BiblioVault - Books about Osiris

Osiris, Volume 10

Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science

Edited by Arnold Thackray

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Osiris, Volume 11

Science in the Field

Edited by Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Unlike many histories of scientific practices, which deal with laboratory experiments, this collection of essays focuses on scientific investigations conducted out of doors: biological, physical, and social. Case studies from varied disciplines explore the material, human, and cultural aspects of fieldwork, and the relationships between scientific activity and popular outdoor activities such as exploration and recreation.

Included are "Gender, Culture, and Astrophysical Fieldwork: Elizabeth Campbell and the Lick Observatory-Crocker Eclipse Expeditions," by Alex Soo-jung-Kim Pang; "Wallace in Other Lands," by Jane Camerini; "The Heroic Science of Glacier Motion," by Bruce Hevly; "Objectivity or Heroism: Invisibility of Women in Science," by Naomi Oreskes; "When Nature is the Zoo: Vision and Power in the Art and Science of Natural History," by Gregg Mitman; "Manly Men in Scientific Balloons: Meteorology and the Victorian Scientist as Romantic Hero," by Jennifer Tucker; "Paul du Chaillu and Construction of Authority," by Stuart McCook; "Of Sangfroid and Sphinx Moths: Cruelty, Public Relations, and Entomology, 1800-1840," by Anne Larsen Hollerbach; "The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the 18th Century," by Richard Sorrenson; and "'A Tent with a View:' Colonial Officers, Anthropologists, and the Making of the Field in Northern Rhodesia, 1937-1960," by Lynette Schumaker.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 12

Women, Gender, and Science: New Directions

Edited by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Helen Longino

University of Chicago Press, 1997

What do research on women in science and research on science and gender have to do with each other? This volume brings together prominent historians and philosophers of science to examine women's participation in science, gender and science, and the potential for interaction between these two pieces of a larger puzzle. The eleven chapters included here explore a number of interrelated topics: the experiences of individual women working in science; the demographic patterns of and support for women in specific fields; the gendered construction of scientific education and terminology; the impact of feminist critiques on contemporary science; and more. The result is a collection of works that are rich in suggestions, specific in their evidence, and grounded in the complex discussion of gender in late twentieth century cultural and academic life.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 13

Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology, and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia

Edited by Morris Low

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Devoted to the history of non-Western science, technology, and medicine, this path-breaking volume goes beyond the legacy of the late historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham, by covering an unprecedented range of countries and by adopting new approaches. The seventeen chapters address topics in China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. However, the contributors do not view the histories of these countries in isolation. Many adopt a cross-cultural approach by tracing interaction with other Asian countries and the West. The volume begins with four chapters that provide a "big picture" overview of science and civilization in Asia. These are followed by more focused essays, which deal with aspects of science, technology, and medicine in specific countries.

Specialist and non-specialist readers alike will leave this volume with a strong sense of the political and economic imperatives behind knowledge systems in Eastern Asia, their cultural contexts, and how they have coexisted along with those in the West.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 14

Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory

Edited by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Clark A. Elliot

University of Chicago Press, 2000

This volume breaks new ground in the study of how national culture, disciplinary tradition, epistemological choice, and political expediency affect the construction of collective memory and, then, how historians work with—and sometimes against—those constructions. Essays focus on a variety of commemorative rites, ranging from the quincentennial of Copernicus to the centennials of Pasteur, Darwin, and Planck; from the tercentenary of Harvard to the half centennial of Los Alamos; from the centennial of evolutionary theory to anniversaries of research schools in molecular biology.

Contributors include Clark A. Elliott, Owen Gingerich, Dieter Hoffmann, Dominque Pestre, Robert W. Seidel, and V. Betty Smocovitis.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 15

Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise

Edited by Roy MacLeod

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Surveying Africa, Asia, and the Americas, this important new collection looks at roles of science, medicine, and technology during five centuries of colonialism. This thought-provoking history examines the many intersections of science, politics, and culture during colonialism, including the relation between racism and medical science, "exploration" and its potential for wealth, and the perceived differences between indigenous knowledge and European science. Sixteen chapters focus on such topics as intellectual property rights and biodiversity, "acclimatizing" the world, and science and development. Bringing together contributions from scholars of history and science from around the globe, Nature and Empire forges a new path for readers interested in science and society during the modern era.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 16

Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions

Edited by John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler, and Jitse M. van der Meer

University of Chicago Press, 2001

It is a widely shared assumption that science and religion are fundamentally opposed to each other. Yet, recent historiography has shown that religious belief needs to be added to the social, economic, political, and other cultural factors that went into the making of modern science. This new collection shows religious ideas not only motivated scientific effort but also shaped the actual content of major scientific theories. The fourteen studies contained in this volume concentrate on such topics as the theological facets of modern astronomy in the works of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton; the retention of teleology in the natural philosophy of Boyle; and the theistic and teleological associations of the modern theory of evolution authored by Darwin and Wallace. While the majority of the contributions focus on the Christian traditions, the collection also contains case-studies of Judaic and Islamic influences.

Reflecting the fecundity of contemporary scholarship, the current volume should be of extraordinary interest to historians of science, scientists, as well as anyone intrigued by the many ways in which relations between religion and science have been constructed.

Contributors include:

Peter Barker,
John Hedley Brooke,
Geoffrey Cantor,
Margaret G. Cook,
Michael J. Crowe,
Thomas Dixon,
Noah J. Efron,
Richard England,
Martin Fichman,
Maurice A. Finocchiaro,
Menachem Fish,
Bernard R. Goldstein,
Bernard Lightman,
Margaret J. Osler
F. Jamil Ragep,
Phillip R. Sloan,
Stephen Snobelen,
Jitse M. van der Meer,
Stephen J. Wykstra,

[more]

Osiris, Volume 17

Science and Civil Society

Edited by Lynn K. Nyhart and Thomas Broman

University of Chicago Press, 2002

This volume explores the varieties of relationships formed between science and civil society, at both the conceptual and institutional levels, since the late seventeenth century. It brings together general historians and historians of science with different national perspectives to confront the various ways sin which science and civil society have shaped one another in different times and places. How, when, and why did science become intertwined in the network of voluntary associations, professional groups and other institutions we understand as comprising "civil society"? How has science affected the ideology of civil society and thus the legitimacy of political authority in historical contexts as different as late eighteenth-century America, mid nineteenth-century Germany, and early twentieth-century China? How have scientists made use of the ideological links between science and civil political discourse to further their own professional ends? In contrast to much recent writing on civil society, this volume does not aim at making normative pronouncements about the role of civil society in promoting democratic polities, nor does it attempt to weigh the role of science in democracy. Instead, the essays examine how the fruitful interplay of beliefs concerning science and civil society has worked to legitimize the institutional forms of civil society and naturalize its ideologies, while at the same time giving to science its overwhelmingly powerful role in public life.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 18

Science and the City

Edited by Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and Andrew Mendelsohn

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Seeking to unite the history of science and urban history, this book emphasizes the active role cities play in shaping both scientific practice and scientific knowledge. Furthermore, the authors argue that cities themselves have to be viewed as mediated by science. Four interconnections of science and the city are discussed: the relationship between scientific expertise and urban politics; science's role in the cultural representation of the city; the embedment of scientific activity in the city's social and material infrastructure; and the interaction between science and everyday urban life.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 19

Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments

Edited by Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Bringing together historians of science and medicine with environmental historians, and adding more contemporary vantage points from geography, anthropology, and sociology, Osiris Volume 19: Landscapes of Exposure offers an unprecedented interdisciplinary depiction of how, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists and lay people have generated methods for connecting health and place, disease and ecology, calculation and risk.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 20

Politics and Science in Wartime: Comparative International Perspectives on the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

Edited by Carola Sachse and Mark Walker

University of Chicago Press, 2005

Politics and Science in Wartime brings together a team of internationally known scholars who compare science and its practices in the Third Reich to that in other wartime nations. Their nuanced conclusions on topics ranging from scientific mobilization and purges to the ethics of scientific practice offer new perspectives on science under extreme political conditions.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 21

Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs

Edited by John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Osiris annualy examines a particular topic in the history of science, bringing together experts in the field to consider multiple aspects of the time period, episode, or theme. Volume 21, Historical Perspectives on Science, Technology, and International Affairs, explores the ways in which scientists and issues in science and technology have played significant roles in foreign policy and international relations, especially since the Second World War.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 22

The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences

Edited by Greg Eghigian, Andreas Killen, and Christine Leuenberger

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Osiris annually examines a particular topic in the history of science, bringing together experts in the field to consider multiple aspects of the time period, episode, or theme. Volume 22 explores the ways that twentieth-century political institutions and the human sciences in the western world attempted to understand and shape the attitudes and behaviors of individuals.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 23

Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860-1960

Edited by Michael Gordin, Karl Hall, and Alexei Kojevnikov

University of Chicago Press, 2008

The newest annual volume of Osiris, Intelligentsia Science explores the transformations in science in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, from serfdom to Sputnik, as a series of developments in Russian culture.
The contributors argue that it was the generation of the 1860s that transformed “intelligentsia” into a central notion of Russian popular discourse, cementing its association with revolutionary politics—and with science. Science became the cornerstone of the intelligentsia’s ideological and political projects, either as an alternative to socialism, or more often as its nominal raison d’être. The Russian century may in fact be over, but the interrelation of the intelligentsia and science to form “intelligentsia science” proves enduring.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 24

National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology

Edited by Carol E. Harrison and Ann Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2009

This latest volume of Osiris, National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology, explores the ways in which modern science and the nation-state have mutually interacted since the Enlightenment. The contributors argue for the formative role of science and technology in the creation of national identity, and with examples drawn from eastern and western nation-states, they argue that possession of scientific and technological resources became a marker of national character; the first states to develop this power nexus of science, technology, and bureaucracy went on to become globally dominant and widely imitated. This volume traces the significance of this relationship from its beginnings in the West to its dissemination into the postcolonial world.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 25

Expertise: Practical Knowledge and the Early Modern State

Edited by Eric H. Ash

University of Chicago Press, 2010

This newest annual edition of Osiris brings together a variety of scholars to consider a topic of increasing interest in the history of science: expertise. Focusing specifically on the role expertise has played in the support, legitimation, and growth of the state since early modern times, Expertise and the Early Modern State reveals how scientific expertise and practical knowledge were crucial to the construction of early modern empires and economies. The state, on the other hand, performed a similar function for scientists, giving them much of the status and resources they needed to further their work. A penetrating, multifaceted investigation, Osiris 25 will be required reading for historians of science and early modern political development.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 26

Klima

Edited by James Rodger Fleming and Vladimir Jankovic

University of Chicago Press, 2011

“Climate is a rather elusive entity,” wrote Helmut Landsberg in 1950 as he sorted out some twenty or so competing definitions. This volume of Osiris explores the complexities in understanding what climate means from a historical perspective. The title of this volume, Klima, evokes its Greek origins, κλίμα, meaning an extended period encompassing vast layers of different kinds of meteorological information. The volume thus seeks not only to decouple Klima from its current exclusive association with atmospheric sciences, but also to re-visit the implications of an ancient vocabulary for medical, geographical, agricultural, economic, racial, and other “endemic” concerns. If climate is not just about the weather, what is it? The essays in this volume treat climate discourse as a framing device that makes explicit all social concerns arising from the anxiety over the sensible and latent experiences of living in an atmosphere of hunger and satiation, disease and health, poverty and wealth, isolation and community, angst and hope.

James Fleming is a historian of science and technology and Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Colby College, Maine. Vladimir Jankovic is a faculty member, at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. He is a historian of atmospheric sciences, and has published in the history of meteorology, geography of environmental knowledge, and medical climatology.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 28

Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750-1980

Edited by Alexandra Hui, Julia Kursell, and Myles W. Jackson

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2013

The understanding of sound underwent profound changes with the advent of laboratory science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New techniques of sound visualization and detection, the use of electricity to generate sound, and the emergence of computers radically reshaped the science of acoustics and the practice of music. The essays in this volume of Osiris explore the manifold transformations of sound ranging from soundproof rooms to psychoacoustics of seismology to galvanic music to pedaling technique. They also discuss more general themes such as the nature of scientific evidence and the development of instruments and instrumentation. In examining the reciprocity between music and science, this volume reaches a new register in the evolution of scientific methodology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 29

Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Edited by Matthew D. Eddy, Seymour H. Mauskopf, and William R. Newman

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2014

The last twenty-five years have witnessed some provocative transmutations in our understanding of early modern chemistry. The alchemist, once marginalized as a quack, now joins the apothecary, miner, humanist, and natural historian as a practitioner of “chymistry.” In a similar vein, the Chemical Revolution of the eighteenth century, with its focus on phlogiston and airs, has been expanded to include artisanal, medical, and industrial practices. This collection of essays builds on these reappraisals and excavates the affinities between alchemy, chymistry, and chemistry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It reveals a rich world of theory and practice in which instruments, institutions, inscriptions and ideas were used to make material knowledge. More generally, the volume will catalyze wide-ranging discussions of material and visual cultures, the role of expertise, and the religious and practical contexts of scientific inquiry.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 30

Scientific Masculinities

Edited by Erika Lorraine Milam and Robert A. Nye

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2015

This volume of Osiris integrates gender analysis with the global history of science and medicine from the late Middle Ages to the present by focusing on masculinity. The premise is that social constructions of masculinity function simultaneously as foils for femininity and as methods of differentiating between “kinds” of men. In exploring scientific masculinities, the book asks: how has masculinity been defined, and what are the mechanisms by which it operates in science? The essays are divided into sections that emphasize the importance of gender to the practices of professionalization, the spaces in which scientific, technological, and medical labor is performed, and the ways that sex, gender, and sexual orientation are measured and serve as metaphors in society and culture.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 31

History of Science and the Emotions

Edited by Otniel E. Dror, Bettina Hitzer, Anja Laukötter, and Pilar León-Sanz

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016

What new insights become available for historians when emotions are included as an analytical category? This volume of Osiris explores the historical interrelationships between science and its cultures and cultures of emotions. It argues that a dialogue between the history of emotions and the history of science leads to a rethinking of our categories of analysis, our subjects, and our periodizations. The ten case studies in the volume explore these possibilities and interrelationships across North America and Europe, between the twelfth and the twentieth centuries, in a variety of scientific disciplines. They analyze how scientific communities approached and explained the functions of emotions; how the concomitant positioning of emotions in or between body-mind-intersubjectivity took place; how emotions infused practices and how practices generated emotions; and, ultimately, how new and emerging identities of and criteria for emotions created new knowledge, new technologies, and new subjectivities.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 32

Data Histories

Edited by Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, and David Sepkoski

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2017

The history of data brings together topics and themes from a variety of perspectives in history of science: histories of the material culture of information and of computing, the history of politics on individual and global scales, gender and women’s history, as well as the histories of many individual disciplines, to name just a few of the areas covered by essays in this volume. But the history of data is more than just the sum of its parts. It provides an emerging new rubric for considering the impact of changes in cultures of information in the sciences in the longue durée, and an opportunity for historians to rethink important questions that cross many of our traditional disciplinary categories.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 33

Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories

Edited by Lukas Rieppel, William Deringer, and Eugenia Lean

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018

The historical relationship between science and capitalism has long stood as a central question in science studies, at least since its foundations in the 1930s. Taking inspiration from the recent surge of scholarly interest in the “history of capitalism,” as well as from renewed attention to political economy by historians of science and technology, this Osiris volume revisits this classic quandary, foregrounding the entanglements between these two powerful and unruly historical forces and tracing the diverse ways they mutually shaped each other. Key attention is paid to the practices of knowledge work that enable both scientific and capitalistic action and to the diversity of global sites and circuits in which science/capitalism have been performed. The assembled papers excavate an array of tangled nodes at the science/capitalism nexus, spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, from Nevada to Central Asia to Japan, from microbiology to industrial psychology to public health.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 34

Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science

Edited by Amanda Rees and Iwan Rhys Morus

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2019

The role of fiction in both understanding and interpreting the world has recently become an increasingly important topic for many of the human sciences. This volume of Osiris focuses on the relationship between a particular genre of storytelling—science fiction (SF), told through a variety of media—and the history of science.

The protagonists of these two enterprises have a lot in common. Both SF and the history of science are oriented towards the (re)construction of unfamiliar worlds; both are fascinated by the ways in which natural and social systems interact; both are critically aware of the different ways in which the social (class, gender, race, sex, species) has inflected the experience of the scientific. Taking a global approach, Presenting Futures Past examines the ways in which SF can be used to investigate the cultural status and authority afforded to science at different times and in different places. The essays consider the role played by SF in the history of specific scientific disciplines, topics, or cultures, as well as the ways in which it has helped to move scientific concepts, methodologies, and practices between wider cultural areas. Ultimately, Presenting Futures Past explores what SF can tell us about the histories of the future, how different communities have envisaged their futures, and how SF conveys the socioscientific claims of past presents.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 35

Food Matters: Critical Histories of Food and the Sciences

Edited by E. C. Spary and Anya Zilberstein

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

Since the early modern period, science has played an ever-growing role in healthcare, agriculture, the regulation of food and drink trades, and the standardization of nutrition guidelines. Yet until now, few studies had explored the historical processes through which scientific claims of knowledge gained the power to shape food supply chains and consumer choices. This volume of Osiris reveals how sciences of food have been informed by, and helped to shape in turn, an array of institutions, labor regimes, cultural practices, and ethical commitments.

The essays delve into a range of topics, from early modern dietetics and debates about cannibalism to modern ready-to-eat rations and Ayurvedic recipes, from analyses of hungry model organisms to the dining rituals of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their patrons. As Food Matters shows, the history of knowledge about food has always raised debates about the shifting definition and boundaries of expertise: between traditional recipes and experimental protocols; between domestic craft skill and laboratory procedure; between the management and redistribution of resources for the social body on the one hand, and the subjective experiences of individual bodies on the other. At a moment when the authority of science is being questioned by a variety of publics, Food Matters is a timely reminder that such tensions, always present in food-related domains, reflect broader historical developments through which science became a prevalent force in shaping all aspects of public and private life.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 36

Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge, and Law

Edited by Helen Tilley

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

This volume of Osiris takes as its point of departure a simple premise: we have yet to fully flesh out the complex historical interplay between medicine and law across the globe. Therapeutic Properties takes an inventive look at the issue, presenting welcome insights on the worldwide ascendancy of biomedicine, the persistence of nonofficial and unorthodox approaches to healing, and the legal contexts that have served to shape these dynamics.

The contributions draw upon source material from the Americas, Africa, Western Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia to trace the influence of penal and civil codes, courts and constitutions, and patents and intellectual properties on not only health practices but also the very foundations of state-sanctioned medicine. The authors explore, too, how institutions of global governance, including those underpinning empires and trade, have historically created feedback loops that enabled laws and regulatory regimes to spread, amplifying their effects and standardizing approaches to diseases, drugs, professions, personhood, and well-being along the way. Highlighting the payoff of interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, this volume adroitly teases apart how different actors fought to write the rules of global health, rendering certain approaches to life and death irrelevant and invisible, others pathological and punishable by law, and others still, normal and natural.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 37

Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds

Edited by Tara Alberts, Sietske Fransen, and Elaine Leong

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period.

This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief.

Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 38

Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present

Edited by James Evans and Adrian Johns

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023

Perceptively explores the shifting intersections between algorithmic systems and human practices in the modern era.

How have algorithmic systems and human practices developed in tandem since 1800? This volume of Osiris deftly addresses the question, dispelling along the way the traditional notion of algorithmic “code” and human “craft” as natural opposites. Instead, algorithms and humans have always acted in concert, depending on each other to advance new knowledge and produce social consequences. By shining light on alternative computational imaginaries, Beyond Craft and Code opens fresh space in which to understand algorithmic diversity, its governance, and even its conservation.

The volume contains essays by experts in fields extending from early modern arithmetic to contemporary robotics. Traversing a range of cases and arguments that connect politics, historical epistemology, aesthetics, and artificial intelligence, the contributors collectively propose a novel vocabulary of concepts with which to think about how the history of science can contribute to understanding today’s world. Ultimately, Beyond Craft and Code reconfigures the historiography of science and technology to suggest a new way to approach the questions posed by an algorithmic culture—not only improving our understanding of algorithmic pasts and futures but also unlocking our ability to better govern our present.

[more]

Osiris, Volume 7

Science after '40

Edited by Arnold Thackray

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Osiris, Volume 8

Research Schools: Historical Reappraisals

Edited by Gerald L. Geison and Frederic L. Holmes

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Osiris, Volume 9

Instruments

Edited by Albert Van Helden and Thomas L. Hankins

University of Chicago Press, 1994

They measure, they demonstrate, they reveal unseen worlds. Through the ages, scientific instruments have been used not only to advance understanding, but also to advance careers, dazzle audiences, and impose standards. These eleven essays take stock of the philosophy of instrumentation and the impact of new instruments in both the physical and life sciences, carefully considering the important interplay between instruments and authority, audience, and culture.

Contributors include Albert Van Helden on telescopes and authority, Jan Golinski on the demonstrative order of proof in Lavoisier's chemistry, Bruce J. Hunt on the development of electrical standards, Deborah Warner on terrestrial magnetism, Bruce Hevly on Stanford's supervoltage X-ray tube, Robert W. Smith and Jose h N. Tatarewicz on devices and black boxes, Thatcher Deane on the imperial astronomical bureau in the Ming dynasty, Thomas L. Hankins on Louis-Bertrand Castel's ocular harpsichord, Simon Schaffer on demonstration devices in Georgian mechanics, Timothy Lenoir on Helmholtz and the materialities of communication, and Robert Frank on instruments, biological techniques, and the "all-or-none" principle.

[more]