Römer,Flamsteed, Cassini and the Speed of Light

One of Ole Römer's most influential contributions to astronomy was the theory that light has a finite speed, which he calculated from inequalities in the motion of a satellite of Jupiter. The English astronomer John Flamsteed, first director of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, is credited with being an early and influential supporter of the theory. This article examines how he came to be so, taking issue with the claim that he was instantly converted to the idea by a personal encounter with Römer. The publication of Flamsteed's Correspondence has made illuminating material newly accessible; through letters it is possible to track the gradual development of his thinking and how it related to his dealings with Römer and with Giovanni Domenico Cassini (director of the Paris Observatory). The resulting account offers new insights into their attempts to share information, in a situation where motives for collaborating were counterbalanced by a potential for rivalry and conflict, and into the interlinked roles played by written correspondence, personal meetings and empirical investigation in the spreading of new ideas.     

Technical assistance versus cultural export: George Cressey and the U.S. Cultural Relations Program in wartime China, 1942–1946

After the outbreak of the Pacific War, the United States and the United Kingdom both set up cultural assistance programs to China in order to aid the fight against Japan in Asia and to shape the postwar world according to their interests. From 1942 to 1946, the United States sent 30 experts in science, technology, medicine, and public health to China. Among them was George Cressey, a geographer of international reputation deeply familiar with the cultural and physical geography of China, who travelled to China as a visiting professor of the Sino–U.S. Cultural Relations Program and a representative of the State Department. However, he was recalled earlier than expected, after only 7 months, because his remarks were thought to be damaging to Sino–U.S. relations. Examining his wartime visit to China within the context of Sino–U.S. relations, this paper uncovers Cressey's diplomatic mission. We illustrate how geography simultaneously became the object of Cressey's research, a tool for the promotion of Sino–U.S. cultural relations, and the theoretical basis for foreign policy proposals. Finally, through a comparison of Cressey's and Joseph Needham's experiences in wartime China, this paper illuminates their different understanding of Chinese culture (including China's society and concept of science and culture), which led to their different approaches to Chinese affairs. It also shows the tension between technical assistance and cultural export in diplomatic relations during wartime. This case demonstrates the expanding role of science and technology in diplomatic agendas and international relations as a new, distinctive feature of science and technology in the 20th century.     

Instructor perceptions of engineering ethics education at Chinese engineering universities: A cross-cultural approach

During the past decade, governmental agencies, universities and programs, policymakers, and educators in China have been striving for reforming and “globalizing” the engineering ethics curriculum. Chinese scholars have proposed strategies for improving the teaching effectiveness of engineering ethics that integrate “global forms” derived from the “American-style engineering ethics” into the Chinese context. Nevertheless, limited empirical research is available that examines the alignment of these strategies and the cultures of engineering education in China (e.g., instructor perceptions of engineering ethics education). We argue that understanding how Chinese instructors perceive engineering ethics instruction is critical for designing instructional strategies sensitive to the Chinese sociocultural context. In this study, we reviewed the literature on teaching engineering ethics (primarily after the 2000s) and teased out a set of most “contested” questions concerning American educators since the emergence of engineering ethics education as an academic discipline. By using these questions as a guideline, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 Chinese engineering ethics instructors trained in three different fields: STS and philosophy of science and technology, engineering, and Marxist studies and ethical theories. This paper also briefly discussed how the ways Chinese instructors perceived engineering ethics education are connected to and distinct from the views held by American educators discussed in the literature review section. This paper is expected to shed light on the cultures of engineering ethics education in China and provide insights into formulating effective policies and teaching strategies sensitive to the Chinese context.     

Reflecting on the philosophy of technology in China in the form of five questions

In China, philosophical research on technology should focus on dealing with practical problems such as exploring how to construct harmonious relationships between technology and science, technology and society, as well as technology and human development during a period of great economic and social transformation. The construction needs to be based on China's social and cultural contexts. Efforts also need to be made to help engineers, technologists, and the public understand and undertake corresponding social responsibilities in order to facilitate the sustainable development of society.     

Computability,G?del's incompleteness theorem,and an inherent limit on the predictability of evolution

The process of evolutionary diversification unfolds in a vast genotypic space of potential outcomes. During the past century, there have been remarkable advances in the development of theory for this diversification, and the theory''s success rests, in part, on the scope of its applicability. A great deal of this theory focuses on a relatively small subset of the space of potential genotypes, chosen largely based on historical or contemporary patterns, and then predicts the evolutionary dynamics within this pre-defined set. To what extent can such an approach be pushed to a broader perspective that accounts for the potential open-endedness of evolutionary diversification? There have been a number of significant theoretical developments along these lines but the question of how far such theory can be pushed has not been addressed. Here a theorem is proven demonstrating that, because of the digital nature of inheritance, there are inherent limits on the kinds of questions that can be answered using such an approach. In particular, even in extremely simple evolutionary systems, a complete theory accounting for the potential open-endedness of evolution is unattainable unless evolution is progressive. The theorem is closely related to Gödel''s incompleteness theorem, and to the halting problem from computability theory.     

HOW EVOLUTIONARY IS SCHUMPETER'S THEORY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?

The generic features of an evolutionary theory which are identified in the conceptional discussion of the present paper can be shown to be present already in Schumpeter's 1912 work, The Theory of Economic Development . None the less, it is argued that Schumpeter fell short of a level of generality by which he would have succeeded in providing a true foundation for evolutionary economics. The reason is his eagerness--very clearly visible in the "lost" seventh chapter--to align his theory with the economic reasoning of contemporary "pure" economic theory that was moulded in an equilibrium-oriented heuristic and the methodology of comparative statics. Schumpeter's conception--which, in opposing the idea of borrowing from Darwinian thought, he called "development"--is rather a special theory of the unsteady capitalist growth process passing through booms and crises. Throughout all of Schumpeter's writings the notion of development is therefore closely related to the business cycle phenomenon. The paper argues that this special framing implies not only some arbitrary hypotheses which are difficult to accept in an evolutionary interpretation, but also some limitations in his understanding of (what he refused to call) economic evolution, particularly with respect to its driving forces.     

设计科学中国化发展的历史与学科路径研究

通过对设计科学中国化发展的历史回顾,来考察设计科学中国化之路的学科路径及其主要议题。运用文献考证和理论辨析的方法,讨论自20世纪50年代以来设计科学的中国化探索与路径,并结合欧美设计研究的背景展开横向联系与比较,以揭示相关理论在传播中的联系性和语境差异。在设计科学的中国化发展历程中,工程设计领域起到了重要的推动作用,艺术+设计的质性方法,在设计学研究中让位于技术+设计的科学方法。进入21世纪,随着中国设计学学科体系的完善,不但改变了以往设计科学研究与设计实践之间相脱离的现象,而且出现了从理论引入转向立足本土创新的局面。     

The Sign of Stieglitz,the Art of Evans

This essay examines how Walker Evans evolved his documentary style in response to what he saw as Alfred Stieglitz's overbearing aestheticism. It begins with their first meeting and Evans's ‘rejection’ of this father‐figure, a rejection which became generalised in the history of photography on the grounds of a dichotomy between photographic art and social documentary. Evans came to represent this latter tendency despite his own wishes. With the help of friends like Lincoln Kirstein and Bernice Abbott, Evans claimed a different artistic genealogy, via the Civil War work of Mathew Brady and his teams and Eugène Atget, neither of whom were working in the same vein of documentary as Evans might have imagined. He attempted to remain the independent artist, all the while taking advantage of his various photographic employments and the directions in which they pushed him. In the end, history made him famous and influential as the champion of social documentary, a genre which coincided neatly with his own desire for a ‘lyric documentary’ for only a few years. In his desire to be an artist free from a social agenda, in his resistance to branding, he is a maverick bohemian much closer to Stieglitz than has been supposed, and he seemed to recognise the fact in his last comments on his predecessor.     

Walter Benjamin's glimpses of the unconscious

Abstract

Despite their overexposure, the writings of Walter Benjamin include appropriations and transfonnations of modernist architectural history and theory, the potential of which to illuminate the problematics of representation in the fields of architecture and photography remains insufficiently explored. In this essay, I focus on three moments in his writings, each of which touches on the issue of representation in a different way: first, Benjamin's reading of Carl Bötticher's theory of architectural tectonics as a theory of history in which the unconscious serves as a generative and productive source; second, Benjamin's transformation of Sigfried Giedion's presentation of iron structures into optical instruments for glimpsing a space interwoven with unconsciousness, a space the image of which had seemingly been captured by photography; and third, Benjamin's suggestion that the mimetic faculty continues to play within representation, history and technology to produce similarities between the human and the non-human. In each instance, Benjamin reworked the dynamic dualism of nineteenth-century tectonics — representation seeking reconciliation with alterity — into a dialectic. In so doing, he set the cause of revolution (of a modernity yet to come) against metaphysical and Utopian claims, progressive and regressive alike.     

Engineering and Philosophy of Engineering

Philosophy of engineering lays the philosophical foundation of recognition, understanding and management of engineering. Being the kernel of philosophy of engineering, engineering ontology becomes the master key to understanding of engineering. The paper proposes and interprets the principal theses of engineering ontology, which differs from understanding of engineering in separate elements. Engineering ontology believes that engineering is the direct, realistic productivity that runs dynamically and feasibly and creates values. Engineering involves the relationship between human beings and the nature as well as the relationship between human beings and the society, and it has been a basic motive force and a basic way of promoting the social development, so that engineering gains the ontological status and fundamental value in social existence and social development. From the historical point of view, the engineering appears before the emergence of technology and science. Engineering has its own basis for existence, its own structure and its own laws for movement and evolution. Engineering should not be simply regarded as the ramification and derivative from science or technology. Engineering ontology is the theoretical basis of the triism of “science, technology, and engineering”. To understand and handle the mutual relationship among engineering, technology and science, by the evaluation criteria of engineering as the direct productivity, the process and effect of engineering-centered selection, integration and construction must be emphasized and the characteristic and mechanism of selection, integration and construction must be paid high attention. Under no circumstance may the engineering be deemed as an unchanged matter, which is constantly evolving and developing, so the studies on engineering ontology are closely and internally related with the theory of engineering evolution.     

Introduction for SI: EPEED on TIS: The emergence of Chinese discussions of engineering,philosophy, and ethics

As a general introduction to this special issue, what follows is a brief account of themes in the philosophical and ethical discussion of technology in China. It begins with some special perspectives on technology from ancient philosophers such as Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Mozi. Then it turns to the relationship between Chinese and western science and technology that grew out of the eastward spread of western culture since the end of the sixteenth century. Finally, it indicates some developments and new trends in the discussion on technology and engineering under the influence of Marxism and other western analyses since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. It concludes with a summary of the contributions being made by the articles collected in this special issue.     

Ermakov album

Abstract

When I first met Henry Ries in his home in Manhattan in the mid-1980s, I was struck by his generosity in telling me about his career. Born in 1917 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in an assimilated Jewish family, Henry (born Heinz) Ries left for New York on 13 January 1938. Initially, he found employment in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he taught photography at the Jewish community centre and could use their laboratory for his own work. He tried to enlist in the United States Army in December 1941, but this was not possible, since he was an 'enemy alien' and a recent emigrant without American citizenship. In May 1943, he joined the Army Air Corps and received American citizenship. Initially posted to the Pacific theatre, making aerial photographs of China for the 20th Bomber Command, he subsequently transferred to the European theatre, arriving in London in late May 1945. Assigned to the ‘Office Director of Intelligence’, his first job was to evaluate Heinrich Himmler's ‘secret state library’ correspondence with the SS, Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, and others, which was later utilized in the Nuremberg Medical Trial. Three months later, Ries was transferred to Berlin.     

Über die Variationsrechnung in Hilberts Werken zur Analysis

The paper deals with some of the developments in analysis against the background of Hilbert's contributions to the Calculus of Variations. As a starting point the transformation is chosen that took place at the end of the 19th century in the Calculus of Variations, and emphasis is placed on the influence of Dirichlet's principle. The proof of the principle (the “resuscitation”) led Hilbert to questions arising in the 19th and 20th problems of his famous Paris address in 1900: theexistence in a generalized sense, and theregularity of solutions of elliptic partial differential equations. By this new concept Hilbert pointed out two very important issues the history of which is closely tied up with the rise of modern analysis. Further on, Hilbert'stheorem of independence of the Calculus of Variations, an important contribution to its formal apparatus as well as to its field theory, is briefly discussed. But even as Hilbert published his first essential results, he was turning his attention to another area of mathematics that differs in an important respect from the Calculus of Variations:integral equations. Hilbert did so because he recognized that in this branch by its flexibility he was coming closer to his goal of an unifying methodological approach to analysis.     

Darwin's vertical thinking: Mountains,mobility, and the imagination in 19th-century geology

Like other aspiring geologists in the 1830s, Darwin focused heavily on the rising and falling of the earth's crust. I use his time in the Andes to underscore the importance he placed on larger questions of vertical movement, which mountains helped to solidify in his mind. His most impressive ramblings occurred in 1835 on two high passes in the Andes. Prior to his upland journey, he was well prepared to see the gradual movement of the earth's crust, but his time in the mountains honed his vertical vision. His actual travels up and over enabled him to think more clearly about rise and fall, and how corresponding geographies could link the past to the present. Mountains were instructive backdrops to his theorizing, partly because he traveled through them, but also because his time there, linked with other geographies, became a means to foster his thinking both spatially and temporally. He did not think about mountains, but with them and through them. He is a good example of the broader vertical consciousness that directed many sciences at this time.     

Ara Güler's Photography of ‘Old Istanbul’ and Cosmopolitan Nostalgia

Based on Ara Güler's photographs of Istanbul, this paper explores the relationship between nostalgia and photography in the city. Most of Güler's best known photographs were taken in the 1950s and 1960s while he was working as a photojournalist for the print press. The re-coding of a selection of his black and white images since the 1990s as art photography and in the pursuit of recalling ‘Old Istanbul’ as a cosmopolitan city presents a revealing case. Güler's recruitment as a photojournalist in the 1950s was a result of the expansion and modernisation of the city's print press, which itself was a response to dramatic transformations in the city, such as massive rural-to-urban migration and urban renewal and expansion. Güler's pictures from this era are typically of the urban poor and working classes. Focusing on two journalistic narratives co-produced by Güler – one in 1959 for the illustrated journal Hayat, and the other in 1969 for the daily Ak?am – this paper asks why and how only images from the latter circulate today. It argues that contemporary urban discourses influence how we interpret these old photographs now.     

‘s Gravesande's Appropriation of Newton's Natural Philosophy,Part I: Epistemological and Theological Issues

In this essay I reassess Willem Jacob ‘s Gravesande's Newtonianism. I draw attention to ‘s Gravesande's a‐causal rendering of physics which went against Newton's causal understanding of natural philosophy and to his attempt to establish a solid foundation for the certainty of Newton's natural philosophy, which he considered as a powerful antidote against the theological aberrations of Descartes and especially Spinoza. I argue that, although ‘s Gravesande clearly took inspiration from Newton's natural philosophy, he was running his own scientific and intellectual agenda and that he was combining Newtonian and non‐Newtonian elements.     

The Plausibility of Galileo's Tidal Theory

In Galileo's opinion, his most important argument for the Earth's motion was based on his theory of the tides that combined the Earth's rotation with its orbital motion so that it alternately accelerates and decelerates the sea. His theory deliberately ignored the Moon's influence, which at that time was generally regarded as occult. Galileo's confidence in his theory was strongly reinforced by its providing a mechanical model. That a theory that ignored the Moon's influence could seem plausible is confirmed by comparison with the theories of Bacon and Wallis. That Galileo's theory could seem plausible despite encountering difficulties is confirmed by comparison with Newton's theory, which is deeply flawed by its inclusion of a vertical response to the total tidal force. That many people now regard Galileo's theory as wrong is due to our having absorbed as natural Newton's idea of lunar attraction.     

An explanation and critique of taguchi's contributions to quality engineering

Recently there has been much interest and some controversy concerning the statistical methods employed by Professor Genichi Taguchi of Japan for improving the quality of products and processes. These methods include the use of fractional factorial designs and other orthogonal arrays, parameter design to minimize sensitivity to environmental factors, parameter design for minimizing transmitted variation, signal-to-noise ratios, loss functions, accumulation analysis, minute analysis and the analysis of life test data. This paper explains some of Taguchi's contributions to quality engineering and also provides a critical evaluation of his statistical methods. Our conclusion is that although on the one hand, Professor Taguchi's quality engineering ideas are of great importance and should become part of the working knowledge of every engineer, on the other hand, many of the techniques of statistical design and analysis he employs to put these ideas into practice are often inefficient and unnecessarily complicated and should be replaced or appropriately modified. In this short article only an overview is attempted, but references are appended where these matters are discussed in greater detail.     

Henri Cartier‐Bresson Reinterprets his Career

Between 1952 and 1974, Henri Cartier‐Bresson significantly revised his understanding of himself as a photojournalist. This article analyses that change through close readings of his book, The Decisive Moment (1952), an interview in Le Monde (1974), and other published statements and unpublished letters by Cartier‐Bresson. It draws on interviews and correspondence with his widow Martine Franck, with his friend and representative Helen Wright, and with associates at Magnum Photos. It argues that what appears from a superficial reading of the interview to be a rejection of photography and photojournalism was in fact Cartier‐Bresson's first public expression of a long‐simmering opposition to the consumer society – which he as an ecologist strongly opposed – and to fashion and advertising photography, which he believed promoted unnecessary consumption. It concludes that Cartier‐Bresson reinterpreted his past by seeing himself as a surrealist to the denial of having done photojournalism. The article is predicated on the belief that understanding the change in Cartier‐Bresson's own conception of his work is essential to a full understanding of it.     

Edward Linley Sambourne (1844–1910)

Abstract

Edward Linley Sam bourne worked as a Punch cartoonist from 1867 until his death in 1910.¹ Beginning his 43-year association with the magazine as a freelance contributor he then joined the permanent staff in 1871 as Cartoon Junior (to Tenniel who was Cartoonist-in-Chief). His rise through the Punch ranks meant a commensurate increase in his workload and, because of this, he took up photography in the early 1880s to assist his productivity and to satisfy his demand for accuracy. Sometimes Sam bourne copied the entire photograph, occasionally he even traced it; or else he used elements of a photograph or several photographs to construct the picture for the final drawing. Gradually, Sam bourne the Cartoonist became Sambourne the Photographer as his interest in drawing was supplanted by a fascination with photography; he developed an enthusiasm for the medium in an amateur way, joining the Camera Club in April 1893 and slowly amassing an enormous archive comprising some 30,000 images. To follow Sambourne's development as a photographer involves looking at how and why he used photography, and what his private as well as his public attitude was towards the medium.