Title

Talking about Dead Scientific Objects. Ether, Phlogiston and Other Corpses

Abstract

At times, history of science is reduced to a chronology of theories, concepts or experimental findings that appear and disappear on the stage of science. Two words are often used to describe these moments of history: discovery and falsification; and with them a simplistic idea of scientific progress is conveyed. In these accounts, the new theories or concepts supersede old ones because the latter were (now) obviously wrong. The question of what to do with the former becomes irrelevant: they should naturally be rejected as false or erroneous. Implicit in these story lines is scientific monism; namely, the notion that one phenomenon may have only one legitimate explanation. Alternatively, one could adopt a pluralistic approach and suggest that several scientific explanations might co-exist. In his Is Water H₂O, Hasok Chang (2014) gives an alternative account of the so-called Chemical Revolution and argues for the latter. To do so, his favourite case study is the long-dismissed phlogiston (Chang 2009), an entity supposedly existing in pre-Lavoisier chemistry and rejected with the appearance of oxygen. The electromagnetic ether is another example of a supposedly absurd notion that physicists naïvely used in the 19^th century and that modern physics supposedly proved not to exist. In the recent collective volume Ether and Modernity (2018) some of us have shown the ways in which the ether remained and, at times, was even reinforced in the early 20^th century. The co-existence of several physical theories, some with the ether, others without, may be yet another example of scientific pluralism, thus giving a more nuanced picture of the complexities of the work of scientists. In this session I shall explain the results of our project on the demise of the ether as a case-study for scientific pluralism as well as an example of the complexities of writing the history of dead scientific objects.

Selected References 

• Arabatzis Th (2006) Representing Electrons. A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities. Chicago University Press, Chicago.
• Badino M, Navarro J (2018) Introduction. “Ether—The Multiple Lives of a Resilient Concept”. In Navarro 2018.
• Chang H (2009) We Have Never Been Whiggish (About Phlogiston). Centaurus 51:239-264.
• Chang H (2011) The Persistence of Epistemic Objects Through Scientific Change. Erkenntnis 75:413-429.
• Chang H (2014) Is Water H₂O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism. Springer, Dordrecht.
• Daston L (2000) (ed) Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago University Press, Chicago.
• Navarro J (2016) Ether and Wireless. An old medium into new media. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46/4:460-489.
• Navarro J (2018) (ed) Ether and Modernity. The Recalcitrance of an Epistemic Object in the early twentieth century. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Contact

• jaume.navarro@ehu.eus