coaching system.

—

This post is largely a distillation of arguments and material in Andrew Warwick’s superb Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (2003), which I have also listed as a candidate for a canonical source for the history of 19th-century physics.  Some inconsistencies in the text regarding wrangler status have been corrected using the Wikipedia list of senior and second wranglers.

Every good field needs an “orientation” text, and, in my experience, for this corner of history, Nye is it. Read chapters 1, 3, and 4 before Warwick and Smith, if you’re not familiar with the territory. Taking some advanced electricity and magnetism helps, too, to get a little “Fingerspitzengefuehl” in how physicists came to use mathematics in this period.

Warwick and Smith basically cover what has to be the most important shift in the history of physics in the 19th century, which is the importation of 18th century analytical techniques use in what was called “rational mechanics” primarily to study orbits (but also ordinary mechanics and hydrodynamics), as the route to the creation of valid theories. The primary entry point for analysis into non-mechanical physics is the science of energy, which established the fields of thermodynamics and electricity and magnetism. These two books, read in this order, will pretty much tell you everything you need to know about this shift, at least in Britain (German physics will be coming up).

Warwick is in my top 3 favorite history of science books of all-time, and is an excellent account of the cultural and intellectual shifts necessary to make physics into the heavily mathematical science that it has since become. Very few authors ever discuss the uses of mathematics, let alone the experience of using them. Warwick does both in a way that illustrates the watershed shift in what it meant to be a physicist, and what it meant to offer a physical theory, that took place in this period.

Smith (which I’ve actually never read before now) discusses the “program” that provided the entry point for this new kind of physics, the “North British” idea of energy, which drew on Continental engineering theory and the experimentation of James Joule, recruited little-known work by Mayer and Helmholtz on conservation of “Kraft”, systematized it in the fairly new Cambridge mathematical tradition, jibed it with geological theories about the history of the earth and the sun and attendant religious sensibilities, thereby creating an intellectual and social program (we should talk about this word “program” in the future; I find it very useful, but exploring its connotations would be worthwhile) that was capable of cementing a new scientific tradition.

Both works incorporate recent concern for social context in enlightening and highly specific ways. Both are extremely informative narrative accounts of topics of immense importance. Both concentrate largely on Britain, so we’ll need to supplement them with works addressing what was taking place on the Continent (I really would like to find a good source on 19c. French physics–any suggestions?). Still, these books beautifully illustrate what one could argue to be the most important change in physics over the course of the century, and if you had to choose just two books to read on the history of physics in this period, I think you could make a case that these would be the two to read. We’ll look at some good supplements in future posts.

So, a necessary context is some context necessary to arrive at a proper understanding of something; it provides a motivation. Situating something within a new necessary context can totally change why we see something as having taken place.

A generic context, on the other hand, enriches our understanding of a topic, but will rarely demand a wholesale change in the way we think about something. It describes a gross sort of contingency (i.e., 19th century natural history wouldn’t have existed in anything like the form it did without the imperialist project), or it provides an understanding of why something looks the way it does. Say there’s an operative metaphor or imagery in use that resonates with some other metaphoric tradition that has nothing to do with the history of the subject at hand. Oftentimes, a generic context is something we can safely take for granted, but it doesn’t have to be menial. For example, say we’ve never paid attention to a certain tradition of theory-making, a study of that tradition will tell us both about the theory in question, as well as about the context. However, in subsequent history (provided the original study has achieved canonical status), we can refer to this tradition off-hand, or even ignore it entirely.

A context of tradition speaks to us of a learned behavior. A scientist uses this sort of diagram, which goes back a century, or the tradition of spectroscopic analysis, or the tradition of anthropological characterization in terms of evolutionary principles.

A context of response speaks to us of a more reasoned response to some stimulus. Placing a theory in the context of a certain experiment tells us that to understand the motivation behind the theory, we have to be aware of such and such an experiment. To understand why science funding increased after 1957, we have to be aware of the launch of Sputnik.

So, when is contextual analysis worthwhile? A context of tradition, it seems to me, can move from being a necessary context, if it hasn’t been previously considered, to being a generic context, once the tradition becomes well-understood. Whereas, a context of response is always necessary (or is it?). So, it’s always worthwhile if we can learn about a new context. We can do this through a case study, or, better still, by making the context the subject of investigation itself. One of my favorite history of science books is Andy Warwick’s Masters of Theory. It could place, say, the work of the Maxwellians in the context of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, but it’s a much better book than that, because it turns the scenario around and make the Tripos (the ostensible context) the subject instead. Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks is a great book, but it’s maybe a bit awkward, because it’s framed around placing the special theory of relativity in the context of the technical challenges of the late-19th century, but the book ends up being about this context. The effect is to make much of the book seem extraneous to the central point of contextualizing relativity, until you realize that Galison has simply shifted the focus to the context.

Conversely, it’s rarely interesting to contextualize something for the sake of contextualization. To contextualize something significant (like the theory of relativity) is interesting only if the context is necessary. If it’s generic it’s less interesting. So, you could say, Einstein talked a lot about clocks in his 1905 relativity paper, and then say that clocks were everywhere in this period. But Galison goes beyond this, and shows that the problem of simultaneity was a deeply conceptual problem in this period–what could have been generic becomes necessary. However, if the subject is insignificant and is placed within a well-understood context, it’s not interesting. So, say someone placed some other uninfluential paper on time coordination within the context Galison illustrated, it would just come off as a cheap knockoff. That said, there might still be room for a definitive history of time coordination in the late 19th century not as context, but as subject, if there are actors and traditions that need to be made explicit, but not if it’s just a recapitulation of what Galison said.

So, where do we go next? Tuesday’s lecture is on History of Mathematics in the 1700s into the early 1800s. Bernoulli! Euler! Lagrange! Laplace! Fourier! Poisson! This is sort of a masochistic move, since to the best of my knowledge there is no real precedent for fitting the history of mathematics into the history of science. (In my education, at least, the 1700s as a whole tended to get skipped over, except for maybe the Enlightenment, which is two weeks from now). Plus, the material is so technical, that I have to figure out some digestible things to say about it.

Those historians of mathematics are sort of a breed apart, aren’t they? So, question of the day: how should the history of mathematics fit into the history of science as anything other than a series of discoveries. I’ll be damned if I’m going to project an image of Brook Taylor, and say, “This is Brook Taylor. He invented the Taylor series” and then, God forbid, define the Taylor series mathematically. I have two strategies in mind. First, emphasize mathematics as a theory-generating tool (I’m thinking Dave Kaiser and Andy Warwick here), and, second, do something about the shifting occupations of mathematicians. So, looks like I need to know more about the pre-Revolutionary Ecole Militaire.