JournalTOCs

HoST - Journal of History of Science and Technology
Number of Followers: 8

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1646-7752
Published by Sciendo

[389 journals]

Editorial: Reflections on Last Triennium
- PubDate: Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Under Shannon’s Bandwagon. Rethinking the Reception of Information
Theory in Thermal Physics, 1948-1957
- Abstract: In this paper I analyze the historical case of how Shannon’s theory of information, among other alternative theories, began to be applied rapidly and systematically within thermal physics in the 1950s. After evaluating this theory and the intellectual context in which it is inserted, I argue that it was not the formal-conceptual features of Shannon’s theory but the particular motivations of influential scientists such as von Neumann, Weaver and Wiener that properly made it possible for information science to become deeply rooted in thermal physics during the 1950s, as shown by the proposals of Brillouin and Jaynes.
  PubDate: Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Book Review: Matteo Valleriani, Giulia Giannini, and Enrico Giannetto,
eds., . Cham: Springer, 2023. 360pp. ISBN: 978-3-031-11316-1
- PubDate: Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Book Review: Maria Elvira Callapez, Sara Marques da Cruz, Vânia Carvalho,
eds., Leiria: Município de Leiria, Museu de Leiria, 2022. 269 pp
- PubDate: Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Book Review: Pekka Hämäläinen, , New York: Liveright, 2022. 571 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-63149-699-8
- PubDate: Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT
Cândido Baptista de Oliveira and the “Forgotten Memoir”: The First
Plan of a National Astronomical Observatory After Brazilian Independence
(1822-1831)
- Abstract: On February 1, 1828, the newspaper Diario Fluminense published in full the Plan for the establishment of an astronomical observatory in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The document was written by the Brazilian mathematician Cândido Baptista de Oliveira and substantiated the approval of the law determining the creation of the future Imperial Astronomical Observatory of Rio de Janeiro (IORJ). This paper discusses the influences embedded within Oliveira’s project, by analyzing the appropriation of different scientific traditions gained during his training as a mathematician at the Observatory of the University of Coimbra and during his studies at French scientific institutions, such as the Polytechnic School and Paris Observatory. I argue that this project had a nationalistic ideal, imbued with the notions of progress and modernity, both effects of the ongoing circulation of people and scientific knowledge during the beginning of the nineteenth century.
  PubDate: Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT
The Dinosaur Renaissance 1960s-80s: A Foundational Episode for the
Historiography of Paleoart
- Abstract: The “Dinosaur Renaissance” is known as a crucial event in the study of dinosaurs. From sluggish and lizard-like, they came to be conceived and represented as more dynamic animals. This paper argues that the “Dinosaur Renaissance” did not only constitute a significant scientific and artistic shift. Indeed, it can also be interpreted as a foundational episode for the historiography of paleoart. During the “Dinosaur Renaissance,” a growing community of artists and paleontologists promoted the integration of artistic processes in paleontology. They began to actively discuss the historical legacy and future of such integration. The itinerant paleoart exhibition Dinosaurs Past and Present, hosted in eight major cities across North America at the end of the 1980s, can be identified as having played a significant role in setting the foundation for the historiography of paleoart. The “Dinosaur Renaissance” did not only result in revised visual representations of dinosaurs, but also spurred some of the first investigations on the historical relationship between visual arts and paleontology. This article concludes by offering some remarks on how the present historiography of paleoart can continue to build on the efforts made during the “Dinosaur Renaissance” while remaining cognizant of their context. To effectively answer the needs of historians, as well as of paleontologists and paleoartists alike, the growing historiography of paleoart has much to gain in clarifying its own history.
  PubDate: Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT
The Anthropocene or the Perennial Mining of Otherness—Inquiry on
Artistic and Ethnographical Practice for Climate Emergency
- Abstract: The Anthropocene hypothesis brings into play a set of paradoxes and virtually incommensurable spatial and temporal dimensions. Drawing on these debates, the present text will try to analyse experimental artistic productions and actions, particularly in indigenous contexts in Brazil, framing them in a broader discussion on the relations between art, anthropology and ecology. The concept of the Anthropocene will be unfolded into at least three sub-problems that it necessarily raises: the redefinition of the hegemonic concept of nature, the redefinition of the hegemonic concept of humanity, and the redefinition of the dichotomous division between these two concepts.
  PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Preface: Prometheus in the Garden of Eden. Essays on the Anthropocene
- PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Book Review: Agustí Camós Cabeceran.
- PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Has Humankind Overwhelmed Nature’s Agency'
- Abstract: Humankind’s relationship with nature has been evolutionary. Nature’s agency initially overpowered human agency, limiting what people could do in their quest for survival. Ever so slowly people domesticated material things, such as fire and wood, and they made tools to assist them from bones, wood, and stone that gradually became more sophisticated. These tools became the principal link between humankind and the material world, and as human communities became more complex, people produced sophisticated tools worthy of being called technologies. Ships, mills, weapons, buildings—each invention and innovation increased human agency, and nature slowly gave way before it, a process visible through landscapes. This essay focuses on North America, where between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, human commodification of nature and the side effects of their technologies ultimately became so complex and complete that they ate away at the planetary ecosystem on which their own existence depends. Today, the Anthropocene encapsulates the idea of the age of humans, and nature’s agency seems to crumble as an independent force in the face of human actions.
  PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Book Review: Dipesh Chakrabarty.
- PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Pyrethrum and the Second World War: Recontextualising DDT in the Narrative
of Wartime Insect Control
- Abstract: Historians have long recognised that DDT’s fame began with extraordinary propaganda late in the Second World War, yet heroic narratives that centre the chemical still shape historical understanding. Two false assumptions inform much of the existing scholarship on wartime insect control: one is that without DDT the Allies had no protection from malaria and typhus; the other is that DDT was significantly more toxic than any alternative insecticide available. This paper tells a very different story of wartime insecticides. We recontextualise DDT in the wider wartime technological landscape and in so doing show the enduring significance of the natural insecticide, pyrethrum. DDT was never solely responsible for protecting troops and civilians from malaria and typhus and its deployment did not render all existing insecticides obsolete. Claims about the significance of DDT often work by writing out the existence of alternative methods of controlling vectors or by downplaying the efficacy of existing materials and practices.
  PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Book Review: Gianenrico Bernasconi and Susanne Thürigen, eds.
- PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Death, Life, and Longing in the Pandemicene
- Abstract: This essay explores the concept of the Pandemicene, a proposed elaboration of the Anthropocene tailored to account for the COVID-19 pandemic and the world it is making. The Anthropocene itself is a new geological era defined by human industrial activity as the dominant shaping force on the planet and its resources. Humans have already created the conditions for nonhuman animal to human disease spillover, exemplified by the emergence and global spread of SARS-CoV-2. The bimodal impact of climate change is crucial: leading to a rapid and large-scale species die off, while also reconfiguring ecosystems and placing more and more species into close contact. The results are hard to predict, just like a pandemic, but epidemiologists working on spillovers are alarmed—even if climate change were to slow down, the acceleration is underway. The Pandemicene offers a useful articulation of the Anthropocene, a concept that too often floats freely without coming to the ground in the form of specific disasters, in specific places, killing real people. With COVID in mind, we know the Pandemicene as well as we know anything, and it has reshaped human society, economies, and geopolitics in only three years-time. Building on a body of interviews conducted for the COVIDCalls podcast, this essay digs deeper into the Pandemicene, exploring ways that it elaborates the Anthropocene, and the new research questions it raises.
  PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Digesting Planetary Harms: Ocean Life, Biomaterial Innovation, and Uncanny
Ingestions of the Anthropocene
- Abstract: This article explores innovations in biomaterial ingestion that would seek to solve ecological harm in the Anthropocene. Focusing on ocean ecologies and marine life, we follow several case studies that examine the paradigm of digestion to consider how efforts to eat the harmful by-products of the Anthropocene spark multifaceted interventions including, the development of novel cuisines, dieting tools, the invention of new animal feed additives, and an array of biotechnologies that would digest or otherwise sequester plastic pollutants. In doing so, we explore how this paradigm of digestion and associated bioscientific interventions are shifting relations between humans and nonhumans, exacerbating the conditions of an “uncanny” Anthropocene. We ask: Can the moving of “strange” surroundings and digestible objects through our bodies better hold us to account for the colonial and calculative epistemes that forged the Anthropocene' Or will these dreams of a circular, digestive economy only extend the promise of the never-ending extraction, valuation, and manipulation of nonhumans as a means of locating solutions to planetary precarity'
  PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abbe’s Theory and its Introduction in Spain: The Use of Instruments for
Scientific Demonstrations
- Abstract: The theory of image formation in a microscope proposed by Ernst Abbe changed the scientific approach to microscopy. Though the theory had many detractors, his new approach led to a technological revolution in the design and construction of high-quality microscopes. It paved the way for new discoveries in the fields of biology and medicine. Joaquín María de Castellarnau, was a contemporary connoisseur of Abbe’s ideas who decided to disseminate them in Spain through various publications and training courses. In his lectures, he used various devices for practical demonstrations that allowed some concepts of the new theory to be better understood. At the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid (MNCN–CSIC), one such original and unusual instrument designed by Abbe and used by Castellarnau has been preserved in perfect condition. Castellarnau used this instrument for various experiments that helped clarify the most complex points of Abbe’s theory. In this work, we explore how the context in which science developed in Spain favoured practical activities to demonstrate new scientific theories, such as Abbe’s in the early twentieth century.
  PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Introduction: Prometheus in the Garden of Eden. Essays on the Anthropocene
- PubDate: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Colonial Railways of Mozambique: Critical and Vulnerable Infrastructure,
1880s-1930s
- Abstract: In the early 1880s, Portugal began the construction of railways in its colonies. The main goals were to reinforce Portuguese presence and increase colonial revenue. This paper aims to analyse the transnational railways built in Mozambique, between the 1880s and the 1930s, as critical infrastructure (or critical systems). I argue that the lack of railways in Mozambique was the cause for deep concern and fostered a “sense of urgency” among the Portuguese authorities, as this could potentially jeopardise the Portuguese imperial project. Railways were considered critical to bolstering Portugal’s sovereignty, as well as to exploit local resources and attract traffic from neighbouring territories. Once built, the railways revealed two major vulnerabilities: competition from South African ports and dependence on British capital. A few episodes involving Portuguese and British agents highlighted these vulnerabilities and motivated Portuguese policymakers to find solutions. This paper explores these topics based on a comprehensive literature review and the use of primary sources, intended to provide a novel approach to Portuguese colonial railways.
  PubDate: Fri, 24 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT
From the Quadrivium to Modern Science
- Abstract: The ultimate objective of this work is to demonstrate that it is possible to reconsider the emergence of modern science as a process of disintegration of the quadrivium, which was considered a stable scheme for the organization of knowledge. The argument considers the quadrivium according to the Boethian systematization that was used to organize the curricula of the late medieval universities. This argument follows the development of each of its disciplines and illustrates the practical turn they underwent. The period between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries is explored, and shows that during this period, the quadrivium potentially included a fifth autonomous discipline, calendric. The article concludes by describing epistemological considerations to the mechanisms of disintegration of knowledge structures.
  PubDate: Fri, 24 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT