From William Hyde Wollaston to Alexander von Humboldt - Star Spectra and Celestial Landscape

The discovery of dark lines in the spectrum of the sun as well as in some fixed stars since 1802 by William Hyde Wollaston, Joseph Fraunhofer and Johann Lamont is a relatively isolated phenomenon in the history of astronomy of the first half of the 19th century. Wollaston's representation of the sun's spectrum of 1802 can be seen as a simplification and reduction of the phenomenon by way of a seemingly clear connection with contemporary knowledge. Fraunhofer's famous colour etching of the dark lines, of about 1817, can be regarded as a meticulous and painstaking representation of the known facts, taken to a high aesthetic level.

Lamont's spectra of the fixed stars from 1836 are the first sketches of all of these phenomena. He emphasized the ‘oddness’, that is, the chaotic variety of identifiable lines. What was common to all of these representations was the general belief that something new and unimaginable could now be established as a scientific subject. The observations of these lines were coincidental with the thinking in other fields, as for example, in Alexander Humboldt's understanding of nature, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's theory of light and his interest in pictorial representations of nature, and in the new concept of landscape of the romantic painters.     

Knut Lundmark,Meteors and an Early Swedish Crowdsourcing Experiment

Mid twentieth century meteor astronomy demanded the long-term compilation of observations made by numerous individuals over an extensive geographical area. Such a massive undertaking obviously required the participation of more than just professional astronomers, who often sought to expand their ranks through the use of amateurs that had a basic grasp of astronomy as well as the night sky, and were thus capable of generating first-rate astronomical reports.

When, in the 1920s, renowned Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark turned his attention to meteor astronomy, he was unable to rely even upon this solution. In contrast to many other countries at the time, Sweden lacked an organized amateur astronomy and thus contained only a handful of competent amateurs. Given this situation, Lundmark had to develop ways of engaging the general public in assisting his efforts. To his advantage, he was already a well-established public figure who had published numerous popular science articles and held talks from time to time on the radio. During the 1930s, this prominence greatly facilitated his launching of a crowdsourcing initiative for the gathering of meteor observations.

This paper consists of a detailed discussion concerning the means by which Lundmark's initiative disseminated astronomical knowledge to the general public and encouraged a response that might directly contribute to the advancement of science. More precisely, the article explores the manner in which he approached the Swedish public, the degree to which that public responded and the extent to which his efforts were successful. The primary aim of this exercise is to show that the apparently recent Internet phenomenon of ‘crowdsourcing’, especially as it relates to scientific research, actually has a pre-Internet history that is worth studying. Apart from the fact that this history is interesting in its own right, knowing it can provide us with a fresh vantage point from which to better comprehend and appreciate the success of present-day crowdsourcing projects.     

Antony van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes and other scientific instruments: new information from the Delft archives

This paper discusses the scientific instruments made and used by the microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723). The immediate cause of our study was the discovery of an overlooked document from the Delft archive: an inventory of the possessions that were left in 1745 after the death of Leeuwenhoek's daughter Maria. This list sums up which tools and scientific instruments Leeuwenhoek possessed at the end of his life, including his famous microscopes. This information, combined with the results of earlier historical research, gives us new insights about the way Leeuwenhoek began his lens grinding and how eventually he made his best lenses. It also teaches us more about Leeuwenhoek's work as a surveyor and a wine gauger.

A further investigation of the 1747 sale of Leeuwenhoek's 531 single lens microscopes has not only led us to the identification of nearly all buyers, but also has provided us with some explanation about why only a dozen of this large number of microscopes has survived.     

Science and the arts in William Henry's research into inflammable air during the Early Nineteenth Century

Historians have explored the continuities between science and the arts in the Industrial Revolution, with much recent historiography emphasizing the hybrid nature of the activities of men of science around 1800. Chemistry in particular displayed this sort of hybridity between the philosophical and practical because the materials under investigation were important across the research spectrum. Inflammable gases were an example of such hybrid objects: pneumatic chemists through the eighteenth century investigated them, and in the process created knowledge, processes and instruments essential for the creation of a new gaslight industry from 1800. Once this industry began to expand and mature, the interests and experiments of the gas industry stimulated new research work which in turn had relevance for theoretical debates.

This paper explores how the emergence of the gas industry from 1800 provided an impetus for new work in theoretical chemistry. Boulton & Watt, important pioneers of the gas industry, explored the compositions of inflammable gases for practical purposes: the composition of these gases had an important effect on the luminosity of gaslights, and hence the economics of the new technology compared to older forms of lighting. As they explored these questions in their engineering work, they stimulated their friend William Henry to explore the nature of these gases further, and he carried out a series of experiments to determine their composition more exactly than Boulton & Watt had done. Henry published a series of paper between 1805 and 1820 where he made arguments about the compositions of inflammable airs, and further related these to contemporary debates about the laws of multiple and definite proportions, as well as John Dalton's atomism. Henry's research was also a hybrid of the theoretical and practical in that he tried to develop results useful for the fledgling gas industry. Specifically, he suggested the best kind of coal to use, and showed how gas quality varied with distillation time and temperature.     

Horticulture in Portugal 1850–1900: The role of science and public utility in shaping knowledge

In this paper, we address the emergence of horticultural practice, agents, spaces and institutions in the two urban settings of Lisbon and Porto, in Portugal, during the second half of the nineteenth century. We do so by following the networking activities of two players: the self-made horticulturist and entrepreneur José Marques Loureiro, who created, in Porto, a commercial horticultural establishment and founded the Journal of Practical Horticulture; and the agronomist Francisco Simões Margiochi, head of the gardens and green grounds department of the municipality, who created the first course on gardening and horticulture, and founded the Royal Horticultural Society, both in Lisbon. Their joint activities were aimed at establishing horticulture as an applied science and to cater simultaneously to an extended audience of citizens. They enable us to enrich the narratives on the emergence and development of horticulture in Europe by calling attention to the participation in circulatory extended networks of actors who are often absent from these accounts. Additionally, they allow a comparative assessment of the outcome of their actions at the national level, and to understand their results in terms consonant with recent historiographical trends on the co-construction of centres and peripheries.

Abbreviations: AML – Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa (Municipal Archive of Lisbon).; ANTT – Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (National Archives at Torre do Tombo).; AHCPL – Arquivo Histórico da Casa Pia de Lisboa (Historical Archive of the Casa Pia of Lisbon).; JHP – Jornal de Horticultura Practica (Journal of Practical Horticulture). Online at: http://www.fc.up.pt/fa/?p=nav&;f=html.fbib-Periodico-oa&;item=378; BSNHP - Boletim da Sociedade Nacional de Horticultura de Portugal (Bulletin of the National Society of Horticulture of Portugal).     

Spurious Forecasts?

P. C. B. Phillips (1998) demonstrated that deterministic trends are a valid representation of an otherwise stochastic trending mechanism; he remained skeptic, however, about the predictive power of such representations. In this paper we prove that forecasts built upon spurious regression may perform (asymptotically) as well as those issued from a correctly specified regression. We derive the order in probability of several in‐sample and out‐of‐sample predictability criteria ( test, root mean square error, Theil's U‐statistics and R²) using forecasts based upon a least squares‐estimated regression between independent variables generated by a variety of empirically relevant data‐generating processes. It is demonstrated that, when the variables are mean stationary or trend stationary, the order in probability of these criteria is the same whether the regression is spurious or not. Simulation experiments confirm our asymptotic results. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Kitcher''s Compromise: A critical examination of the Compromise Model of scientific closure, and its implications for the relationship between history and philosophy of science

In The Advancement of Science (1993) Philip Kitcher develops what he calls the ‘Compromise Model’ of the closure of scientific debates. The model is designed to acknowledge significant elements from ‘Rationalist’ and ‘Antirationalist’ accounts of science, without succumbing to the one-sidedness of either. As part of an ambitious naturalistic account of scientific progress, Kitcher's model succeeds to the extent that transitions in the history of science satisfy its several conditions. 1 critically evaluate the Compromise Model by identifying its crucial assumptions and by attempting to apply the model to a major transition in the history of biology: the rejection of ‘naive group selectionism’ in the 1960s. I argue that the weaknesses and limitations of Kitcher's model exemplify general problems facing philosophical models of scientific change, and that recognition of these problems supports a more modest vision of the relationship between historical and philosophical accounts of science.     

Science, truth and history, part II. Metaphysical bolt-holes for the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge?

Historians of science have frequently sought to exclude modern scientific knowledge from their narratives. Part I of this paper, published in the previous issue, cautioned against seeing more than a literary preference at work here. In particular, it was argued—contra advocates of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK)—that a commitment to epistemological relativism should not be seen as having straightforward historiographical consequences. Part II considers further SSK-inspired attempts to entangle the currently fashionable historiography with particular positions in the philosophy of science. None, I argue, is promising. David Bloor’s proposed alliance with scientific realism relies upon a mistaken view of contrastive explanation; Andrew Pickering’s appeal to instrumentalism is persuasive for particle physics but much less so for science as a whole; and Bruno Latour’s home-grown metaphysics is so bizarre that its compatibility with SSK is, if anything, a further blow to the latter’s plausibility.     

Joseph LeConte and the development of the physiology and psychology of vision in the United States

The nineteenth-century American scientist, philosopher and teacher Joseph LeConte (1823–1901) is well-known for his writings on geology and the reconciliation of evolutionary theory and religion, but he has not been properly recognized for his contributions to the physiology and psychology of vision. This study explores and assesses his work in the latter field, showing the nature of his original investigations into human vision and the influence of his book Sight: an exposition of the principles of monocular and binocular vision, which served as the major textbook on the subject in the United States from its publication in 1881 until after the turn of the century. Grounded in neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory, LeConte's publications on vision had a strong impact upon subsequent studies of the phenomenon of human sight.     

Collaborative explanation,explanatory roles,and scientific explaining in practice

Scientific explanation is a perennial topic in philosophy of science, but the literature has fragmented into specialized discussions in different scientific disciplines. An increasing attention to scientific practice by philosophers is (in part) responsible for this fragmentation and has put pressure on criteria of adequacy for philosophical accounts of explanation, usually demanding some form of pluralism. This commentary examines the arguments offered by Fagan and Woody with respect to explanation and understanding in scientific practice. I begin by scrutinizing Fagan's concept of collaborative explanation, highlighting its distinctive advantages and expressing concern about several of its assumptions. Then I analyze Woody's attempt to reorient discussions of scientific explanation around functional considerations, elaborating on the wider implications of this methodological recommendation. I conclude with reflections on synergies and tensions that emerge when the two papers are juxtaposed and how these draw attention to critical issues that confront ongoing philosophical analyses of scientific explanation.     

Similar pattern of fine structure in the basement lamella of the skin and the external sheath of the notochord inXenopus larvae

Zusammenfassung Auf Grund von elektronenmikroskopischen Beobachtungen wird nachgewiesen, dass die Basalmembran der Epidermis und die äussere Chordascheide im Schwanz vonXenopuslarven eine übereinstimmende Feinstruktur besitzen; sie ist gekennzeichnet durch orthogonal angeordnete Kollagenfibrillen.

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Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation for the Promotion of Scientific Research.     

印度科技政策与科技发展--兼对中印国家创新能力比较

印度科技政策对推动印度科技进步起着重要的促进作用,1958年“科学政策决议”奠定了基本原则,“2003年科学技术政策”明确了印度科技政策目标,还制订了科技战略行动计划。印度科技发展具有科技体制较为完善、科技投入不断增加、科研经费重国防轻民用、科技著作多、专利获得少、科技人才素质高、高科技异军突起等特点。与中国相比,印度国家创新能力评价更高。本文阐述了印度科技政策演变过程,分析了印度科技发展特征,论述了印度十五计划科技发展战略重点,并比较了中印国家创新能力。     

The Dostoevsky Machine in Georgetown: scientific translation in the Cold War

SUMMARY

Machine Translation (MT) is now ubiquitous in discussions of translation. The roots of this phenomenon — first publicly unveiled in the so-called ‘Georgetown-IBM Experiment’ on 9 January 1954 — displayed not only the technological utopianism still associated with dreams of a universal computer translator, but was deeply enmeshed in the political pressures of the Cold War and a dominating conception of scientific writing as both the goal of machine translation as well as its method. Machine translation was created, in part, as a solution to a perceived crisis sparked by the massive expansion of Soviet science. Scientific prose was also perceived as linguistically simpler, and so served as the model for how to turn a language into a series of algorithms. This paper follows the rise of the Georgetown program — the largest single program in the world — from 1954 to the (as it turns out, temporary) collapse of MT in 1964.