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I'm taking a class on the history of science (most interesting! ) and one of its very light requirements is that for an A you have to write a 15 page term paper on something to do with the course (basically either a scientific discipline or a scientist) who lived within the bounds of the course syllabus, Newton to Einstein (technically Newton to Relativity, but he's loose). Now I did ask the professor about Quantum Physics and he said since that had Einstein in it to that'd be OK, but now I'm not really sure if that's what I want to write on. I figured something would jump out at me, but really the science I find by far the most interesting all happened in the last century, and though I'm vaguely interested in almost everything between Newton and Einstein I'm really fascinated with none of it.
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I took a history of science type course last semester and loved it. For my paper, I wrote about Michael Faraday. He's in the 19th century, so I don't know if that's too late, but the primary sources for this guy are tremendous. There are a collection of books that contain his letters (both to and from) and another collection of his lab notebooks. He's also an interesting character.
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Coulomb and the measurement of the electric constant. Lavoisier, oxygen vs phlogiston. That one's really fascinating, because phlogiston is actually an excellent theory for all it gets bashed as pseudoscience today. It's basically negative oxygen; the old guys had a fifty eprcent chance of guessing which way matter was flowing, and they got it wrong, but they had the principle right. OK, so phlogiston has to have negative mass - minor details!
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Millikan is interesting... often considered one of the greatest of all experimental scientists.
Neils Bohr is fascinating.
Enrico Fermi, though he's right there on the edge of the timeline.
Max Born trained some of the greatest physicists of this century... I know of at least Wolfgang Pauli, and Enrico Fermi. It wouldn't surprise me if other european physicists of the early 20th century were trained under Born.
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i'm not sure you can find enough about him, but Leo Slizard was instrumental in the Manhatten project, being one of those who approached FDR about developing nuclear weaponry.
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Gauss was an absolute genius -- among other things, the first to flirt with the possibility that the space we live in is curved. It was anathema to the Kantians of the time.
Poincare is also super-interesting. Science and Hypothesis is a ground-breaking work that foresaw a lot of the conceptual developments of relativity. In fact, some think Poincare came within a hair's breadth of finding relativity himself, but he couldn't take the final step that Einstein did in eliminating the ether frame.
Ernst Mach's thinking was also extremely important to the early Einstein, and especially to the development of general relativity. It's fascinating how Einstein began by assuming "Mach's principle" that space in the absence of matter could possess no structure, and then later found himself repudiating that view after it was seen to conflict with GR.
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By the way, how is 'Einstein' defined? There's a lot of science between special relativity in 1905 and the Manhattan project.
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My problem with Marie Curie is that she's the quintessential female scientist, and I'm trying to stay away from anything I think has been overdone. What's my criteria for that? It feels like it's been overdone to me. Pretty scientific huh?
quote:By the way, how is 'Einstein' defined? There's a lot of science between special relativity in 1905 and the Manhattan project.
Technically it's defined as relativity and that's it, but the proffesor has made it clear (to me at least) that really if I can come up with any sort of backdoor, no matter how lame, anything within Einstein the man's time period is acceptable.
quote:And you could write your report in French!
I really couldn't, as in, unless the whole report was about the list of conjugations for verbs I could look up on the internet, was that what Marie Curie researched?
I'm a big fan of development in the atom/electron arena, not because I don't like it, it's just less interesting to me, maybe it all stems from the high school physics class in which I got bored and attempted to prove Gauss's Law wrong... and failed, but I gave it a good shot!
I think most likely I'd rather study the devlopment of a specific invention, or area of science (or math, which I'm positive is allowed) even if it spans very long periods of time, rather than one person.
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No, but a lot of science is mathematics, and a lot of mathematics is developed because of science. They are very inter-related fields, and from about Aristotle through the mid-nineteenth century, most physicists were called mathematicians.
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Sorry, I did delete it right away, before I thought anyone would have read it. I said, math is not science.
edit: And science is not mathematics. Mathematics is both a theoretical field that can have implications for scientific theories and it is a tool often used in science, but the two fields are separated by definitional boundaries. Math is very sciencesque, but it is not science.
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"Science" as distinct from other learning is a very new concept, especially in the timeframe related to Hobbes's assignment.
Off the top of my head, Pascal, Newton, and Gauss made significant contributions to what we now call "science" and to mathematics. And the distinction is often not clear in any individual piece of work they did.
Advances in the techniques of science are certainly valid in a discussion over that time frame. The movement from deductive to inductive reasoning is critical, and what made that possible is a series of mathematical developments. Any paper on one of these cross-discipline geniuses will lead to a discussion of scientific discovery and mathematical discovery.
Nowadays, this would be much less true. But, as best I can determine, quantum physicist have been developing specialized mathematical techniques still.
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Which is one the reasons that I deleted my original post. In the context of the history of the philosophy of science, mathematics (and especially mathematician/scientists) are extremely important.
I don't like that most people don't seem to understand what science is and what it isn't, but my objection didn't really fit in this context.
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Meh, people want to have exact, sciencesque way of compartmentalizing people. You should see some of the stupid crap people tried to pull during the trait-theory happy days of the mid-20th century.
Always treat people who study people but don't seem to like them with a great deal of caution, especially when they pull reductionalist stuff out of a hat.
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"And science is not mathematics. Mathematics is both a theoretical field that can have implications for scientific theories and it is a tool often used in science, but the two fields are separated by definitional boundaries. Math is very sciencesque, but it is not science."
Of course, I didn't say that science is mathematics. I said that " a lot of science is mathematics, and a lot of mathematics is developed because of science."
There's a difference there. A lot of the business of doing science is, basically, doing mathematics.
Leaving aside the question of whether science is a subset of mathematics (which I think it is) my statement above would be better worded to say "Doing science requires doing a lot of mathematics."
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I'd be fine with that Paul, as long as you point out that science can also be done without any math whatsoever.
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Barely. You can do sketchy science without mathematics, but if you want rigorous science, you need mathematics. And thats been true since the 1400's.
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Well semantics aside I'm pretty sure I'll have no problems with doing a field of mathematics.
Kwea, I thought about doing some pre-computer, computer stuff but I think I'd have to really include the computer on that and that's too recent. I was thinking maybe boolean algebra but I think I'd rather do non-Euclidean geometry.
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Paul, If you believe that, then you don't understand what science actually means. People do science every day. Very little of it invovles math. Some of it doesn't even yield itself to numerical analysis.
Hobbes, If you're interested in quantam mechanics, why not look at the pre-Eistein crew, like Planck, Helmholtz, and Maxwell?
edit: And it's not semantics. The substance of math and the substance of science are very different.
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"Paul, If you believe that, then you don't understand what science actually means."
I'd wager I have a significantly better grasp of what science is then you do.
Yes, people do science every day... but its very often sketchy science, and very often involves mathematics, even if we don't realize we're doing it. "If I step out into the road now, i'm going to get hit by that car," involves doing math intuitively.
We can have a long argument over exactly what science is, and exactly what mathematics is, but if you want to enter any scientific field today, you need to be able to readily handle, at the very least, algebra, and probably statistics and calculus as well. And there's a reason for that... you can't do rigorous science without mathematics. Its part of the reason that chemistry and physics are so far ahead of psychology, biology, and the social sciences.
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When I'm debugging a program, I often engage in scientific thinking that is neither sketchy (whatever the heck that means) nor quantitative. The same is true with a mechanic or a kid playing with a new toy. If we follow the scientific method, we're doing science. Mathematics is a tool that can often make analysis easy or even possible and it can lend precision, but following the common ideas that if it involves math (or other sciencesque trappings) it's science and if it doesn't, then it isn't is a big mistake. In my own field, I can think of behaviorism (or phrenology) being taken for science because it had a bunch of the trappings, including math, while some scientificly conducted cross-cultural research (for example) has been regarded by some as non-scientific because it demonstrated qualitative as opposed to quantitative differences.
In what way is physics et al. ahead of what I do? I wasn't aware that we were racing.
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quote:edit: And it's not semantics. The substance of math and the substance of science are very different.
OK, so this is interesting, I was going to respond that to me, semantics had always meant the definition of a word, like arguing semantics was arguing what the words in an argument meant, which was pretty much what was going on. But then I realized I was certainly wrong so I looked it up, and every definition of "semantics" is "the study of languages", or some variation using "the study of". I guess I'm the slowest light-bulb in the proverbial ... ummm... light-bulb holder but I learned something new today.
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Hobbes, That's what I was saying too (the definition of the word). The difference between math and science isn't that some people call some parts of something math and some parts science and other people disagree. It's that the two words denote two different and pretty much mutually exclusive concepts. They differ not just in labeling, but in what they describe. Thus, it's not a semantic difference, but a substantive one.
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Hobbes, We're not arguing over what they mean, we're arguing over the meanings. (There, that out to sort out your confusion.) Two people are arguing semantics when they are using the same word to mean different things or two diffrent words to mean the same thing. Here we have two strictly defined concepts that I'm saying are mutually exclusive. The concepts differ, not just the labels that we're using.
Science by its definition is data driven. You inductively go from specific case to come up with and test general theories.
Math by its definition is law driven. You deductively apply general laws to specific cases to deterministically find out answers. It can be applied as a tool to data as part of the practice of science, but it can not be science.
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Whatever math and science are and/ aren't, I'm positive I can do my report on math as well as science.
I reall think that I would prefer to do it on a concept or field of study, or even invention (though invention would be least preferable) rather than on a person...
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I'm very into Pasteur and Lister, but that's definitely not what you're looking for. Then there's the first doctor to use willow bark for fever. I'm very into medical history, and I know it's completely irrelevant to your thread, but who cares? You all can just ignore this post. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I always thought it would be interesting to look at the differences between formalized "Ivory Tower" science and the hotter, more chaotic frontier science. You could do a comparision of Western European to the less conservative stuff being done in America and elsewhere during the 18th and 19th centuries. (Of course, I'm going to try to tease the social out of anything I study, so maybe that doesn't sound interesting to other people.)
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