What the Greeks saw in the heavens
Diurnal motion
Motions of various
"wanderers"
The Greek need for rationality
Why the material world had
to be rational: Plato's explanation of the origin of the worlds
Greek (Platonic) assumptions
about rational motion in the heavens
Circular orbits
Uniform motions
Aristotle's Physics
Aristotle's classification
of matter: The 4 elements
The Aristotelian axiom of
motion: All motion requires a mover
Natural motion and the
doctrine of natural place
Violent motion: projectiles
The relation between force
and motion
The relation between
resistance and motion
The immovable earth
Ptolemy's innovation: the equant
Copernicus and his achievement
The state of astronomy on the eve of Copernicus
Why Ptolemaic astronomical
systems were in crisis
External pressures
From the church
From the maritime sector
Who was Copernicus?
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs (1543)
Early versions
Osiander's Preface
The dedication
Traditional aspects of the De
Rev
Platonic assumptions regarding circles and uniform motion
Use of Ptolemaic techniques
Aristotle's physics of motion
Novel aspects of the De
Rev
Rotation on axis and what it achieved
Revolution and what it achieved
Advantages of Copernican system
No equant
Slightly better fit
Internal harmony
Order of planets sure
Disadvantages of Copernican system
Not appreciably less complex
(still plenty of epicycles, etc.)
Sun the center of stars, not
planets
Physics inconsistent with
predicted experience (if earth in motion)
Challenge to understanding
of scripture
Lack of parallax
Youth and position (+ legends)
Interest in astronomy, Uraniborg, and the island of Hveen
Couldn't lecture at
university
Instruments and the accurate
data they produced
Intriguing phenomena and
their implications
New Star of 1572 - Aristotle wrong
Comet of 1577 - no crystalline spheres
The problem of stellar
parallax
The Tychonic system
Wittich's system and why it would not work
Its structure
Its observational equivalence to Copernicus
Its advantages
Scientific - no problem with physics of motion
Religious - no problem with Scripture or humankind's place
Kepler: the person and social background
Early training and mystical
disposition
Platonist and
Aristotelian
Relation to Tycho
The three questions
Why are there six planets?
Why are they spaced as they
are?
Why do they revolve at the
speeds they do?
Answer to questions 1 and 2: The 5-solid theory
Jupiter and Saturn conjunction
Nesting the orbits
The problem of Mars and Kepler's attempts at a solution
Re-introducing the equant
The introduction of physics
into astronomy - a historical watershed
Off-center circular orbits
and the "second" law (equal areas)
Elliptical orbits and
the second law
The first law: elliptical orbits)
Answer to question 3: the third law (T2 α
d3)
Galileo Galilei - The Starry Message
Galileo
Early training and career
Socio-economic aspirations
From Pisa to Padua
Padua
Early stance on Copernicus
In 1597
In 1604-05
Early work on motion
The Leaning Tower legend
Critiquing Aristotle's notion of free fall
The odd numbers law
Inclined plane experiments
On being a philosopher vs.
being a mathematician
Starry Messenger (1610)
Observations
Moon
Stars
Satellites of Jupiter
Implications of observations
Later observation
Phases of Venus
Significance of the Venus observation
Week 3
Encounters with Rome
1611 visit to Rome
The Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)
Galileo's reconciliation of
science and religion
Visits to Rome
1616: The injunction
received
Cannot hold Copernican doctrine
May consider as hypothesis
1624: Conversations with
Urban VIII
Urban's favorite argument
The trial of 1633
Galileo's position
Dialogues = hypotheses
He obeyed the 1616
injunction
Church's position
Galileo violated the spirit
of the 1616 injunction
A new injunction and its
significance
Possible sources for the new injunction
"Hold and defend" vs. "teach in any way whatsoever"
Results of trial
Galileo's last years
Galileo's daughter
The Dialogues on
the Two New Sciences
Controversy over burial
The break with Aristotle
What it meant
Examples of the break
In Britain - experimentalism
Gilbert and Bacon
In France - a new conception of matter
Dualism and atomism
Materialism - the specter of atheism
Hobbes and Spinoza
The mechanical philosophy
Alchemy
Corpuscularianism in Boyle
A scientific revolution?
The Royal Society
Newton the man
Unusual birth
His conception of himself
and his place in history
His social standing
The interests of his university years
The calculus
Optics
Alchemy
Celestial mechanics
Newton and the apple
The miraculous years
Recalling the incident with the apple
The span of time
to a solution
Recasting Galileo's inertial motion
Where he and Descartes agreed
Where he and Descartes disagreed: active matter
The problem of the moon's motion: Newton's solution
The structure of the argument
The assumption
What he had from others
Why the moon "falls"
Discovering the inverse square law
Calculating how far the moon "falls" in 1 minute
The approximate confirmation of his guess
The Principia and beyond
Theology - the crisis of 1675
Hooke's correction of Newton
Halley's famous visit
The Principia
Newton's 2 laws of motion
The Law of Universal Gravitation
Defining mass
Using the Second Law
Using the Law of Gravitation
The reception of the Principia
The Black Year of 1693
London
At the Royal Mint
In the Royal Society
Last years
Newton's status in 18th century science
The Newton/Leibniz disagreements
Over the
calculus
Over God's
relation to nature
The origin and development of Newtonianism
Competing systems of natural philosophy
The vis viva controversy
God and the conservation of motion
Measuring the force of motion
Descartes
Leibniz
Establishing Newton's godlike
status through challenges to his system and utilization of the system
Controversy over the shape of the earth - 1730s
The
three-body problem and the moon's location 1740s
The
return of Halley's comet 1750s
Reconciling ancient records of lunar eclipses 1780s
The meaning of Newtonianism
The nebular hypothesis
and the cosmos
as machine (Newton himself not a pure Newtonian here)
Mathematics
as neutral description of nature
Suspicion
of hypotheses (Newton not pure Newtonian here in spite of his public
stance)
The Enlightenment as watershed
Chemistry
The Aristotelian legacy
Elements and states of
matter
Alchemical principles
Starkey and Boyle
What are imponderables?
The German "rational chemistry" and its break with alchemy
Stahl's critique of alchemy
The phlogiston theory of
combustion
Respiration
Flame combustion
Calcination
Quantifying chemical reactions: Joseph Black and magnesia alba
The discovery and naming of new "airs"
Priestley, mercury calx, the discovery of oxygen, and Lavoisier
Reducing calx via heat with
charcoal
Reducing calx via heat
without charcoal
Priestley's meeting with
Lavoisier, October 1774
Priestley's confirmation of
de-phlogisticated air
Lavoisier's Easter Memoire,
1775
Tests on the two airs from mercury calx
Lavoisier's conclusions
Lavoisier's assumption: the conservation of matter
The naming of oxygen
The reception of Lavoisier's theory
The French Revolution
Electrical phenomena before the 18th century
In antiquity
In the 17th
century: Gilbert and Huaksbee
Electricity in the 18th century
Gray and Desaguliers: communication and
classification
Electrics per se
Nonelectrics
Dufay's Rule, two electricities, and sparks
Storing electrical charge
Bose's theatrics
Von Kleist's discovery
The shocking machine: the Leyden Jar
Explaining electricity
Nollet's theory of double flux
Franklin on the Leyden Jar
Essential properties of
electrical fire
The ground as infinite
recipient and supplier
Franklin's theory of the
operation of the Leyden Jar
The kite experiment
From static electricity to galvanism
Mesmerism
Medicine in the eighteenth century
Sanctioned and non-sanctioned healers
Quakery
Health and balance
Mesmer's background
Physician in Vienna
To Paris in the 1780s
Popular science in
pre-revolutionary France
Mesmer's theory of disease
Imponderable fluid flow and
health
Blockage and disease
Method of cure
Mesmer's protection of his
theory
Reception of Mesmer's theory in France
Deslon and the Paris medical
faculty
The Paris Commission of 1784
Radicalization of Mesmer's theory prior to the Revolution
The French Revolution
The Great Chain, Linnaeus, and Species in the 18th century
The arrangement of species
Plato's plenum formarum
The Great Chain of Being and
its Implications
The place of human species
The problem of species
Two definitions of species
Natural: From similarity of appearance
Artificial: From ability to produce fertile offspring
The meaning of the "fixity
of species"
No new species
No extinct species
No transmutation of species
Temporalizing the Great Chain in the 18th century
Linnaeus and classification
Linnaeus and the "children
of time": The origin of species
Cuvier and the elephants:
Extinction
(next lecture)
Lamarck and evolution (next lecture)
Evolution and catastrophism
Evolution in Germany
Kielmeyer and recapitulation theory
Ideal evolution
Evolution in Britain: Erasmus Darwin
Cuvier and catastrophism
Comparative anatomy and extinction
Revolutions of the globe
Opposition to transformism
Catastrophism in Britain
Vulcanism and Neptunism
Buckland and catastrophism
Lamarck the person
Youth and training
A mentality not
wholly for the times
His rise and fall in the
French scientific community
The impact of the Revolution
The 1794 Investigations
The Zoological Philosophy of 1809
Its problem: species vs.
varieties
Its Enlightenment
assumption: The ideal vs actual state of nature
Idealized nature and the
"primary" cause of evolution
The "power of life"
Spontaneous generation
Actual nature and the
"secondary" causes of evolution
The law of use and disuse
The law of the inheritance of acquired characteristics
Lamarck's deism and the place of teleology in his evolution
Reception of Lamarckian evolution
Darwin's Early Life and Education
The Europe of Darwin's youth
Bonaparte and science
Germany reaction to Napoleon
German reforms
Differing visions of science
Darwin's youth
Family and upper middle class status
Charles's personality
Edinburgh
Scotland and the continent
The prospects of medicine
Jameson and geology
Collecting
Cambridge
The state of English
universities
The prospect of holy orders
Jacob Henslow
The chance of a lifetime
Darwin and the Beagle
July 1837: Starts "Transformation" Notebook
Need for a non-teleological theory
Teleology and mechanism:
Trying to get rid of spirit
Thomas Malthus (read in
1838): "struggle for existence"
The role of geographical
isolation
Natural Selection: random,
mechanical, undirected
Sketches of 1842 and 1844
The status of "being scientific"
Why the delay in publication?
Chambers and the Vestiges
Illness
Two deaths and their significance
The 1850s
Barnacles and the origin of sex
Life cycle of genera: questioning geographical isolation
Gaining support from colleagues
The Origin of Species
The context of its rushed publication
Its immediate reception
Contents and structure
From variation under
domestication to variation under nature
The struggle for existence
Natural selection
Difficulties of the theory
Why are species well defined if evolution has occurred?
Could evolution have produced complex organs?
The eye
Bees and their hives
Can evolution be reconciled with the fossil record?
The conditions needed for accumulating marine fossils
How to view the fossil record
Geographical distribution
The unity of type
The immediate reception
The oxford meeting
Friends and enemies
The geological controversy
Critique from physics - not enough time
Kelvin and the age of the
earth
Rutherford and radioactivity
Fleeming Jenkin's critique
Blending inheritance
Swamping of advantageous
traits
Conclusion: can't use
"sports of nature"
Non-adaptive inheritance - the case of the Irish elk
Francis Galton and the regression of the mean
Conclusion: can't use
individual differences, must use "sports"
The "eclipse" of Darwinism: Neo-Lamarckianism
Philosophical/religious issues
Human evolution
Hypothetical argumentation
Darwinism a moral
Darwinism against design and
purpose
The duke of Argyl's complaint
Theological responses
Orthodox theology: Charles
Hodge
Liberal theology: William
Temple
Radical theology: Wilhelm
Herrmann
The social response
Cultural evolutionists
England: Herbert Spencer and
social "Darwinism"
English reform in the 1830s and 1840s
The doctrine of laissez faire
Spencer's understanding of evolution: "Nature" as normative
Germany: Ludwig Büchner
and scientific materialism
Force and Matter, 1855
Büchner's understanding of evolution : "Humans" as normative
The synthesis of biological issues
The new physiology
In Germany
In France
Heredity reconsidered: The work of Mendel
Evolution in the late nineteenth century
Darwinian
Non-Darwinian
Debates about Darwinism (natural selection)
The biometricians
Mendelism and the birth of genetics
Selection and continuous variation
Mutation theory
Sex-linked traits
The evolutionary synthesis
Human evolution
Fossil discoveries
The Scopes Trial
Eugenics
Rejecting Lamarck
Molecular biology's contribution
The birth of ecological thinking
The new biology
Concerns of conservation
Early ecologists
Warming
Tansley
Clements and the climax formation of vegetation
Ecology between the wars
Animal ecology
Ecosystem ecology
The Odum brothers
Rachel Carson and Silent Spring
Ecology and evolution
From Force to Energy
The concept of conservation
Unification of forces in early nineteenth century
Galvanism and chemistry
Electromagnetism
The special nature of heat
Conservation of force
Conservation of mechanical "force"
The mechanical context
Leibniz's critique of
Descartes
"Living" force vs. "dead" force
Interconvertibility (and conservation) of living + dead force
Meaning of force vs. effects of force (force of motion)
Conservation of "energy" in
general
Sadi Carnot and the use of heat to do work (heat conserved)
Mayer, Joule and the mechanical equivalence of heat
Helmholtz and the general conservation of "Kraft"
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
The ubiquitous presence of
heat in energy transformations
Necessary condition for
transforming heat to mechanical energy
Helmholtz's 1854 Innsbruck
speech
Clausius and change in S
greater than or equal to 0
Energy: what is it?
Ascendency of mechanical explanation
Scientific materialism in
the 1850s
Anti-transcendence (soul, religion)
Identity of mechanics and logic
Successes of mechanical model making in the 19th century
Kinetic theory of gases
Flaws in the mechanical
model
Repairing the model by
taking it seriously
The ether in the nineteenth century
Maxwell and electromagnetic theory
Stressing the ether:
electric effects
Moving the ether: magnetic
effects
The unexpected appearance of
c
Completeness of science
Naiveté and
overconfidence
Embarrassing predictions
The elusive ether and unrealistic radiation
From stresses and motions
of ether in wire to ether in space
Nature of the equations: sinusoidal
Why difficult to test
Hertz's successful test
Problems with the
ether
Must create a "wind" as we move through it
The
Michelson-Morley experiments
Meaning of the null result - ether must be dragged
with moving earth
Objections - Copernican and otherwise
The
dilemma - an ether that should be moving with respect to the earth but
was not
Contraction hypothesis - objects
(space) shrinks in the direction of their motion through the ether
Dismissed by most as too extreme
Other problems
Light interacts mechanically with matter but electricity does not
Properties of ether bizarre - elasticity > that of steel
Problems
raised question about status of models, especially given Age of Realism
Attitude
as century ended - we will solve the problems
Special relativity
The young Einstein
Rescuing Galilean relativity
Unrealistic radiation
The electron and x-rays
Radioactivity
Clausius and entropy
Entropy, law, and nature's
rationality
Boltzmann's revision of
Clausius's result
Planck on Clausius vs.
Boltzmann: Trying to prove entropy increase by deriving it from
mechanics
Planck and black body radiation
The oscillating electrical
particle model
Experimental results and
their mathematical expression
Problems with the model
The ultraviolet catastrophe
Reverting to Boltzmann
Differential equations as expression of the statistical view
The meaning of Planck's solution for understanding energy absorption
and radiation
How the "quantum" idea (E=hf) solved the problems with the model
The implications of Planck's solution for understanding nature
Advantage of the quantum hypothesis: Einstein and the
photoelectric effect
The plum pudding model of the atom
Advantage #2: The Rutherford-Bohr atom
Rutherford and the scattering experiments
The new model of the atom
Bohr's explanation of the model's stability
The creation of quantum mechanics
The Bohr/Sommerfeld
explanation of hydrogen
The electron as wave and particle
Competing versions of
quantum theory: Heisenberg and Schrödinger
Matrix mechanics
Wave mechanics
The Copenhagen
Interpretation, 1927
The Uncertainty Principle
A changing universe
General relativity, 1916
Allowing frames of reference
relative acceleration
1919 solar eclipse
An expanding universe
Leavitt, variable stars, and red shift
Hubble's law
Payne-Gaposchkin and the composition of stars
Big bang vs. steady state
Background microwave radiation
From the discovery of the neutron to nuclear fission
Early experimentation in radioactivity
Alpha, beta, and gamma radiation
Rutherford, the proton, and the prediction of the neutron (1920)
Discovery of the neutron,
1932
Irene Curie, beryllium, and gamma radiation
Chadwick's reaction
Rutherford's 1933 "moonshine" speech
Irene Curie and uranium
The 3.5 hour activity
Carriers and fractional crystallization
German reaction to French experiments
Hahn, Strassmann and "chemical" fission
Meitner and "physical"
fission
Bohr and the liquid drop nucleus
The rise of Hitler and the plight of science
Rise of the Nazis
Germany at the end of World War I
The "stab in the back"
complaint
Versialles Treaty
The Weimar republic
Multiple political parties
Economic instability
Political unrest
Rise of the Nazi Party
The SA and SS
Growing popular and
political
power
Hitler becomes chancellor,
January 30, 1933
The Nazi takeover
Civil Service Law of April, 1933
Effect on Jews
Effect on German physics
community
J. Stark and P. Lenard: Disgruntled physicists
Lenard's "German (or Aryan)
physics" vs. "Jewish physics"
Organic mechanism
Experimental
Against theoretical physics
The campaign against Heisenberg
Heisenberg's stance in the Nazi period
The growing political crisis
Hitler's rash actions in
1936 and 1938
Uranium stores
Challenges in fission science
Slowing neutrons
Enriching uranium
The German Uranium Club, September 1939
Heisenberg's secret report, end of 1939
Heisenberg-Bohr meeting, September 1941
Speer and the June 1942 meeting
American efforts
Szilard's pro-active stance on nuclear energy:
The Einstein letter, October 1939
Advisory Committee on Uranium and initial indecision
NDRC and MAUD: determining feasibility
MAUD report, July 1941
Re-evaluating feasibility, October 1941
Manhattan Project
Groves appointed, Fall 1942
December 2, 1942
Los Alamos begins, April 1943
Strassbourg, 1944 and after
The petition among
scientists; Oppenheimer's stance
The military's position
The Franck Report
Germany defeated, May 1945
Trinity, July 1945
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Augusst 1945
Week 15
Settling into cold war
Joe I, 1949
The hydrogen bomb and Soviet imitation
1950s and the birth of deterrence
The meaning of Sputnik, October 1957
Cuban Missle Crisis, October 1962
Nuclear fear
Prospect of nuclear holocaust
Peaceful use of nuclear energy
Three Mile Island, March 1979
Chernobyl, April 1986
Energy and the future
What lies ahead?
The Ionian dream
Nature's four fundamental forces
GUT's
TOE
Energy sources for the future
Non-renewable
Renewable
Prospects
Global warming
Popper and falsifiability as criterion
Error is easier to show than
truth
Scientific statements:
Susceptible of falsification testing
History of science as conjectures and refutations
Implications for scientific
revolutions
The logic of scientific
discovery
Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Kuhn's relation to Popper
Meaning of terms
paradigm
normal science
extraordinary science
The structure of scientific revolutions
The recognition of novelty
From novelty to anomaly
The development of crisis
Paradigm shift
Not a logical process
Resulting paradigm incommensurable with original
Whither progress?
Post-Kuhn and post modern
Downplaying the constraints
of nature
Equalizing rational
reconstructions
Emergence of determinative
agendas
The present polarization
between science and post modernism