Title: Social Science and Probabilistic Analysis in Physics
Abstract: (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes formula omitted.) LIKE THE ENCYCLOPEDIE and the Jacobin Philosophy of (No. 6 above), this paper was composed for delivery at a conference, in this case a week-long symposium held at the University of Oxford in July 1961.1 Alistair Crombie organized the affair under the auspices of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science. The proceedings were similar to those at the Madison meeting in 1957. Discussion from the floor followed prepared remarks of one or several critics assigned to comment on each paper. Excellent people participated. The occasion did not draw them together in the same way, however. It scarcely could. The members of the symposium numbered one hundred and sixty-one. Represented were universities, academies, and museums from most of the countries of Europe. Apart from those who had participated in the Madison meeting, only a handful from the United Kingdom and France aspired to be historians of science. The majority were established scientists, philosophers, historians, museum directors, and officers of institutions of various sorts. Many such attended only one or two sessions. Perhaps too the accommodations in an unheated late-medieval Oxford college during a damp, chilly English July with few bright intervals were less conducive to congeniality than the open, warm, and friendly campus of the University of Wisconsin in gorgeous late-summer weather. Still, the papers for the most part were very interesting and the volume that collects them holds up well. After completing The Edge of Objectivity ( 1960), I conceived the notion of studying the history of probability, and applied successfully to the National Science Foundation for a grant for that purpose. The paper that follows was the firstfruits. Having become involved in 1963 in organizing and then editing the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, I never did complete a book on the subject. Nevertheless, what I learned in that year, in which I audited the late William Feller's undergraduate course on probability, informed much of my later work. I could not otherwise have written Pierre-Simon Laplace, a Life in Exact Science (1997) or the parts dealing with Laplace, Condorcet, et al. in the two volumes on Science and Polity in France. My paper was not well received in Oxford. Critics were appreciative enough of the middle passages on Laplace, Poisson, Quetelet, and Cournot. The central point, however, was the conjecture that John Herschel's account in the Edinburgh Review for June 1850 of Adolphe Quetelet's Theory of Probability as Applied to the Moral and Social Sciences may well have been what suggested to Maxwell the law of distribution of velocities which inaugurated the use of statistical methods in the dynamical theory of gases. My principal critic, Mary Hesse, dismissed this suggestion out of hand. She did graciously acknowledge in a footnote what I had not known. In the interval between the Oxford meeting and publication of its proceedings, it had come to light that Maxwell in a letter to his biographer, Lewis Campbell, expressly writes of having read Herschel's essay.2 Hesse still considered that to be of no importance, however. It was then thought unlikely, not to say inconceivable, that a technique could be transferred from social to physical science. All the discussantes agreed with her. I confess it to be a gratification that historians of physics since then are in accord that the Herschel review did contribute, and in an important manner, to Maxwell's development of the kinetic theory of gases.3 Notes 1. Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social, and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention from Antiquity to the Present, A. C. Crombie, ed. (London, 1962: Heinemann), pp. 431-453. In 1962 I delivered this paper with minor modifications in Paris as a lecture at the Palais de la Decouverte, where it was printed as a pamphlet with the title Les fondementes intellectuels de l'introduction des probabilites en physique ( 1962). …
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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