Lecture "The History of the Gene Concept," Neuburg an der Donau, annual meeting of the "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Theorie und Geschichte der Biologie," June 22-25, 1995.
Lecture "Population Genetic Dimensions of the Gene" annual meeting of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, Leeds, September 1-3, 1995.
Lecture "What is a Gene?," bi-annual meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, Leuven, July 19-23, 1995.
Lecture "Evolutionary Biology Today," Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, November 15, 1995.
Invited lecture "Prehistory and Cognitive Development," Twenty-Fifth Annual Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society, Berkeley, June 1 - 3, 1995
Director of the Arbeitsstelle "Albert Einstein" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (together with J. Renn).
Editor of the series Materialien zu den frühen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients (MSVO) (together with R. M. Boehmer, R. K. Englund und H. J. Nissen).
Lectures and seminars at the University of Chicago, Spring Quarter 1995.
Lecture "Preternatural Philosophy," delivered at conference on "The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Scientific Objects," Berlin, September 21, 1995.
Lecture "Nature by Design," delivered at the conference on "Histories of Science, Histories of Art," Boston, November 5, 1995.
Member of the Advisory and Editorial Boards for the international journals Isis, Critical Inquiry, and Science in Context and of the series Ideas in Context, Cambridge University Press.
Member of the International Advisory Boards: "Einstein Forum," Potsdam and "Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften," Wien.
Member of the organization committee of the conferences "The Knowing Body of the Scientist," (with Simon Schaffer and H. Otto Sibum) Berlin, August 1995 and "The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Scientific Objects," Berlin, September 20-23, 1995.
Member of the International Network of the Berlin Summer Academy.
Habilitationsvortrag "Methoden wissenschaftlichen Entdeckens," Hamburg, February 1, 1995.
Lecture "On Scientific Discovery," Stanford, American Association of Artificial Intelligence, March 28, 1995.
Lecture "The Discovery of the Urea Cycle," Tucson, April 14, 1995.
Lecture "The Use of New Technologies in the Humanities," Weinheim, April 21, 1995.
Lecture "Causal Reasoning," Herbstschule der Kognitionswissenschaft, Hamburg, October 9-13, 1995.
Member of the organizing committee of the 2nd conference of the Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft.
Member of the Advisory Board of a special issue on scientific discovery in Artificial Intelligence.
Head of the organizing committee of the "VI. Physikhistorische Tagung" March, 21 and of the conference "Emergence of Modern Physics," Berlin March 22-24, 1995 and lecture "DDR-Physik(er) im Spiegel der Physikalischen Blätter."
Lecture "Operation Epsilon und das deutsche Uran-Projekt," round-table der Tagung der "Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte," Greifswald, May 27, 1995.
Lecture "The Relations of German Scholars with Russian Scholars," conference "The Transmission of the Scientific Ideas to the Countries of the European Perephery During the Enlightment," of the Prometheus-Project, Delphi (Greece) July 21, 1995.
Lecture "Operation Epsilon -The Quest for Nazi Atomic Secrets," Physical Society of Island, Reykjavík, September 9, 1995.
Lecture "Operation Epsilon -The Quest for Nazi Atomic Secrets," St. Thomas University, Fredericton, September 12, 1995.
Co-organizer of the conference "Science under Socialism" and lecture "Robert Havemann - A Marxist Heretic," Conway, September 15-17, 1995.
Lecture "Hans Geiger - Pionier der Kernphysik," colloquium of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, Berlin, October 16, 1995.
Organizer of the session "German Scientists from Nazism to Socialism: Three Case Studies" of the Annual History of Science Society-Meeting and lecture "Scientist, Anti-Nazi, Stalinist, Dissident: Robert Havemann - A German Life," Minneapolis, October 29, 1995.
Lecture "Die Farm-Hall-Protokolle: Vom zeithistorischen Wert einer Archivalie," Hannover, November 19, 1995.
Head of the commission "Geschichte der Physik" of the "Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft."
Member of the Board of the commission "History of Physics" of the European Physical Society.
Secretary of the commission "History of Modern Physics" of the International Union for History and Philosophy/Division History of Science.
Member of the Board of the "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik e. V."
Member of the Board of the Physikalische Blätter.
Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the "Deutsches Museum Bonn."
Advisor for history of science matters to the "Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Braunschweig/Berlin."
Lecture "Peter Debye und die Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft," VI. Physikhistorische Tagung der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft, Berlin, March 22-24, 1995.
Lecture "Physik in Berlin vor der Jahrhundertwende im Kontext ihrer kommunikativen Strukturen; Eine Betrachtung zu möglichen Untersuchungsfeldern," colloquium "Wissenschaft und Stadt/ Region," Berlin, April 3, 1995.
Lecture "Hermann von Helmholtz und seine Bedeutung für die Physik," Kolloquienreihe zur Geschichte der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig sowie des Karl-Sudhoff-Instituts der Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, November 16, 1995.
Lecture "C. F. v. Weizsäckers Weg nach Strassburg," workshop "Die Wissenschaften in den Strassburger Universitäten 1872-1945," of the program "Histoire des Sciences et des Institutions scientifiques en Alsace," Strasbourg, December 7-9, 1995.
Lecture "Dreams and Self-consciousness. Mapping the Mind in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," symposium "The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Scientific Objects," Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, September 20-23, 1995.
Lecture "Traum und Selbstbewusstsein. Zur Kartographie der Seele im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert," Einstein Forum, Potsdam, December 12, 1995.
Lecture "E. F. Geoffroy's Tabelle stofflicher Beziehungen: Kulminationspunkt in der Herausbildung des chemischen Verbindungsbegriffs," conference of the Fachgruppe Geschichte der Chemie der Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, Bonn, March 16-18, 1995.
Lecture "Chemischer Atomismus und Formelschreibweise," Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftstheorie, Berlin, May 19, 1995.
Lecture "Experimental Practice and Layers of Knowledge in Early Modern Chemistry," international workshop "Fundamental Concepts of Early Modern Chemistry in the Context of the Operational and Experimental Practice," Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, June 16-18, 1995.
Lecture "Repräsentation durch Formeln in der Chemie des 19. Jahrhunderts," Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, September 13, 1995.
Lecture "Experiment, Repräsentation und chemische Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert," Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, October 31, 1995.
Organization of the international workshop "Fundamental Concepts of Early Modern Chemistry in the Context of the Operational and Experimental Practice" (together with W. Lefèvre), Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, June 16-18, 1995.
"Dissertationspreis" of the "Landkreis" of Konstanz, July 1, 1995.
Lecture "Die Historikerkongresse in der DDR" in the conference "Politik, Gesellschaft und wissenschaftliche Institutionen. Historikerkongresse im Vergleich," Universität Leipzig, Zentrum für höhere Studien/Alexander v. Humboldt-Stiftung/Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte e. V., Leipzig, October 27-28, 1995.
Organization of the international workshop "Fundamental Concepts of Early Modern Chemistry in the Context of the Operational and Experimental Practice" (together with U. Klein), Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, June 16-18, 1995.
Member of the Board of the "Internationale Hegel-Gesellschaft."
Lecture "Noncommutative Geometry and Discrete Physics," Universität Konstanz, November 16, 1995.
Referee for several international physics journals including Classical and Quantum Gravity, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Journal of Physics A, Physics Letters A.
Chair of session at the workshop "Gene Concepts and Evolution," Berlin, January 6, 1995.
Chair of session at the workshop "Fundamental Concepts of Early Modern Chemistry in the Context of the Operational and Experimental Practice," Berlin, June 16-18, 1995.
Member of the organizing committee of the "Fourth International Conference on the History of General Relativity," and lecture "Heuristics and Deductivity in Einstein's Discovery of the Gravitational Field Equation," Berlin, July 31, - August 3, 1995.
Chair of the round-table discussion "Vom Nutzen der Wissenschaftsgeschichte für Physiker und andere Zeitgenossen," Einstein Forum, Potsdam, August 2, 1995.
Commentator at the symposium "The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Scientific Objects," Berlin, September 20-23, 1995.
Lecture "History of Science as Historical Epistemology," workshop on "Current Trends in the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science," Budapest, November 6, 1995.
Director of the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (together with P. Damerow).
Editor of Science in Context (together with G. Freudenthal).
Member of the Editorial Board of Archimedes, New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
Member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
Member of the Scientific Committee of the "Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca in Filosofia e Fondamenti della Fisica" of the universities Bologna and Urbino.
Vice-Chair of the "Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte," Berlin.
Member of the International Network of the Berlin Summer Academy.
Member of the organizing committee of the Conference Series "Science and the Visual Image 1500-1800."
Adjunct Professor for history of science at Boston University.
Honorary Professor for history of science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Lecture "A bibliometric ageing study based on serial and non-serial reference literature in the sciences" (jointly with Wolfgang Glänzel) at the 5th Biannual Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, June 7-10, 1995, in River Forest.
Section chair of the "Workshop on Bibliometric Standards," June 11, 1995, in River Forest.
Member of the program committee of the 6th Biannual Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 1997 in Jerusalem.
Chairperson of the Committee on Scientometrics of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation.
Vice-chair of the Research Association for Science Communication and Information (RASCI).
Lecture "As Good as Gold," Cambridge, Symposium "The Achievement Project. Intellectual and Material Culture in Modern Europe," Churchill College, March 23-26, 1995.
Lecture "The Brewing Culture in James Joule's Heat Measurements," Royal Academy of Sweden, Stockholm, March 20, 1995.
Convener (with Lorraine Daston and Simon Schaffer) of the Summer Academy 1995 "The Knowing Body of the Scientist" and lecture "An Old Hand in a New System," Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, August 20-23, 1995.
Lecture "Civilised Engineering in Modern Practical Physics," workshop "Research Technology: Instrumentation for Science, State and Industry," Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung, Berlin, December 7-9, 1995.
Lecture "Manchesters Braukunst in James Joules Wärmemessungen," Universität Stuttgart, December 5, 1995 and Universität Hamburg, December 18, 1995.
Director of research project "Innovation, Historical Replication and Training in Classical Experimental Physics," British German Academic Research Collaboration Programme (British Council and German Academic Exchange Service, 1993 - March 1996).
Member of Board of the Interdivisional Group on "History of Physics" in the European Physical Society.
Lecture "Trust, Truth and Mathematics," sixth annual conference on "History of Mathematics," Universität Hamburg, October 29, 1995.
Member of "International Commission on the History of Mathematics."
Lecture "Theorieentwicklung und Experiment in Ampères Elektrodynamik," Universität Regensburg, November 14, 1995.
Lehrbeauftragter at the Philosophisches Seminar der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Lecture "Der Globus des Martin Behaim in zeitgenössischer Sicht," Verein für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, November 7, 1995.
Lecture "Neuzeitliche Transformationen der Gewalt. Zur Methodologie einer historisch vergleichenden Analyse von Gewalterfahrung und -verarbeitung," workshop "Gewalt im 17. Jahrhundert," Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, November 14, 1995.
Member of the Board of the "Willibald-Pirckheimer-Gesellschaft für die Erforschung von Renaissance und Humanismus."
Lecture "Emil Julius Gumbel - Die Widerspiegelung seines Lebens in der Weimarer Republik in Briefen," colloquium of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften und Karl-Sudhoff-Institut der Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, March 23, 1995.
Lecture "Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner (1871-1935) - Bakteriologin und erste Frau, der 1912 der Professorentitel verliehen wurde und Mutter dreier Kinder," Jüdischer Kulturverein zu Berlin, April 25, 1995.
Lecture "Wissenschaftlerinnen in der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft," colloquium of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, April 26, 1995.
Lecture "Paris-Lyon-Marseille - Stationen des Exils von Emil Julius Gumbel," colloquium of the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum, Potsdam, May 8, 1995.
Lecture "Die Berliner Gelehrten-Familie Remak - eine deutsch-jüdische Geschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert," 3rd conference of the Fachsektion Geschichte der Mathematik der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung, Rummelsberg, June 17, 1995.
Lecture "Nicht nur Lise Meitner - Wissenschaftlerinnen in Instituten der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft," Universität Jena, June 21, 1995.
Lecture "Zur Biographie Emil Julius Gumbels," Universität München, July 5, 1995.
Lecture (in Russian) "Jüdische Gelehrte, Mathematiker und Physiker in Berlin im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert," Jüdischer Kulturverein zu Berlin, August 17, 1995.
Lecture "`Auch Damen möchten den Doktorhut.' Zu den Promotionen von Frauen an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Berliner Universität zwischen 1898 und 1945," 78th annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik, Bonn, September 24, 1995.
Lecture "Nicht nur Lise Meitner - Österreicherinnen in Instituten der KWG," conference "999 years of Austria," Neuhofen/Ybbs, November 6, 1995.
Lecture (in Russian) "Albert Einstein und seine Beziehungen zu Deutschland," Jüdischer Kulturverein zu Berlin, November 16, 1995.
Lecture "Zu den naturwissenschaftlichen Promotionen von Frauen an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Berliner Universität zwischen 1898 und 1945 - Überblick und Einzelbeispiele," workshop "`Einbruch der Frauenzimmer in das gelobte Land der Wissenschaft', (Hedwig Dohm) - Zur Geschichte des Frauenstudiums und weiblicher Berufskarrieren an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin," Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, November 25, 1995.
Lecture "Chemikerinnen in der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zwischen 1910 und 1945," colloquium of the Institut für Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften, Universität Hamburg, December 11, 1995.
Lecture "`Mit ihr habe ich nicht geredet, nur mit ihrem Mann' - die Wissenschaftlerin Elena Timoféeff-Ressovskaja und ihr Verhältnis zu Deutschland," Osteuropa-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin, December 20, 1995.
Lecture "Ernst Machs Begriff der Wissenschaftsgeschichte," Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftstheorie, Berlin, February 24, 1995.
Lecture "Das notwendige Dritte," Eighth International Kant Congress, Memphis, March 1-5, 1995.
Lecture "Was bleibt von Friedrich Engels' Konzept einer Dialektik der Natur?," Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftstheorie, Berlin, September 7, 1995.
Lecture "Demokrit und die Quantenmechanik oder Erwin Schrödingers Rezeption des antiken Atomismus," Österreichische Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Vienna, October 19, 1995.
Marie-Noëlle Bourguet (Université de Paris 7)
is staying at the Institute from September 28, 1995 - February 3, 1996 as a visiting scholar funded jointly by the University of Paris 7-Denis Diderot and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
Her current research focuses on the history of scientific travel in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century and investigates the fieldwork practices of naturalists and explorers. Her study analyzes the knowledge produced by the making of herbals, maps, and tables, and examines how the diversity of the world has been explored and mastered through such practices. A general question underlines her research: how does one go from the local to the global; how was a universalist vision of a nature progressively substituted for the former images of discrete phenomena, heterogenous data and local curiosities?
Visiting the Institute offered her the opportunity to work on Alexander von Humboldt's manuscript notebooks, a microfilm copy and a transcription of which are available at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The research was specifically focused on Humboldt's notes on his daily measurements and calculations while travelling in South America.
Using Humboldt's material as well as other eighteenth-century travellers' narratives (such as Bouguer, La Condamine, Saussure), she is currently working with Christian Licoppe on the paper "Exact Measurements and Nomadic Instruments. Scientists on the Move and a New Experience of the World in the Enlightenment," to be presented at the conference on "Calculation, Chance and the Enlightenment" organized by the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Studies (February 23-24, 1996).
Finally, she is planning to write a book with Christian Licoppe and H. Otto Sibum at the Institute, in collaboration with three other scholars, on "Science, Voyages and Instruments. The Itineraries of Accuracy in the Natural Sciences in the Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries."
Michele Camerota (Università di Cagliari)
stayed from March 27 - May 27, 1995, and from November 16, 1995 - February 10, 1996 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His work focused on Galileo's manuscript 72, a codex now in the "Collezione Galileiana" at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. He worked on the development of an electronic edition of this manuscript, and prepared the transcription of the manuscript used for this edition. For a detailed account of the work, see the report about the electronic edition of the manuscript in the section "Electronic Research Tools and Databases."
Leo Corry (Tel-Aviv University)
stayed from August 15, 1994 - February 28, 1995 and from March 21, 1995 - May 18, 1995 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. His work at the Institute was concerned with Hilbert's approach to general relativity and is described in detail in section b of the research activities "The Relativity Crisis and the Reorganization of Classical Knowledge on Gravitation." During his stay at the Institute, he also wrote preprint no. 19, "The Kuhnian Agenda and the History of Mathematics."
Berna Kilic Eden (University of Chicago)
is staying from September 1, 1995 - October 31, 1996 as a predoctoral research fellow at the Institute. Her research focuses on the claim that frequency conceptions of probability provide an objective interpretation of probability. She is reassessing that claim by considering the first formulations of the frequency theories of probability around the middle decades of the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill, R. L. Ellis, A. A. Cournot, George Boole, John Venn and Charles Sanders Peirce. The quest for objectivity in their studies of probability can be related to developments within contemporary psychology, logic, moral sciences and biology. Two trends turn out to be of primary significance in that contemporary context: anti-psychologism and historicism. Anti-psychologism refers to the ways in which a psychological understanding of cognition was barred from philosophy of logic as either irrelevant or misleading. Anti-psychologism started to take root in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when several logicians and psychologists no longer countenanced logic and psychology as concordant or complementary disciplines. Since probability theory was an integral part of logic according to many frequentists, the investigation of the tension between logic and psychology provides valuable insights into the process by which the concept of probability became bifurcated into objective and subjective probabilities. The second intellectual trend to have a bearing on the philosophy of probability was historicism, which was entrenched by developmental theories in biology, culminating in the works of Charles Darwin. The research project reveals the consequences of the ensuing tension between what the historian John Theodore Merz called the genetic and the statistical views of nature. The latter view, which was conceptualized by the frequentists into a theory of probability, was premised on the assumption that there were fixed categories of being; populations whose boundaries could be clearly delineated. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, depicted a universe in which there was only historical development. The research project analyzes how frequentism could retain its claim to objectivity in this new vision of the universe in which the conceptions of natural kinds and universals needed to be reassessed in a radical manner.
Yehuda Elkana (Tel-Aviv University, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich)
stayed from July 1, 1995 - August 30, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. He continued to work on a problem-oriented theory of culture, which does not distinguish between history, philosophy, and the sociology of science, or of knowledge, as separate disciplines. This is a comparative epistemology which is dialectical and hermeneutic, and which combines relativism and realism.
This research grew into a longitudinal study of "Rethinking - not Unthinking - the Enlightenment," a broad topic around which an international workshop was convened at the Institute in November 1995.
He presently works on a study of Ernst Cassirer, seeing him an early, and perhaps reluctant, anthropologist of ideas. Far from being a neo-Kantian and a pure idealist philosopher, it is argued that Cassirer tried to see his own Enlightenment tradition in socio-political terms, and tragically, in his biography, clung to such ideas. Yehuda Elkana's critique of the Enlightenment follows from this study of Cassirer.
Johannes Fehr (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich)
stayed from April 1 - September 30, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. In this time, he prepared parts of a research project on "Processes of Transformation of External Representation Systems of Scientific Thought," which will be carried out under the responsibility of Y. Elkana, H. Nowotny, O. Besomi and E. Hohlenstein at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, in cooperation with the Institute.
It is generally recognized by philosophers and historians of science that the development and employment of specific means of representation constitute a substantial part of the scientific practice. But the exact role these means of representation (language, writing, symbolic notation systems, diagrams, etc.) play in the processes of acquiring and structuring knowledge does not seem yet sufficiently understood. One of the aims of the project is to provide a survey of the different conceptions of the cognitive role of external (as opposed to internal, or mental) representation prevailing today in various scientific disciplines, as well as in the philosophy and history of science. To this end, Johannes Fehr modified a bibliographic database developed at the Institute to meet the specific needs of the project.
In June 1995, Johannes Fehr participated in a symposium on "Reihe und System" in the Akademie für Musik und Theater in Hannover, where he presented a paper entitled "Die Linearität des sprachlichen Zeichens - Serie und System bei Ferdinand de Saussure." In September 1995, he presented his work on "Geographische Linguistik: Ein Ausgangspunkt der Semiologie Ferdinand de Saussure" in the Institute's internal colloquium. Both papers placed special emphasis on possible ways of dealing with external representation systems from an historical-epistemological perspective.
During his stay at the Institute, he wrote preprint no. 23, "Saussure: Zwischen Linguistik und Semiologie."
Jöran Friberg (University of Göteborg)
stayed from January 15, 1995 - July 15, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. During his stay, he performed research on mathematical thinking in ancient civilizations, focused on five particular topics.
1. His project on "round and almost round numbers" started out as an investigation of a phenomenon he had observed in Mesopotamian proto-literate administrative texts from the time of the very first script (proto-cuneiform, about 5000 years ago). The observed phenomenon was that in many of the more complex early texts the grand total was an "almost round number," by which he means a large and round number increased by a small integral fraction of itself. A typical example is the proto-cuneiform area number 11 bur 2 eshe = 11 bur = (1+ ) . 10 bur = (1+ ) . 1800 square ninda, where the ninda is the basic unit of length, while bur and eshe are large units of area. The almost round area number in this example can also be written in the factorized form . 1800 sq. ninda = 7 . 300 sq. ninda.
In his report "Round and Almost Round Numbers in Proto-Literate Metro-Mathematical Field Texts," published under the same title as preprint no. 22, he investigated the whole corpus of proto-literate "field texts" containing large area numbers (proto-cuneiform or proto-elamite texts, archaic texts from Ur, early stone tablets) and showed that it is the rule, not the exception, that such large area numbers are almost round. He has suggested explanations for this curious fact, including the conjecture that a certain clever "proto-literate field-sides algorithm" was used for the computation of areas of rectangular fields.
In the sequel to this first research report he is able to show that the initial use of almost round numbers was one of the seeds out of which Mesopotamian mathematics eventually grew. Thus, he has shown the substantial role that such numbers played in several categories of Old Akkadian and Old Babylonian mathematical texts, and that the origin of Old Babylonian "geometric algebra" can be explained as a consequence of the use "in reverse" of the proto-literate field-sides algorithm. Briefly, the final result of this research project is the conclusion that Old Babylonian mathematics (around 1800 B. C.) owed much of its substance and some of its characteristic (even peculiar) features to a tradition that had its roots in the proto-literate period (before 3000 B. C.).
2. Jöran Friberg's work on Old Babylonian "figurative algebra" grew out of his preparations for his role as a public opponent at Jens Høyrup's defense of his Fil Dr. dissertation (habilitation) Mellem Gåde og Videnskab [Between Riddle and Science] in Roskilde, Denmark, on March 30, 1995. He has been able to give new interpretations in the style of Høyrup's "naive geometry" of the Babylonian treatment of problems involving pairs of linear equations. He has also improved Høyrup's explanation of the Babylonian way of handling indeterminate linear equations by showing how the general (parametric) solution of such an equation was expressed in some Babylonian mathematical texts and how it sometimes could be used in order to set up quadratic equations.
3. In his third research topic, concerning counting with bricks (see preprint no. 32), he was able to approach Babylonian mathematical texts dealing with bricks from a new direction. This success came after a study of various brick parameters, the "molding," "carrying," and "laying" numbers, and of the values of these parameters for ten types of bricks documented in mathematical or administrative cuneiform texts. Nearly all such texts have remained badly understood until now. Among the particularly interesting results achieved are new interpretations of problems about bricks for the steps of a ramp, and of a table of an apparently nonsensical table of constants which actually has to do with a "combined work norm" for carrying mud and molding bricks.
4. The work on pyramids and cones in Babylonian, Chinese, Greek and Indian mathematical texts (see preprint no. 29) is still in progress. A preliminary report was presented under the title "Some Glimpses of a Common Tradition in Ancient Mathematics" at the Workshop on the Cultural History of Mathematics and Informatics at the Freie Universität Berlin, July, 1995.
It was previously not known with certainty if Babylonian mathematicians knew the formulas for the volumes of pyramids and truncated pyramids. A new Old Babylonian mathematical "topic text," found this spring by Farouk al-Rawi in the collections of the British Museum, in a search program he initiated, quite unexpectedly shows that these and other formulas, including the correct formulas for the volumes of cones, truncated cones and generalized pyramids, were indeed known by the Babylonians. This new find led him to the discovery of the correct interpretation of one of the Susa texts, which shows that Babylonian mathematicians were familiar with a certain partition of a triangular prism into a rectangular and a triangular pyramid. This partition of a prism plays a crucial role in ancient Chinese and Greek proofs of the formulas for the volume of a pyramid. Hence both Book 12 of Euclid's Elements and Chapter 5 of the Chinese mathematical classic Nine Chapters can now, unexpectedly, be shown to have Babylonian predecessors.
5. The work on a re-edition of the famous Old Babylonian mathematical texts from Susa, originally published by Bruins and Rutten in TMS = Textes Mathematiques de Suse (1961), has been carried on intermittently, since several of the Susa texts are related to and play important roles in the preceding topics. It can be mentioned here, for instance, that the Susa text TMS 5 is related to the topic "round and almost round numbers," TMS 7-8, 16, and 19 to the topic "figurative algebra," TMS 3 to the topic "counting with bricks," and TMS 14 to the topic "pyramids and cones."
Martin Gierl (Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen)
is staying from October 1, 1995 - September 30, 1996 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. He is currently working on the history of numismatics in the eighteenth century. Collecting ancient antiquities, works of art, and natural objects was one of the most important activities leading to the emergence of the sciences in early modern Europe. Coins and medals constituted an essential part of the collections. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the methods, practices and forms of collecting and categorizing coins resembled in many ways those used for natural objects. Martin Gierl's research focuses on the impact of coin collecting on the development of a scientific network as well as on the establishment of common practices of categorizing. More specifically, his project traces the development of numismatics into a "science" with its own specific methods, and analyses the importance of this discipline for eighteenth-century scientific practice. The study also describes some aspects of the dissolution of the former scientific system and analyzes the social function and scientific practices of the numismatists in order to illuminate the consequences of the cultural turn from a humanistic orientation to an enlightened one. Closely related to this work is the study of the impact of coin studies on the contemporary historiography, which was a central feature of the enlightened public sphere. Coins and medals were not only used as "normal" sources, historians also used them in order to establish the importance of an historical event. They did not only serve as illustrations but also as an indisputable proof of a given historical interpretation. Therefore, one of the most important tasks of the study is to determine those characteristics of coins that allowed their use as historical evidence. This then leads to an investigation of the procedures that the numismatists applied to analyze and categorize their objects in order to grant them historical importance. More generally, the study hopes to gain some insights into what the notion of proof meant to scholars in that period.
Wolfgang Glänzel (Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest)
is staying from July 1, 1995 - February 29, 1996 at the Institute as a visiting scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research interests include distribution theory and mathematical models in information science and scientometrics. His present Humboldt project is focused on two scientometric topics which contribute to the scholarly activities of the Library of the Institute.
The first topic is concerned with the scientific literature based on "bibliographic coupling." This approach considers scientific papers related if they share a certain part of source documents indicated in their reference lists. A new methodology aims at the identification of so-called core documents, defined by the number and strength of bibliographic links. Core documents are important nodes in the network of documented science communication and have proven to be topics of great importance for current research. The results are applicable to both research evaluation and science information.
The second research topic examines the possibility of applying scientometric standard techniques to the social sciences. Scientometric methods were originally developed to measure and characterize quantitative aspects of science communication and science policy in basic research in the life and hard sciences. Their application to technology, mathematics and social sciences is, however, controversial. In a joint project with Urs Schoepflin, the structure of reference literature in the selected science and social science fields is analyzed to find deviations in the information use in those fields. In contrast to science and technology, a great part of cited information in the social sciences originates in non-scientific literature. The question, then, is to what extent citation-based statistics have to be modified to provide valid results in the social sciences.
Finally, during his stay at the Institute he edited the proceedings of the "Workshop on `Bibliometric Standards'," held on June 11, 1995, in River Forest (USA). The proceedings will be published as a special issue of the journal Scientometrics.
Hubert Goenner (Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen)
stayed from November 7, 1995 - February 28, 1996 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. In the four months, he worked on projects dealing with Einstein's historical role as a prominent public figure and with Einstein's political biography, part of section c of the research activities "The Relativity Crisis and the Reorganization of Classical Knowledge on Gravitation."
Further activities were concerned with Einstein's role as an organizer of science, in the context of the research activities "The Quantum Crisis and the Reorganization of Research Strategies in Classical Physics."
Catherine Goldstein (Université de Paris Sud)
stayed from February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. She is a researcher from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS - URA D752 at the University of Orsay) and worked at the Institute within the framework of a joint program between the CNRS and the Max Planck Society.
Her research examines the development of a social history of mathematical concepts, with the work of Norbert Elias as a point of departure, and focuses in particular on number theory. She tries to articulate, through a close analysis of systematically chosen sets of mathematical texts, the construction of mathematical notions and tools (e.g. the method of infinite descent, the notion of "ideal number," the use of analytic functions and geometrical representations in problems concerning numbers), the concrete practices of mathematical activities and their representations.
During her stay at the Institute, she worked on a book on the various readings of a fundamental number theoretical proof in the seventeenth century, usually considered a founding event in the field. The comparative study of its interpretations in different communities (contemporary mathematicians, historians of science in the nineteenth century, logicians and scientists using this result as a paradigm) allows a demonstration of the heterogenous and intrinsically social nature of a technical text, and an analysis of the relationships between the writing of history and the development of mathematics. For instance, the crucial role of the research of a "method" at that time structured specific activities on numbers, inducing some mathematicians like Descartes to neglect arithmetic in favor of problems capable of being posed in algebraic terms, and some others like Frenicle de Bessy to neglect the emerging symbolic algebra in favor of a method more adapted to the treatment of integers. The defining role of such a second method has been underestimated in the usual narratives about number theory in this period, and Goldstein's book analyzes in detail where and how it has been important even at the most technical level. She reported on this work in an internal colloquium at the Institute, "Umgang mit Zahlen," on July 19, 1995.
A more theoretical side issue of this analysis is an attempt to redefine a "context" in the history of mathematics, and its use as a reflexive, dynamical tool. In this context, she focuses on two crucial issues: exploring the bounds between the forms of sociability in mathematical communities and the results they produce (studied in the case of Mersenne's network of correspondence in the seventeenth century and in the case of French number theorists between 1870 and 1914); and examining the problem of shaping and writing a "long term history" of notions and concepts (exemplified in the notion of circle and in Fermat's Last Theorem). She reported on this work in an internal Institute colloquium on the "Writing of the History of Mathematics."
During her stay at the Institute, she also worked on a database devoted to a comparative multi-level study of number theory in France and Germany between 1870 and 1914, its development and diffusion, and on the theoretical problems related to the application of statistical, quantitative methods in history of mathematics.
Michael Hagner (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
is staying from November 1, 1995 - October 31, 1997 as a visiting scholar and Heisenberg Fellow at the Institute. His research interests are focused on the construction and transformation of scientific objects in the experimental life sciences, mainly in eighteenth and nineteenth-century brain research and in teratology. One project deals with the passing away of the older concept of the organ of the soul and its replacement by the idea of a differentiated and complex brain around 1800. This shift not only gave way to what we understand as neurosciences, it also shaped the idea of a "cerebralisation of man," which (with the concept of evolution) can be regarded as a basic formula of the modern scientific conceptions of humans. A related project is focused on the transformation of monstrosities in the late-eighteenth century. While monstrous bodies were regarded as sources of irritation in enlightened natural history, they were incorporated in the epigenetic embryological discourse. This shift also led to fundamental revisions in the modern understanding of human beings.
Mario Helbing (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich)
Mario Helbing is staying from January 16, 1995 - January 16, 1996 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His research focuses on the terminology of preclassical mechanics, and is related to the research project "The Relation of Practical Experience and Conceptual Structures in the Emergence of Science."
In 1995, Mario Helbing attended two research seminars. The first one, organized by Pier Daniele Napolitani (Department of Mathematics, University of Pisa) in Pisa (June 30 - July 2, 1995) was devoted to Galileo's De motu antiquiora. The second one, run by Pierre Souffrin (Observatoire de Nice), took place in Nice (November 15-16, 1995) on Galileo Galilei's mechanical work.
Blahoslav Hruka (Oriental Institute and the Charles University, Prague)
stayed from August 1, 1995 - October 31, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His current research concentrates on two areas of cuneiform studies (assyriology) and history: first, the evolution of technological practices in agricultural areas of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and second, the reconstruction of the Sumerian system of agriculture. During his stay at the Institute, he sought to prepare an overview by weaving the disparate, more than 4000 years old written sources into a reasonable tapestry, in which much detail in one part is necessarily juxtaposed with bare spots in other areas. The resulting picture may be impressive and convincing in part, but due to the lack of certain critical information, the whole is still essentially incomplete and liable to fundamental revisions, depending on changes of perspective or the emergence of new information. The outcome is, therefore, unbalanced. On the one hand, the natural environment is underrepresented in the sources that are available, while on the other hand, the human interventions into the environment are relatively well known. Most of the cuneiform documents pertaining to agriculture deal with the centralized (temple and/or palace) administration of land and labor.
Blahoslav Hruka also uses archaeological and ethnological sources to get a more complete picture. These sources turned out to be especially valuable for the reconstruction of the nature and function of agricultural tools for cultivation and harvesting, but less so for the reconstruction of the processing of agricultural products. In his investigations of ancient Sumerian agriculture, he also employed a variety of studies about modern Middle Eastern farmers and their traditional agricultural practices. It is, however, the information from literary texts (as opposed to economic texts) that has surprisingly proved most enlightening. The Sumerian Georgica (The Farmer's Instructions), the debates between the hoe and the plough and between the ewe and grain (literary compositions from the third and second millennium B.C.) contain many useful observations of a practical nature that are not found elsewhere.
During his stay at the Institute, he reported on his work in an internal colloquium, "Die sumerische `Georgica' - Dichtung und Wahrheit," on October 11, 1995, and wrote preprint no. 26, "Sumerian Agriculture: New Findings."
Thomas Hughes (University of Pennsylvania)
stayed from August 14, 1995 - September 15, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute, examining German sources on the spread of machine metaphors in the realms of art, economics, and politics during the Second Industrial revolution, 1870-1930. This theme will form part of the Page Barbour Lectures to be delivered at the University of Virginia in fall 1995, on "Second Creation, Mechanization, and Control: Metaphors Shaping Modern History." As President of the Rathenau Program Network, Thomas Hughes also participated in the Berlin Summer Academy (see "Workshops and Conferences").
Michel Janssen (University of Pittsburgh, Boston University)
stayed from May 22 - August 3, 1995 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. His research deals with the transition from classical to special and general relativistic physics in the early decades of this century. During his stay at the Institute, he focused on two specific topics in this area. The first focus was on the problem of rotation in the demise of the precursor theory of general relativity, Einstein's so-called "Entwurf" theory, and is described in detail in section a of the research activities "The Relativity Crisis and the Reorganization of Classical Knowledge on Gravitation." A second focus of his research - in connection with his dissertation project for the History and Philosophy of Science department at the University of Pittsburgh - was his critique of the extensive and often confusing secondary literature on the development of Lorentz's so-called theorem of corresponding states. A presentation and discussion of this work helped further refine his interpretation of this crucial development in pre-relativistic electrodynamics, a development which revealed properties of the fundamental laws of electromagnetism that from a special relativistic point of view directly reflect the new space-time structure posited by that theory.
Edward Jurkowitz (University of Toronto)
is staying from December 1, 1995 - December 31, 1996 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. He contributes mainly to the research activities "The Quantum Crisis and the Reorganization of Research Strategies in Classical Physics." He is also assisting Jürgen Renn in writing an integrative overview of the history of quantum theory.
In addition to working on the project on the history of quantum physics, Edward Jurkowitz is finishing one paper and writing a second on the history of superconductivity. The first, "From Surface Energy to Macroscopic Quantum Coherence," describes the process by which multi-sided research exploring the surface energy between superconducting and normal regions of a superconducting body led to a range of ways of conceptualizing what later came to known as `coherence.' The divergent approaches to the phenomenon taken by different low temperature laboratories, and by theorists and experimentalists are examined. The complex intermingling of classical ideas, phenomenological theory and quantum mechanical approaches characterizing different groups' approaches are analyzed in order to give a structured account of research in this field. Also examined are the interactions between theorists and experimentalists, and the different languages - classical and quantum - that they deployed to describe superconductivity.
The second paper describes the relationship between theory and experiment at the Institute for Physical Problems (Moscow). An analysis of the relationship between theorists and experimentalists at the laboratory, and the institutes' position within the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, is used to provide an interpretation of the work done there.
In a further project, the reaction of the Berlin physicists to the advent of quantum mechanics is being reconsidered.
In addition, Edward Jurkowitz has given lectures on "Aspects of Laboratory Culture in the Soviet Union: the Relationship of Theory and Experiment at the Institute for Physical Problems (Moscow)," at Harvard University and the University of Illinois (at Chicago), and organized a session for the American History of Science Society Meeting (1996) entitled "Cultural Meanings of the Quantum: Making and Interpreting the `Quantum Revolution'."
Alexei Kojevnikov (Institute for History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Science, Moscow)
stayed from October 16, 1995 - December 15, 1995 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. He is working on two long-term projects. The first one deals with the history of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics in the 1920's and 1930's. During his stay at the Institute, he worked on "Philosophy in Early Quantum Mechanics: High-Principled Opportunism, Cultural Values, and Academic Ritual," a paper which analyzes stances on interpretational issues taken by main creators of the quantum mechanics in 1925-1927 and reconsiders the role traditionally ascribed to this philosophical discourse in the process of developing quantum theory. He is also participating in discussions on the Institute's research activities for "The Quantum Crisis in the Reorganization of Research Strategies in Classical Physics," and is going to contribute a study of Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen.
The second project deals with the history of physics in Russia and the USSR in the twentieth century and attempts to explain why physics was so successful in the Soviet Union under the conditions of political dictatorship, international isolation, and the denial of academic autonomy. Kojevnikov's book Stalin's Great Science: The Historical Phenomenon of Soviet Physics will soon appear in Moscow. During his stay at the Institute, Alexei Kojevnikov worked on the final version of his paper "President of Stalin's Academy: The Mask and Responsibility of Sergei Vavilov," which is appearing in the March 1996 issue of Isis.
During his visit to the Institute, Kojevnikov gave the following talks at colloquia and conferences: "Games of Soviet Democracy: Ideological Discussions in Sciences around 1948" at the Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte, Universität Tübingen, and also at the Institute; "Constructivism and Egalitarian Democratic Control from a Historical Perspective" at the conference "Democratic Control of Scientific and Technological Research: Principles, Possibilities, and Limitations," at the University of Oslo; and "Philosophy in Early Quantum Mechanics" at the conference "Physics, Industry, Philosophy: 1900-1930," at Cambridge University.
Cheryce Kramer (University of Chicago)
is staying from September 1, 1995 - August 31, 1996 as a predoctoral research fellow at the Institute. She is currently writing a dissertation on the institutional culture of Illenau, one of the first purpose-built psychiatric asylums in Germany. She spent the first three months of her stay in Germany at the State Psychiatric Hospital in Emmendingen doing research on the Illenau patient records and assembling material from various archives in the region. Her research activities in southern Germany were reported in two newspaper articles ("Badische Zeitung," 13.10.95 and "Renscher Zeitung," 14.11.95) which had the fortunate consequence of drawing her to the attention of several people with private collections of Illenau memorabilia. She contributes to the research activities of the Institute by attending the regular seminars as well as the life sciences group. She is currently exploring the following themes: 1) emergence of psychiatry as a medical profession, 2) cultural significance of early psychiatric asylums, 3) forms of observation arising within asylum practice, and 4) historical specificity of the experience of madness per se.
Christian Licoppe (Centre National d'Études des Télécommunications, Paris)
stayed from December 7, 1995 - December 22, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His research examines the history of experiments in eighteenth-century France. During his stay at Institute, he held a colloquium on "Instruments, Precision Measurements, Bodies, Space and Time in Late Eighteenth Century French Science." His current project is the rise of precision measurement in eighteenth-century experiments.
Alexandre Mallard, (École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation)
is staying from October 1, 1995 - September 30, 1996 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. His scientific interests are centered on instruments as mediators in the transformation of practice. His dissertation examined how instruments are constructed and how they frame activity in technical as well as in scientific contexts, using car repairs and air-pollution measurement as case studies. His current project focuses on the role played by instrument makers in the transfer and industrialization of products of research, and seeks to better understand the processes of diffusion of scientific practices.
In the recent years historians, philosophers and sociologists have shown a growing interest in describing the practical details of experiments, and in analyzing the way in which instruments contribute to the elaboration and accumulation of knowledge. Alexandre Mallard's study examines the patterns of industrialization of instruments from this perspective, and will complement the analyses of laboratory practices already available in many sociological and historical accounts by using the sociology of scientific knowledge as a theoretical and methodological framework. At the heart of the project lie the issues of the variety of innovation patterns, of the treatment of experimental know-how, and of interactions between science and the market. The inquiry will try to follow some instruments or processes from their original experimental purpose in one laboratory to other laboratories or industrial sites, where they are used either as black-boxed equipment or are mass produced and commercialized by instrumentation firms.
His current research has concentrated on places where empirical fieldwork can be conducted in the Berlin area. He has made contact with the Transferstelle der Technischen Universität Berlin, which collects products developed by groups of scientists (equipment, processes, software, methods) seeking cooperation and partnership with industry. The Transferstelle's activities cover all disciplines of the Berlin universities, serves as the type of interface between science and industry that needs to be investigated for the project, and thus offers a fruitful starting point for identifying projects for further examination.
John Andrew Mendelsohn (Princeton University)
is staying from October 15, 1995 - October 15, 1996 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. His dissertation, "Cultures of Bacteriology: Formation and Transformation of a Science in France and Germany, 1870-1914," has led him to further work on the history of epidemiology and early immunology. He is now concentrating on the origins of the concept of immunity and the great Franco-German debate over cellular and humoral mechanisms of immunity, 1880-1905.
Sybilla Nikolow (Centre de Recherche de l'Histoire Science et Technique, Paris)
is staying from September 14, 1995 - September 15, 1996 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute, contributing to research activities on the history of scientific objectivity. Her particular focus is the history of visual and graphical representations in the sciences and their bearing on the question of objectivity. The focus of her work is how graphical techniques developed between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries and how they were employed to illustrate statistical data and facts. At this time, graphs and diagrams were no longer only used to illustrate scientific facts, but also to reduce, analyze and interpret data, and thus to produce new scientific facts and arguments. The politics of the modern use of graphical representation consisted of making the objectivity of the data immediately visible.
The visual graphic project, entitled "Die anschauliche Sprache der Daten," investigates the visual rhetoric utilized by advocates of the graphical representation in three case studies. At the center of the rhetorical analysis are questions of how statistical data and facts achieve visual credibility and persuasive force. In exploring these two questions, it became clear that credibility resulted from the use of objectified algorithms, which yield scientific objectivity as if produced mechanically by symbolic machines. The force of persuasion is derived from the graphs and diagrams semantically enriched with notions and images in order to link them to intuition ("Anschauung") and make them understandable and communicable.
The first case study examines the relational graphs of the German cameralist August Friedrich Wilhelm Crome around 1800. Like Playfair in England, he employed regular forms like circles and rectangles to visualize the extent of surface, population and other public resources of different states in order to compare them. This practice took place at the cross section of philanthropic enlightenment pedagogy, comparable methods of the cameralism and political science ("Kameral- und Staatswissenschaften") and the novel thematic mapping of social and economical activities. The second case study investigates the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1911, where more than 4,000 graphical representations of different kinds were employed. The graphic riches of the Dresden Exhibition are a striking example of the visual culture called "Volksaufklärung mit Bildern" as well as of the advertising skills of the organizer of the exhibition, the producer of the mouthwash Odol Karl August Lingner. The aim of using graphical representations in this case was to objectify popular and scientific discussion about the recent developments in hygiene, for example the decline in the birth rate. The third case study deals with the "Bildstatistik" of Otto Neurath, a universal visual language which he developed in the 1920's and 1930's for public education.
She also contributed the paper "Staatswissenschaften in der Kaiserzeit" to a project initiated at the Université "Louis Pasteur" de Strasbourg on the history of the scientific institutions in Elsace between 1850 and 1950. The study is structured as a collective biography of Wilhelm Lexis, Gustav Schmoller, Lujo Brentano and Friedrich Knapp, professors for social sciences and political economy at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität in Strasbourg during the German reign between 1872 and 1918, and also some of the most influential social scientists at this time in Germany.
Brian W. Ogilvie (University of Chicago)
is staying from September 1, 1995 - July 31, 1996 as a predoctoral research fellow at the Institute. His research focuses on the phenomenology of experience and observation in early modern natural history, in particular botany. His dissertation, in contrast to older historiography, examines the structure of experience and the practices of observation, rather than taking these as primitive, unproblematic categories whose meaning is always and everywhere the same. It fits into the broad framework of recent literature on the culture of early modern natural history but stresses the careful investigation of European plants and animals rather than introductions from the New World and Asia, and the close attention which naturalists devoted to ordinary, common objects as well as to the strange, marvelous, and foreign.
Dorinda Outram (University of Cambridge and University College Cork)
is staying from September 15, 1995 - September 15, 1996 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. Her research focuses on the relationship between the Enlightenment and the new scientific knowledge produced by exploration of the non-European world in the eighteenth century by men such as Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Reinhold Forster, Cook and Bougainville. Exploration science contributes to Project "The Varieties of Scientific Experience" of Department II, since it explores a great variety of scientific experience within the confines of a particular activity. Direct observation under field conditions and making large-scale series of instrumental readings are both part of exploration experience. Equally, the collection of specimens of plants and animals to send back to metropolitan institutions contributed greatly to the institutional development of science in Europe, and enabled much broader claims about taxonomy and distribution to be made than before. The correlation of large-scale series of instrument readings gathered during exploration also led to a new understanding of the climate and of geophysics. Exploration science also raises broader questions concerning historical epistemology, questions such as the reasons for the acceptance of exploration knowledge as real and legitimate knowledge. How are others persuaded to accept experiences and observations which they have not experienced? What beliefs about facticity, observation and generalization in the society at large, and in its scientific culture in particular, are mobilized in order to persuade?
Katharine Park (Wellesley College)
is staying from September 1, 1995 - January 31, 1996 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. She and Lorraine Daston finished the principal draft of their co-authored book Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, which involved significantly revising five chapters, helping to compose an introduction, and compiling a list of illustrations. In addition, she wrote a prospectus for her next book "The Visible Woman: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection," and produced preliminary drafts of two (of a total of six) chapters: "Impressed Images: From Vision to Generation," and "Nero Dissects His Mother: Violence and Authority in Vesalius' Fabrica." Finally, she completed most of the research for an article on art and anatomy in Masacchio's "Trinity" fresco, using the resources of the Berlin Kunstbibliothek. Her major research field focuses on the history of medieval and Renaissance science and medicine, cultural and intellectual history of Italian Renaissance and history of gender and sexuality. During her visit, Professor Park reported on her work in an internal colloquium on December 6, 1995, "Natural Particulars: Medicine, Epistemology, and the Literature of Healing Springs in Renaissance Italy," and also held an internal colloquium entitled "The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570-1620."
Albert Presas i Puig (Technische Universität Berlin)
is staying from September 1, 1995 - August 31, 1996 as a Rathenau postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. In 1995, he continued his studies on the history of practical geometry in close consultation with the research project "The Relation of Practical Experience and Conceptual Structures in the Emergence of Science." In his dissertation, he investigated the history of practical geometry in antiquity, in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance as a basis of geometrical and cosmological theories. He also studied practical geometry in connection with the fields in which it was applied, which required a thorough analysis of the geometrical methods subsequently used in architecture, surveying, mechanical engineering, and art. At the Institute, he is studying the traditions of practical geometry, especially in the Renaissance, as one of the intellectual bases of practical mechanics. On October 30 - 31, 1995, he attended the Fourth Mercator Symposium at the Universität Duisburg.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg)
stayed from July 1, 1995 - September 30, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. During this time, he completed his book Experimental Systems: Toward a History of Epistemic Things. Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, which will appear in 1996 from Stanford University Press. This book contains a case study on the history of molecular biology, and through the case study, develops the outlines of an epistemology of experimentation which considers research an open-ended procedure for the acquisition of knowledge. He also finished a chapter on the history of molecular biology that will appear in Jahn et al. (eds), Geschichte der Biologie, Fischer Verlag, Jena 1996, and a research paper on Carl Correns's "rediscovery" of Mendel (Isis, December 1995). Furthermore, he wrote an introductory chapter on the history of protein synthesis that will appear in a textbook on The Translation of the Genetic Message (Nierhaus et al., eds., in preparation). He conducted research resulting in two conference papers, one on the work of the embryologist Jean Brachet in Brussels, presented at the Biannual Meeting of the International Society for the Philosophy, History and Social Studies in Biology in Leuven (July 1995), and one on the historical emergence of microsomes and ribosomes as scientific objects for a meeting on "The Coming into Being and the Passing Away of Scientific Objects," held at the Institute in September 1995. In the context of the Institute's activities, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger was engaged in scientific exchange with several staff and visitors. He cooperated with Peter J. Beurton in the planning of his research project on "Gene Concepts and Evolution;" he discussed his project on nineteenth-century microbiology with Ohad Parnes; and he discussed a new research project on modes of external representation in the history of science with visiting scholar Johannes Fehr. During his stay at the Institute, he wrote preprint no. 24, "Kurze Geschichte der Molekularbiologie."
James Ritter (Université de Paris 8)
stayed from February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His research concentrated on two themes: the history of unified field theories in the period 1918-1955, and the history of "rational practices" (mathematics, medicine, divination) in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the second millennium. These areas, though apparently disparate, are in fact linked by a common constellation of methodological questions centered on the problem of concretely embedding the social and intellectual practices of privileged areas of knowledge (called `sciences' in our own era) in the socio-economic and cultural structures of the societies of which they constitute a part.
His activities on the problem of relativity and the history of unified field theory are described in section b of the research activities "The Relativity Crisis and the Reorganization of Classical Knowledge on Gravitation."
Those socially and culturally privileged areas in antiquity that James Ritter calls "rational practices," identified by parallel examinations of the sociology of cultural practices and the formal structure of professional and pedagogical texts, are, he believes, a particularly clear ground on which to trace that interplay of internal and external factors that are constitutive of that knowledge privileged by societies. He discussed the case of medicine in Egypt and Mesopotamia in an internal colloquium at the Institute on August 9, 1995 "Ancient Near Eastern Medicine - Social and Rational Practices," using letters, funerary inscriptions, and professional texts to delineate what constituted the multiple social and intellectual boundaries of this complex area. A book is forthcoming on the subject. He also continued his work on a re-edition of the Susa mathematical texts and database and the determination of third millennium Egyptian metrological systems; both projects are linked with work being carried out under the auspices of the Institute.
Britta Scheideler (Universität Bochum)
is staying from October 1, 1995 - September 30, 1997 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. She contributes to the Institute's research activities on "Albert Einstein between Science and Politics" by exploring the reasons for and influences on Einstein's political behavior and thinking in the context of cultural and social change between 1914 and 1933. In cooperation with Hubert Goenner, one focus of the research is related to Einstein's socialization and his connections to intellectual and literary circles outside the scientific community. The importance of these connections in explaining his extraordinary reactions to the World War I or to pacifism (compared to the majority of scientists) is a central point of interest. Therefore, the study also focuses on the question of to what extent the affiliation with a particular social group was important for the political behavior of the members in the case of the scientific community. In social-historical studies on the German "Bildungsbürgertum" and their political commitment, scientists are notably underrepresented. Einstein's remarks during the war about the strongly politicized scholars in the humanities, in contrast to the scientists, has not yet been analyzed. The project therefore aims at a description of the scientific community as a more or less coherent social group with a common social profile and status, self-understanding, intellectual tradition and internal communication network. The impact of these social structures on the scientists' political behavior is investigated by analyzing the autobiographical material of numerous physicists, chemists and mathematicians, and the literature of the particular intellectual circles and political associations. Another general research topic is the methodological approach to science policy in connection with the research activities for "The Quantum Crisis and the Reorganization of the Research Strategies in Classical Physics." This includes not only research policy, but also the meaning of theories of the sociology of scientific knowledge, which stress social conditions and the role of social interests as reasons for scientific development.
John Stachel (Boston University)
stayed from June 1, 1994 - August 31, 1995 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. He continued to work on a large scale project on the history of relativity, and participated in sections a and b of the research activities "The Relativity Crisis and the Reorganization of Classical Knowledge on Gravitation."
During his stay, he completed work on the review article, "History of Relativity," and the revision of earlier articles "The Manifold of Possibilities," and "Einstein and Mari." He also completed a first draft of a paper on "The Fresnel Dragging Coefficient." Together with Tilman Sauer, he continued to work on an annotated Bibliography on the History of Relativity, which currently lists approximately 3000 pertinent items.
Zeno G. Swijtink (Indiana University)
is staying from October 1, 1995 - September 30, 1996 as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His current project involves the changing relation between sensibility and reason in the late Enlightenment, exemplified in the early visual representations of experimental and observational data in the physical sciences, especially in the work of the polymath Johann Lambert, and on the consequences of this change for the natural sciences of the early nineteenth century.
These new graphical techniques are studied on the intersection of three distinct developments: the use of construction diagrams within Euclidean geometry, the extension of these diagrams to include mechanical or curved lines in the new calculus of eighteenth century, and the purging of diagrams from analysis in the early-nineteenth century; the visual and manual culture of practical geometry and map making (with its use of the plane table, or mensula praetoriana, and its use and discussion of "Augenmass," or "coup d'oeil," and free hand drawing - proprio Marte); and the development of the theory of errors, in which the earlier deterministic theory of errors, which was part of what we now call experimental design (Cotes, Marinoni, Lambert, Kästner, J. Mayer, Späth) turned probabilistic in Lambert, and algebraic in Gauss, Legendre, and Laplace.
Bernhard Thöle (Freie Universität Berlin)
is staying from November 1, 1995 - October 31, 1996 as Lorenz Krüger Fellow for Historical Epistemology at the Institute. His current research interests lie at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of the mind and the philosophical foundations of science in early modern thought. He is currently completing his book Subjectivity in an Objective World, which focuses on the project of physicalism as it relates to mental phenomena. Physicalism is the thesis that all phenomena are physical at the most basic level. The first chapter of the book provides a critical account of the physicalist program, its motives, and its meaning. The remaining chapters investigate to what extent the physicalist program allows for a satisfactory integration of mental phenomena into its ontology. The discussion focuses on four main topics: qualitative experience, consciousness, self-knowledge and mental causation. It is argued that an adequate solution of the problem of integration presupposes an improved conception of scientific objectivity.
The problem of the relation between the scientific and the manifest image of the world as it appears in perception forms the background of the second research project, which can be seen as an historical counterpart to the first. This project continues work originated as a joint research project with Lorenz Krüger on primary and secondary qualities. With the establishment of the mechanical world view, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and the corresponding thesis about the subjectivity of sensory qualities, became a central topic in philosophical reflection about the foundations of the scientific image. The project focuses on the mutual dependence between science and metaphysics, with emphasis on the "rationalist" tradition, and concentrates on philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz who contributed significantly to the development of modern science. A first draft on the relation between "scientific" and "metaphysical" arguments for the subjectivity thesis in Descartes has been completed.
Both projects are related to other main research activities at the Institute, particularly to the project on "The History of Scientific Objectivity" and the project on "The Emergence of Preclassical Mechanics." Another topic relevant to research at the Institute concerns the philosophical foundations of the concept and methods of historical epistemology.
is staying from October 1, 1995 - September 30, 1996 as a Rathenau postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. Her studies relate to the images and constructions of the body in art and science in the seventeenth century. Three works of early modern art form the basis of her investigation: Jan Saendredam's engraving "Allegorie auf die sinnliche und ideele Erkenntnis/Der Maler und sein Modell" (1616), David Teniers' "Der zwölfjährige Jesus unter den Schriftgelehrten" (1651 - 1656), and "Der Alchemist" (1651 - 1656). Saendredam's engraving contrasts two kinds of bodies: the effective and sensual body of the nuda veritas/the model and the rationalized body of the artist surrounded by a geometrician, a chemist and an astronomer. Moreover, the painting draws attention to the relationship between the artist and the scientists. That relationship can be understood further by looking at Teniers' paintings: the same Jew reading a book is placed in the foreground of both paintings. Both paintings depict different kinds of knowledge (alchemy and elements of the Jewish Kabbala tradition) and links them together. The paintings thus make clearer what was as stake in seventeenth-century disputes about knowledge, as does Saendredam's engraving. With its multiple connotations, the body highlights different kinds of experience and sites of knowledge production. If one can argue that the body is crucial for experience and knowledge, then it is reasonable to analyze the function of body images in historical processes, and particularly how they illuminate changing forms of experiences and knowledge. This approach does not subordinate art to science, but seeks the cultural representation of science in art.
Postdoctoral research fellows of the Rathenau program
Continuing the final phase of the former Walther Rathenau program of the Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin, the Institute is funding five postdoctoral stipends, awarded to Richard H. Beyler, Frank Dittmann, Anke te Heesen, Agnes Miklós Illés, and Edward Jurkowitz.