Search results for "Historiography of science"
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Moving Localities and Creative Circulation: Travels as Knowledge Production in 18th-Century Europe
2014
In recent historiography of science, circulation has been widely used to weave global narratives about the history of science. These have tended to focus on flows of people, objects and practices rather than investigating the spread of universal patterns of knowledge. The approach has also, to a great extent, concentrated on colonial contexts and treated ‘European science’ as a more or less homogeneous knowledge realm. Furthermore, these studies of circulation have usually been tied to a contextualist view of knowledge formation in which locality is taken as a set of specificities linked with particular locations. In this article we redirect the focus of the discussion on circulation to Eur…
Contextualizing Unguru’s 1975 Attack on the Historiography of Ancient Greek Mathematics
2016
In 1975 S. Unguru published his controversial paper on the need to rewrite the history of ancient Greek mathematics. The origin of the paper is sketched according to Unguru’s own story, and then the paper is contextualized in some of the historiographic and disciplinary discussions and shifts taking place during the decade before its publication. The focus is not only on the history of (Greek) mathematics (J. Klein , A. Szabo , M. S. Mahoney ), but a rather broad approach is taken to capture the wider (U.S.-American, academic) discourse around questions of professionalisation of history of science/mathematics. This analysis shows the complexity of the discursive field in which Unguru’s pape…
Einstein and Relativity: What Price Fame?
2012
ArgumentEinstein's initial fame came in late 1919 with a dramatic breakthrough in his general theory of relativity. Through a remarkable confluence of events and circumstances, the mass media soon projected an image of the photogenic physicist as a bold new revolutionary thinker. With his theory of relativity Einstein had overthrown outworn ideas about space and time dating back to Newton's day, no small feat. While downplaying his reputation as a revolutionary, Einstein proved he was well cast for the role of mild-mannered scientific genius. Yet fame demanded its price. Surrounded by social and economic unrest in Berlin, he was caught between two worlds, one struggling to be born, another …