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Showing 1 - 14 of 14 matches in All Departments
Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured in scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity-- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (both Zone Books). Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, and other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999)."
Is science unified or disunified? Over the last century, the question has raised the interest (and hackles) of scientists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science, for at stake is how science and society fit together. Recent years have seen a turn largely against the rhetoric of unity, ranging from the please of condensed matter physicists for disciplinary autonomy all the way to discussions in the humanities and social sciences that involve local history, feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, scientific relativism and realism, and social constructivism. Many of these varied aspects of the debate over the disunity of science are reflected in this volume, which brings together a number of scholars studying science who otherwise have had little to say to each other: feminist theorists, philosophers of science, sociologists of science. How does the context of discover shape knowledge? What are the philosophical consequences of a disunified science? Does, for example, an antirealism, a realism, or an arealism become defensible within a picture of local scientific knowledge? What politics lies behind and follows from a picture of the world of science more like a quilt than a pyramid? Who gains and loses if representation of science has standards that vary from place to place, field to field, and practitioner to practitioner.
Galison provides excellent histories of three experimental episodes: the measurement of the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron, the discovery of the mu meson, or muon, and the discovery of weak neutral currents. These studies of actual experiments will provide valuable material for both philosophers and historians of science and Galison's own thoughts on the nature of experiment are extremely important. . . . Galison has given both philosophers and historians much to think about. I strongly urge you to read this book.--Allan Franklin, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science Anyone who is seriously concerned with understanding how research is done should read this. There have been many books on one or another part of its subject matter but few giving such insights into how the research is done and how the consensus of discovery is arrived at.--Frank Close, New Scientist [Galison] is to be congratulated on producing a masterpiece in the field.--Michael Redhead, Synthese How Experiments End is a major historical work on an exciting topic.--Andy Pickering, Isis
A dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps" is "part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity....In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others....Galison has unearthed fascinating material" ("New York Times"). Clocks and trains, telegraphs and colonial conquest: the challenges of the late nineteenth century were an indispensable real-world background to the enormous theoretical breakthrough of relativity. And two giants at the foundations of modern science were converging, step-by-step, on the answer: Albert Einstein, an young, obscure German physicist experimenting with measuring time using telegraph networks and with the coordination of clocks at train stations; and the renowned mathematician Henri Poincare, president of the French Bureau of Longitude, mapping time coordinates across continents. Each found that to understand the newly global world, he had to determine whether there existed a pure time in which simultaneity was absolute or whether time was relative. Esteemed historian of science Peter Galison has culled new information from rarely seen photographs, forgotten patents, and unexplored archives to tell the fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that would conquer the empire of time."
"I want to get at the blown glass of the early cloud chambers and
the oozing noodles of wet nuclear emulsion; to the resounding crack
of a high-voltage spark arcing across a high-tension chamber and
leaving the lab stinking of ozone; to the silent, darkened room,
with row after row of scanners sliding trackballs across projected
bubble-chamber images. Pictures and pulses--I want to know where
they came from, how pictures and counts got to be the bottom-line
data of physics." (from the preface)
This collection demonstrates the range of approaches that some of the leading scholars of our day take to basic questions at the intersection of the natural and human worlds. The essays focus on three interlocking categories: Reason stakes a bigger territory than the enclosed yard of universal rules. Nature expands over a far larger region than an eternal category of the natural. And history refuses to be confined to claims of an unencumbered truth of how things happened.
Is science unified or disunified? Over the last century, the question has raised the interest (and hackles) of scientists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science, for at stake is how science and society fit together. Recent years have seen a turn largely against the rhetoric of unity, ranging from the please of condensed matter physicists for disciplinary autonomy all the way to discussions in the humanities and social sciences that involve local history, feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, scientific relativism and realism, and social constructivism. Many of these varied aspects of the debate over the disunity of science are reflected in this volume, which brings together a number of scholars studying science who otherwise have had little to say to each other: feminist theorists, philosophers of science, sociologists of science. How does the context of discover shape knowledge? What are the philosophical consequences of a disunified science? Does, for example, an antirealism, a realism, or an arealism become defensible within a picture of local scientific knowledge? What politics lies behind and follows from a picture of the world of science more like a quilt than a pyramid? Who gains and loses if representation of science has standards that vary from place to place, field to field, and practitioner to practitioner.
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