New Books in the History of Science

From artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011) offers readers an intellectual and cultural history of Europe on the mechanical wings and flexing backs of its automata. Balancing a cognitive argument with careful historical contextualization, Minsoo Kang maps the landscape of self-moving entities as actual and conceptual objects. He allows us a glimpse into the many ways that these categorical anomalies, as perennial figures in what we might think of as a cultural imagination, have helped shape some of the most influential work in the history of science, literature, and ideas. Kang also offers many chapters worth of fascinating examples in this carefully curated cabinet of wonders. In the course of our conversation, we also spoke about the particular joys and challenges of balancing the work of a historian with a concurrent career in fiction writing, and debated the benefits of being an AM vs. PM writer. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method, the concept of a unified science, the increasing divergence of what we might translate as theoretical and practical scientific pursuits. Though these concepts will seem familiar to readers, Phillips’ careful study pays special attention to how science emerged and transformed in German-speaking Europe in very locally-specific ways. Following the transformation of Naturwissenschaft from an eighteenth century invention to a “rallying-cry” by the middle of the nineteenth century, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850 maps the relationships between the collective use of words, the development of concepts, and the creation and ramification of collective social sites. Phillips reveals a world of many distinct but overlapping publics, spanning private learned societies, technical academies, gardens, agricultural societies, and universities, among others. Phillips urges to move beyond simple binaries in our understanding of history, demonstrating that the conceptual and material foundations of modern science in German-speaking Europe, and the figures that populated its spaces, emerged out of border zones and juxtapositions. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“By error or by chance, I think I have discovered an angel.”First things first: Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a masterful, inspiring book. Rather than producing a biography of Hawking, which this is decidedly not, Helene Mialet‘s book encourages us to question the very possibility of knowing who Hawking is without taking away the agency of the man himself, ultimately helping readers reconsider how we think about individuality, embodiment, and personhood in extremely productive ways. Taking a beautifully cinematic approach, Mialet guides us through a series of chapters that help us understand different aspects of the production of Hawking and HAWKING (the distinction becoming clear in the course of the book and the interview) by looking at the machines, bodies, inscriptions, images, and movements that constitute Stephen Hawking. Together, the chapters explore the productive tensions and co-creations of the collective and the individual. Inspired by Actor-Network Theory but pushing it into new territory, Mialet’s study uses a thick description of Hawking’s “extended body” to allow us a glimpse into the formation, movement, and circulation of identity in general, in the sciences and potentially well beyond. What does it mean to say “he thinks”? What’s the difference between dealing with texts and people? How do we define what is “original” and how does that translate into the archive? Mialet’s work explores these and other questions in a series of ethnographic accounts and stories that are both fascinating to read and extremely helpful to think with. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and the Celestial Order (University of California Press, 2011) exhaustively examines the science of the stars in order to understand the problems that drove Copernicus and later engagements with Copernicanism. Far more than a reception study, Westman uncovers the practices, of prognostication and knowledge production, that delimited the conceptual space available to scholars of the stars and the innovative ways that they attempted to generate and secure astral knowledge. Building on his earlier identification of the Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus’s ideas Westman shows how confession, patronage, friendships and university networks all factored into the many faceted appeal of Copernican ideas, illustrating the difficulty of identifying a single unitary Copernicanism in the three generations after the first circulation of Copernicus’s own ideas. Painstakingly researched, often to the point of tracing who had access to which copies of books (and their all important annotations) the book asks us to re-evaluate the scientific revolution in favour of more nuanced understandings of early modern scientific movements.Dr. Westman has written a precis of the book that can be found at the Montreal Review . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), Avner Ben Zaken introduces readers to a wonderfully diverse cast of characters and texts to show how fundamental notions of modern science (and modernity in general) were established in cross-cultural exchanges across the globe. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 is a study of the ways that early modern science traveled among localities and cultures and was constituted by those travels, focusing on the example of post-Copernican cosmologies. In the course of this fascinating study, Ben Zaken considers what it means to talk about “incommensurable” cultures, and champions the historical power of the mundane and the marginal. Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism traces the composition, travels, and translation of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan as a way get at a history of debates about autididacticism in twelfth-century Marrakesh, fourteenth-century Barcelona, Renaissance Florence, and seventeenth-century England. This is an elegantly written and exhaustively researched world history of a single text on wildness, childhood, and nature, among many other themes that emerged and transformed in the very different contexts that the Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan was studied and engaged.Since these two books represent parts of a coherent intellectual project in progress, we spoke about them in both in terms of the broader issues that underpin Avner’s scholarly work. We talked a great deal about the craft of historical writing. Topics ranged from the opportunities and challenges of working at different historical scales and bringing micro- and macro-history into the same project, to how academic training leads young historians to study local cultures in a particularly monadic way. It was a very stimulating conversation for me, and I hope you’ll enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roger Hart‘s The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) is the first book-length study of linear algebra in imperial China, and is based on an astounding combination of erudition and expertise in both Chinese history and the practice and history of linear algebra. Alternating among an... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Should we really believe what our best scientific theories tell us about the world, especially about parts of the world that we can’t see?This question informs a long history of debates over scientific realism and the extent to which we trust what contemporary and future scientific theories tell us about unobservable phenomena. Using the history of science as an evidentiary archive, Kyle Stanford explores this set of problems in Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (Oxford University Press, 2006; paperback, 2010). He suggests that we reframe the problem as one of “unconceived alternatives.” Put briefly, if we look at the history of scientific inquiry we’ll see that scientists have repeatedly occupied an epistemic position from which they could conceive of only a fraction of the theories that would have been amply supported by existing evidence. Stanford develops this idea and demonstrates its significance via a series of case studies from the early history of theorizing about generation and inheritance, moving from Darwin’s “mad dream” to Galton’s rabbit transfusion experiments and Weismann’s theory of germ-plasm. Over the course of our conversation we talked, among other things, about the ways that a project like this can contribute to efforts to create a broader trans-disciplinary dialogue across the vast terrain of STS. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First things first: this was probably the most fun I’ve had working through an STS monograph. (Really: Who doesn’t like reading about Jurassic Park and King Kong?) In addition to being full of wonderful anecdotes about the film and television industries, David Kirby‘s Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011) is also a very enlightening exploration of the role of science consultants on television and in film, and the negotiations of expertise involved in relationships between scientists and the cinema. Scholars of STS will recognize some of the major themes that Kirby raises in the course of a fascinating look behind the scenes of the cinematic production of “science”: negotiated definitions of accuracy and plausibility, technologies of virtual witnessing, the social construction of knowledge. Many of the chapters will change the way you see representations of scientists and their work in the movies and on TV, and Kirby’s description of the filmic use of “diegetic prototypes,” or cinematic depictions of future technologies, is a stand-alone contribution in itself. This is a must-read for anyone interested in popular representations of science. Kirby describes the ways that visual media interpret, naturalize, and engage with scientific theories (be they well-accepted, controversial, or fantastical), and how some scientists in turn manipulate cinematic depictions for their own ends. Plus, have I mentioned how much fun it is?Check out David’s recent discussion of the film Prometheus!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) examines the ways that Californian engineers attempted to reshape their world in the late 19th century. Engineered irrigation appealed to both private individuals and the state as a way of mediating California’s competing interests, creating prosperity and fulfilling an American agrarian ideal. Ideas about irrigation, settlement and development circulated the world and Teisch shows how California’s experts circulated to Australia, South Africa and Palestine, frequently returning with new knowledge then applied to California. Despite their aspirations, few of California’s engineers were as successful as they wished but they had a lot to contend with. Teisch’s engineers inserted themselves into the tumultuous social transformations of the turn of the twentieth century, attempting to shape capitalism, all levels of government and even the developing nation state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Cheng‘s new book Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) uncovers the material and social circumstances that created the social phenomenon of American science fiction. To a population already enamored with the products of scientific research (aviation, automobiles and movies, for example), science fiction magazines offered opportunities for exploring science’s transformative potential, for re-imagining the boundaries of the social and the natural, and, importantly, for building communities. Cheng shows how science fiction readers consumed, produced, argued over and tried to integrate science fiction into their lives: some inspired to devote their lives to science, some inspired to write the Science Fiction Internationale. Historiographically sensitive, Cheng argues for detaching popular culture, and fan culture in particular, from a strong identification with consumption and for the importance of reading texts in their material contexts, while at the same time providing a sophisticated reading of the content of science fiction pulps. Cheng shows how stories about robots, aliens and time travel all reveal Americans’ concerns as science became integrated into American society demonstrating the need for the history of American science to be integrated with American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices