STS3301 Paper Week 3

Responses to readings, Week 3, Work and Waste, for STS 3301

From stories of Wise, Thomson, Crosbie, Kuhn, Harman, and Seth, we see that a thing depends on how it came to be. It seems appropriate that the most important influence we see on what people do is their own human history. But this idea can be applied to physical systems also, as we see at the beginning of Wise (I): Thomson shows succinctly that the force of attraction between two charged spheres at a certain separation can be determined by considering the minimal (and differential) work done to move those spheres to that separation. [p. 264]

According to Wise, Thomson arrived at such methods because of his hands-on lab-work with machines, Paris-style [p.265] Wise, over-dramatically, worries that without Thomson's new style, British scientific culture might have "dissipated into a nebular cloud of variety and complexity."[p. 266] Wise's multiple puns here make me ashamed of my own in recent writings.

Wise helps us differentiate between what was the standard approach, force-wise, to a mechanical problem, and Thomson's new methods: Condillac would have used torques to see how one might lift something with a lever, while Thomson would use work. (In Physics 1116 at Cornell the equivalence is often shown).

Before Mill, Thomson, and Darwin, it seems from reading Wise, people had a hard time accepting change, especially irreversible change. But permanent or irreversible dynamism seems to have arisen as a post-revolutionary theme.

The march of change might be one toward personal salvation (e.g. Chalmers' uplifting view) and/or material doom. According to Wise, for Whewell, it was Encke's Comet's degenerating ephemeris that he (cherry-?)picked to show the inevitability, even in the stellar systems, of material doom; this was an omen of Thomson's solar burnout, aka the heat death. [p. 398] Wise implies that Whewell might have cherry-picked examples "to undermine static views at every turn."

Whewell apparently also saw friction and force as tools for people to use or to squander. This sets up our theme of Waste as we ponder James Thomson's letter to his brother recalling his inquiry about the work lost in the letting of water into a lock. [Sorry for so many prepositions! Word limit!]

Aside: I wonder why were Whewell, Chalmers, and Mill so eager to associate social/economic laws with mechanical ones? Wise writes that Whewell held "natural laws" at arms' length, but what natural laws, Laplacian/Newtonian ones? Yes, I think, for all.

Multiple pathways led to the law of conservation of energy. Kuhn [EC as an Ex of SD] shows this as he agonizes through his selection process of pathways.

Wise follows philosophical paths, occasionally patronage, as when he points out that J.P. Nichol was Thomson's astronomy professor.

Myers follows the ripple effects of Thomson's heat death, and its popularization, on social prophecy. We've seen this before with Newton's popularizers.

Not all instances of the conversion of energy fell on the path; those conversions lay outside mainstream scientific research. [Kuhn, p. 74] But, as seen in Mary Sommerville's 1834 writing, there was enough convergence to call "modern science" tending to be "unified."

Was there only convergence, no divergence? Harman tells the tale of Clausius, Tait, and Helmholtz firing nationalistic missives or reconciliations.[p. 66] We hear Clausius utter the same attempt at conciliation we've heard many times before: He avows to separate deducted theory from hypothesis. [p. 53] I will return to that question as we study quantum physicists.

As Kuhn develops a view of the converging pathways, I recall Crosbie's theme of scientists' social acceptability linked through their work: "If [so many conversion processes] had not been available, the problem of simultaneous discover might not exist at all ."[Kuhn, p. 82] To Kuhn, normal science begets its own revolution. To Crosbie, "if only it were so simple."

More general conclusions:

There are more reasons people come to believe a position than the "sticking to their guns" argument of nationalism, family, tradition, etc. There's also the trust that one puts in a source, and also an expectation of a reward for taking a position. This week we also read about the resources on has available on which to draw, like poetry, industry, and the bible.