Month: May 2015
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Weinberg, Whiggism, and the World in History of Science
This year, Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg published a history of Western science up to Newton: To explain the World. The Discovery of Modern Science. Weinberg was an important player in the science wars, voicing his strong intuitions that genuine science transcended history and culture against what he perceived as subversive social constructivism. Now…
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How to Write a History of Scientific Expertise?
What is an expert? Is it someone who possesses specialized knowledge? Or rather someone who is qualified to make rational decisions on sensitive social issues, a technocrat perhaps? Is it someone with great technical skills, who uses these skills professionally? For historians, the different markers used to typify a class of ‘experts’ pose considerable difficulties.…
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The V-Files
In the classic 1990s television show The X-Files, the Federal Bureau of Investigation relegated files of mysterious cases to a backwater office to be investigated by a lonely pair of agents, forgotten by the rest of the world (except when they got into trouble). The Immanuel Velikovsky Papers, stored in the Department of Rare Books…