Old Email Archive

digest 1997-02-17 #001



11:26 PM 2/16/97 -0800
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 16 Feb 1997 05:51:54 -0800
From: Joseph Duemer 
Subject: Re: The Golem
I recently gave one of my sharper students a couple of chapters from
_The Golem_ by Collins & Pinch. My student is a math whiz and still
young enough to want science to be a search for rational truth. While
he
was able to credit the argument that science is a human institution and
often proceeds by other than purely objective and rational means, he
would like to think that in the end the nature of reality is laid
clear.
So he had a question about the chapter on the reception of relativity.
Specifically, he asked why, if physicists were so all-fired hot to
accept the radical theory of an obscure paten clerk (as Collins and
Pinch seem to argue)--why was Einstein only given the Nobel in 1923,
and
then for the photo-electric effect?
My tentative answer was that the politics and sociology of the Nobel
committee may have played a role. And I suggested that we'd need to
look
at Eddington's biography for evidence of his motives, and to see
whether
he was typical of his fellow-physicists. I also suggested that the
various attempts to reproduce the Michelson-Morley results were more
telling, since the narrative of 20th century science presents the M-M
experiments as conclusive proof of relativity when in fact the results
were open to considerable interpretation.
- --
- --
Joseph Duemer
Clarkson University
School of Liberal Arts
"Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial,
but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to
mistake it for a universal one."
-- Hannah Arendt