This book is not only an autobiography of the respected physicist and director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, but a discussion and analysis of issues critical to the relationship between independent academic inquiry and imposed government orthodoxy. The book describes each phase of Dr. Panofsky's career in a way that clarifies the nature of the issues surrounding his work, and explains his chosen course of action.
Knowledge matters, and states have a stake in managing its movement to protect a variety of local and national interests. The view that knowledge circulates by itself in a flat world, unimpeded by national boundaries, is a myth. The transnational movement of knowledge is a social accomplishment, requiring negotiation, accommodation, and adaptation to the specificities of local contexts. This volume of essays by historians of science and technology breaks the national framework in which histories are often written. Instead, How Knowledge Moves takes knowledge as its central object, with the goal of unraveling the relationships among people, ideas, and things that arise when they cross national borders. This specialized knowledge is located at multiple sites and moves across borders via a dazzling array of channels, embedded in heads and hands, in artifacts, and in texts. In the United States, it shapes policies for visas, export controls, and nuclear weapons proliferation; in Algeria, it enhances the production of oranges by colonial settlers; in Vietnam, it facilitates the exploitation of a river delta. In India it transforms modes of agricultural production. It implants American values in Latin America. By concentrating on the conditions that allow for knowledge movement, these essays explore travel and exchange in face-to-face encounters and show how border-crossings mobilize extensive bureaucratic technologies.
BES, the Beijing Spectrometer, began its first groundbreaking physics run, thirty years ago, in 1989. This is the first high energy physics experiment in China, and has been unique throughout the world for its thorough and extended coverage of the tau and charm energy region. Since then, the BES detector has undergone steady improvements, upgrading to BESII in 1998 and to BESIII in 2008. Over the same period, the collaboration has expanded from 150 members, across 10 institutions in China and the United States, to about 500 members, across 72 institutions and 15 countries. The physics program, too, has extended from light hadron spectroscopy, tau, and charm physics to the discovery of exotic charmonium-like states, precision tests of the Standard Model of particle physics, and searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model.This special volume collects the proceedings of the symposium held at the Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing, in celebration of the 30-year span of achievements and progress at the BES, BESII, and BESIII experiments. Written by many leaders of the BES collaborations, these proceedings document the early days of the BES experiments, important milestones, and the future physics program at BESIII.
What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld. Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason.
This book looks at the types of new research organizations that drive scientific innovation and how ground-breaking science transforms research fields and their organization. Based on historical case studies and comparative empirical data, the book presents new and thought-provoking evidence that improves our knowledge and understanding about how new research fields are formed and how research organizations adapt to breakthroughs in science. While the book is firmly based in science history, it discusses more general sociological and policy propositions regarding scientific innovations and organizational change. The volume brings together leading scholars both from the United States and Europe.
In Sputnik's Shadow traces the rise and fall of the President's Science Advisory Committee from its ascendance under Eisenhower to its demise during the Nixon years. Zuoyue Wang examines key turning points during the twentieth century, including the beginning of the Cold War, the debates over nuclear weapons, the Sputnik crisis in 1957, the struggle over the Vietnam War, and the eventual end of the Cold War, showing how the involvement of scientists in executive policymaking evolved over time and brings new insights to the intellectual, social, and cultural histories of the era.
Warren M. Washington, Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, was among the first scientists to pioneer the development of climate models that are used for evaluation of humankind's impact on the global environment. His modeling work has helped understand climate change including global warming. Over the last 30 years, he has had Presidential Appointments under the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and G.W. Bush administrations and he has served on many science committees and the including National Science Board, which he chaired from 2002 to 2006. He is a former President of the American Meteorological Society and a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the American Philosophical Society. This autobiography provides information about how he became a scientist and his insights into science policy. Throughout the book, footnotes and internet web sites are used were more information is provided.
Deemed by Heinrich Heine a city of merchants where poets go to die, Hamburg was an improbable setting for a major intellectual movement. Yet it was there, at the end of World War I, at a new university in this commercial center, that a trio of twentieth-century pioneers in the humanities emerged. Working side by side, Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky developed new avenues in art history, cultural history, and philosophy, changing the course of cultural and intellectual history in Weimar Germany and throughout the world. In Dreamland of Humanists, Emily J. Levine considers not just these men, but the historical significance of the time and place where their ideas took form. Shedding light on the origins of their work on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Levine clarifies the social, political, and economic pressures faced by German-Jewish scholars on the periphery of Germany’s intellectual world. By examining the role that context plays in our analysis of ideas, Levine confirms that great ideas—like great intellectuals—must come from somewhere.
This book analyses the emergence of a transformed Big Science in Europe and the United States, using both historical and sociological perspectives. It shows how technology-intensive natural sciences grew to a prominent position in Western societies during the post-World War II era, and how their development cohered with both technological and social developments. At the helm of post-war science are large-scale projects, primarily in physics, which receive substantial funds from the public purse. Big Science Transformed shows how these projects, popularly called 'Big Science', have become symbols of progress. It analyses changes to the political and sociological frameworks surrounding publicly-funding science, and their impact on a number of new accelerator and reactor-based facilities that have come to prominence in materials science and the life sciences. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will be of great interest to historians, sociologists and philosophers of science.
