STS3301 Paper Week 7

Response to readings Week 7, for STS 3301

Whether it's the break of fall break or the content, I can't seem to produce definitive responses yet to the readings, but I have generated five or six questions after reading all. Hopefully Thursday's discussion (and there and then I) will be more resolute.

1) Is Mach mistakenly excluding anything when he states "Physics is experience, arranged in economical order"?

2) What in theoretical physics, as it concerned Boltzmann, ran counter to a mechanical world view? Just the energetics, or something new in the fin-de-siècle?

3) Were Maxwell, Thomson, and Boltzmann inconsistent between their expressions to other scientists and those in popularizations? Were they following one path for scientific work, then professing another to the public? [Crosbie, p. 289]

4) Were Tait and Stewart logically successful in reconciling mechanical science and religion against Tyndall? Consider Maxwell and Thomsons's belief in creation from the void, i.e. a discontinuity. Am I getting the sides right here? [Crosbie, p. 253]

5) Boltzmann painted a picture of a nearly unified, mechanical world view before 1900. Why then does Seth paint a picture of fin-de-siècle physics as uncrystallized, thus as incapable of a crisis/revolution as a leaderless state?

Was 1900-1905 a time to call in the chips, to settle the non-committal compromises of the physical hypothesizers? Thus, was it never a revolution, but a creation of committees committed to the diverse endeavors of theoretical and experimental physics?

1900 Was only a crisis for those who resisted the disunity, the impending impossibility of their own restrictive world views.