STS 3301

Science and Technology Studies 3301: Making of Modern Science

Semester

Fall 2009.

Instructor

Suman Seth

School

Cornell

(Make a course template:date, instructor, school, everything here perhaps)

Shawn's Writings

Weekly response papers

Almost every week I wrote a paper in response to the readings, and sometimes included an epigraph or science history haiku. The challenge lay in avoiding reviewing the ideas and methods in the readings without arriving at my own judgments of the value or validity of the arguments therein.

• Week 1:Thomas Kuhn vs. Crosbie Smith
• Week 2:
• Week 3:
• Week 4:

Musings

• On selection versus influence

Mid-term essay

I wrote about self-preservation of scientists and their work, among their peers and among general society.

Final essay

Possible inquiries

Which styles of historiography are best suited to looking at training and its part in the scientific endeavor?

"Were industrialists like Joule, concerned with their precision and efficiency, the prime creators of this compartmentalized, utilitarian physical science?" From the mid-term essay, noted by Suman Seth to be a good possible question for the final essay.

Is something like critical opalescence, measuring the outbursts of science, the meat of the history of science? Are all the successes in science incremental leaps made by people mostly shackled to their peers (social peers, work peers, family peers, religious peers), who tentatively reach just beyond their bounds?

Is training mostly reproduction with a blind touch of freedom in the hopes of creativity?

Concepts

• Blame
• Citation
• Classification by nation
• Conservation
• Constancy
• Constants
• Crisis
• Critical opalescence
• Determinism
• Dissipation
• Doom
• Drawing on sources
• Dynamic states vs. static states
• Economy
• Empiricism
• Enlightenment
• Free will
• Generalization
• Geographical environment
• Hypothesis, avoidance of
• Indoctrination
• Industrialization of learning
• Industrialization of scientific endeavor
• Lab technology
• Liberality
• Loyalty
• Machines of enlightenment
• Mentorship
• Nationalism
• Normal Science begets its own revolutions
• Objective
• Patronage
• Phenomena
• Philosophy
• Physical hypothesis
• Piety
• Precision
• Predictability
• Progress
• Pure vs. applied science
• Puzzle-solving
• Reductionism
• Salvation
• Schooling
• Seeking an ideal state
• Selective understanding
• Self-preservation of scientific endeavors in greater society
• Self-preservation of scientists among peers
• Self-preservation of scientists in greater society
• Simplification
• Social Acceptability
• Social Classes
• Social order
• Specialization
• Standardization
• Statistics, normalcy, deviance
• Steady state
• Subjective
• Technical application
• Theory vs. experiment
• Tradition
• Training
• Unification
• Universality
• Utilitarianism
• Waste