This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

Archived Versions

Readings

Amazon logo When you click the Amazon logo to the left of any citation and purchase the book (or other media) from Amazon.com, MIT OpenCourseWare will receive up to 10% of this purchase and any other purchases you make during that visit. This will not increase the cost of your purchase. Links provided are to the US Amazon site, but you can also support OCW through Amazon sites in other regions. Learn more.

Special software is required to use some of the files in this section: .ogg. This section contains documents that are inaccessible to screen reader software. A "#" symbol is used to denote such documents.

Required books

[MMS] Amazon logo Bowler, Peter J., and Iwan Rhys Morus. Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780226068619.

Amazon logo Frayn, Michael. Copenhagen. New York, NY: Anchor, 2000. ISBN: 9780385720793.

WEEKS READINGS
The culture of experiment

2

"The Scientific Revolution." In MMS, pp. 23-53.

Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and Its Effects (Oxford: H. Hall, 1660), excerpts.

Shapin, Steven. "Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology," Social Studies of Science (1984): 481-520.

Additional background

Bowler and Morus. "The Organization of Science." In MMS, pp. 319-340.

A new language of science

3

"The Chemical Revolution." In MMS, pp. 55-78.

Golinski, Jan. "The Chemical Revolution and the Politics of Language," The Eighteenth Century 33, no. 3 (1992): 238-251.

Lavoisier, Antoine. "Preface" from Elements of Chemistry (Edinburgh, 1790), from Dover facsimile edition (1965), pp. xiii-xxxvii.

Linnaeus, Carl. "Preface," "Introduction," and "Mammalia." A General System of Nature, Through Three Grand Kingdoms of Animals, Vegetables and Minerals. London, UK: Lackington, Allen, and Co., 1806.

Science and life

4

von Liebig, Justus. "Organic Chemistry Applied to Physiology and Pathology." In Animal Chemistry. Cambridge, UK; 1842; reprint, New York, NY: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1964. pp. 1-23.

Schwann, Theodor. "Theory of the Cells." In Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants. Translated by Henry Smith. London, UK: Sydenham Society, 1839, 1847.

Amazon logo Lenoir, Timothy. "Social Interests and the Organic Physics of 1847." In Science in Reflection: The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, vol. 3. Edited by Edna Ullmann-Margalit. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988, pp. 169-191. ISBN: 9789027727138.

Additional background

Bowler and Morus. "The New Biology." In MMS, pp. 165-188.

Science, technology, and the human body

5

Maxwell, James Clerk. "The Telephone: The Rede Lecture Delivered to the Senate House of the University of Cambridge, 24 May 1878." In Empires of Physics: A Guide to the Exhibition. Cambridge, UK: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1993. ISBN: 9780906271087.

"I am the Edison Phonograph," the first recorded promotional message on the Edison phonograph, recorded at the Edison Studios, New Jersey, 1906. (OGG)

Amazon logo Sterne, Jonathan. "Machines to Hear for Them." Chapter 1 in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780822330134.

Additional background

Bowler and Morus. "Science and Technology." In MMS, pp. 391-414.

Science and religion

6

Darwin, Charles. "Struggle for Existence." Chapter 3 in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London, UK: John Murray, 1859. (PDF - 1 MB)

———. "General Summary and Conclusion." From The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 volumes. London: John Murray, 1871. (PDF) (Courtesy of eBooks @ Adelaide.)

Amazon logo Brooke, John Hedley. "Darwin and Victorian Christianity." In The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Edited by J. Hodge and G. Radick. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780521777308.

Caputo, Marc. "Florida schools to teach evolution as 'scientific theory'." Miami Herald, 20 February 2008.

Additional background

Bowler and Morus. "The Darwinian Revolution," and "Science and Religion." In MMS, pp. 129-162 and 341-366.

Midterm exam
7 No readings
Psychiatry and society

8

Sicherman, Barbara "The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32 (1977): 33-54.

Freud, Sigmund The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis (1910). With introduction and commentary by Raymond E. Fancher. (PDF) (Courtesy of Dennis Nilsson, Raymond E. Fancher and Christopher D. Green.)

Additional background

Bowler and Morus. "The Emergence of the Human Sciences," and "Science and Medicine." In MMS, pp. 301-307 and 439-461.

Interpreting relativity

9

Einstein, Albert. Excerpt from "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." Beginning through Part 1: § 3, first three paragraphs.

Galison, Peter. "Einstein's Clocks: The Place of Time." Critical Inquiry 26 (Winter 2000): 355-389.

Amazon logo Graham, Loren R. "The Reception of Einstein's Ideas: Two Examples from Contrasting Political Cultures." In Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives. Edited by Gerald Holton and Yehudah Elkana. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982; reprinted by Dover Publications, 1997. ISBN: 9780486298795.

Additional background

Bowler and Morus. "Twentieth-Century Physics." In MMS, pp. 253-276.

Physics and war

10

Amazon logo Frayn, Michael. Copenhagen. New York, NY: Anchor, 2000. ISBN: 9780385720793.

Amazon logo Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts. Edited by Charles Frank. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 70-91. ISBN: 9780520084995.

Smyth, Henry DeWolf. Excerpts from A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940-1945 (1945). (PDF) (Download the complete the report.)

Additional background

Bowler and Morus. "Science and War." In MMS, pp. 463-486.

Links to four academic symposia discussing Copenhagen [scroll down]

Documents relating to the 1941 Bohr-Heisenberg meeting

Cold war science

11

Badash, Lawrence. "From Security Blanket to Security Risk: Scientists in the Decade after Hiroshima." History and Technology 19 (September 2003): 241-256.

Edward Teller's testimony in the J. Robert Oppenheimer Hearing Before Personnel Security Board, Washington, DC, April 28, 1954.

Kaiser, David. "The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists During the Early Cold War." Representations 90 (Spring 2005): 28-60.

Additional background

Amazon logo Leslie, Stuart W. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780231079594. [The complete text can be accessed via Google: search for the title and click on the link to http://www.earthscape.org/p3/leslie/index.html].

Eugenics and social control

12

Davenport, Charles B. "The Effects of Race Intermingling," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 56 (1917): 364-368. (PDF)

Buck v. Bell, U.S. Supreme Court, 274 US 200 (1927). (PDF)#

"An Act to Provide for the Sexual Sterilization of Inmates of State Institutions in Certain Cases," Virginia Code chapter 394, 20 March 1924. (PDF)#

Amazon logo Kevles, Daniel J. "International Eugenics." In Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 40-59. ISBN: 9780807829165.

Dorr, Gregory M. "Assuring America's Place in the Sun: Ivey Foreman Lewis and the Teaching of Eugenics at the University of Virginia, 1915-1953." Journal of Southern History 66 (May 2000): 257-296.

Additional background

Bowler and Morus. "Biology and Ideology." In MMS, pp. 415-438.

Engineering life

13

Berg, Paul, et al. "Summary Statement of the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules." 1975. (PDF)#

Amazon logo Mendelsohn, Everett. "Frankenstein at Harvard: The Public Policies of Recombinant DNA Research." In Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences. Edited by Everett Mendelsohn. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ISBN: 9780521267243.

Amazon logo Nelkin, Dorothy and M. Susan Lindee. "Preface to the Second Edition," and "The Supergene." In The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780472030040.

Additional background

Rogers, Michael. "The Pandora's Box Congress." Rolling Stone 189 (June 19, 1975): 37-40, 42, 74, 77-78, and 82.

Bowler and Morus. "Genetics." In MMS, pp. 189-212.