Princeton University
Department of History
Prof. M. Norton Wise
HIS292: Science in the Modern World
Part I--Equilibrium and Revolution
Week 1 (Feb. 3-7) Making electrical fire--subtle fluids, utility, and parlor games.
General: Hankins, 46-80. Optional: I.B. Cohen, Revolution in Science (reserve)
Intensive: Franklin, Experiments and Observations on Electricity (in Readings).
Week 2 (Feb. 10-14) The chemical revolution.
General: Hankins, 81-112. Optional: William H. Brock, Chemistry (reserve)
Intensive: Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry, Preface and Part I, ch. I (chs. V-VII, optional) (in Readings).
Week 3 (Feb. 17-21) Ideology of Enlightenment.
General: Hankins, 158-190.
Intensive: Condorcet, "Reception Speech at the French Academy" (in Readings).
Week 4 (Feb. 24-28) Ordering the biological world.
General and Intensive: Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffrey Debate (in Readings); Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom (to be distributed).
Part II--Temporality and Industrialization
Week 5 (Mar. 3-7) Interconversion--Naturphilosophie and electromagnetic fields.
General: Williams, Origins of Field Theory, chs. 2-3.
Intensive: Oersted, "The Spiritual in the Material" (in Readings)
Week 6 (Mar. 10-14) Conservation--heat and life.
General: Kuhn, "Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery" (in Readings).
Intensive: Helmholtz, "On the Interaction of Natural Forces" (in Readings).
N.B. FIRST ESSAY DUE MARCH 12--WEDNESDAY
FALL RECESS (March 15-23) for business as pleasure you may enjoy reading Dickens' novel, Hard Times for week 7.
Week 7 (Mar. 24-28) Progression--progress and decay, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
General: Dickens, Hard Times (entire).
Intensive: Wise, "Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth Century Britain (III)" (in Readings).
Week 8 (Mar. 31-Apr. 4)--Transformation--evolution in the biological world.
General: Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (in Readings).
Intensive: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and On the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection" in (Readings). Optional: Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (reserve)
Part III--Modernity and Re-Creation
Week 9 (Apr. 7-11) Electromagnetism, positivism, and anti-mechanism.
General: Jungnickel and McCormmach, "New Foundations for Theoretical Physics at the turn of the Twentieth Century" (in Readings) or Russell McCormmach, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist (reserve).
Intensive: Einstein and Infeld, Evolution of Physics, 125-153.
Week 10 (Apr. 14-18) The special theory of relativity
General: Holton, "Mach, Einstein, and the Search for Reality," in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, ch. 8.
Intensive: Einstein and Infeld, Evolution of Physics, 153-199.
Week 11 (Apr. 21-25) Quantum mechanics
General: Holton, "The Roots of Complementarity," in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, ch. 4. Film: "Metropolis,"April 21, 7:30 pm.
Intensive: Niels Bohr, "Light and Life" and (optional) "Atomic Theory and Mechanics" (in Readings)
Week 12 (Apr. 28-May 2) Genes and Mutations.
Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (in Readings)
N.B. SECOND ESSAY DUE APRIL 30--WEDNESDAY