The career of Humphry Davy (1778–1829) is one of the fairy tales of early nineteenth-century British science. His rise from obscure Cornish origins to world-wide eminence as a chemical discoverer, to popular celebrity amongst London's scientific audiences, to a knighthood from the Prince Regent, and finally to the Presidency of the Royal Society, provide apposite material for Smilesian accounts of British society as open to talents. But the use of Davy's career to illustrate the thesis that ‘genius will out’ is (...) not without its problems. As Davy began to reap the benefits of his early chemical discoveries, and to acquire status and wealth, his dedication to research waned. The ‘new’ Davy who emerged in the years after Waterloo, though admired by many sections of the metropolitan scientific community, was also widely criticized. Ambivalence became marked with Davy's election to, and conduct in, the Presidency of the Royal Society. (shrink)

Contention about who discovered the compound nature of water (the 'water controversy') occurred in two phases. During the first phase, in the 1780s, the claimants to the discovery (Antoine Lavoisier, Henry Cavendish, and James Watt) produced the work on which their claims were based. This phase of controversy was relatively short and did not generate much heat, although it was part of the larger debates surrounding the 'chemical revolution'. The second phase of controversy, in the 1830s and 1840s, saw heated (...) exchanges in Britain between advocates of Watt on the one hand and of Cavendish on the other. This paper concentrates on this second phase. The concern is not to arbitrate the contest but to delineate the pattern of advocacy and the arguments used to support the opposing cases. 'Discovery' is not treated as an event but as the outcome of an after-the-fact process of attribution of credit. Apart from identifying the opposing argumentative strategies employed in making different attributions, the paper also seeks to explain why there was so much concern about this priority dispute long after the deaths of the protagonists. It is shown that while Scottish-English rivalries were important they were not the only or most significant impetus. Ideological struggles over the nature of science provided a context in which the attribution of discovery to Cavendish or to Watt was of major import. These ideological struggles are shown to have roots in the politics of early Victorian science that ultimately lay behind the second phase of the water controversy and shaped the course that it took. (shrink)

Summary James Watt (1736–1819) is best known as an engineer who dramatically improved the efficiency of the steam engine. What we take to be his chemical interests are conventionally seen as peripheral to his main line of work. He is usually treated as a chemist in three main contexts: his ‘practical’ chemical work relating to chlorine bleaching, varnishes, pottery, and so on; his work with Thomas Beddoes on the medicinal uses of various ‘airs’; his, much disputed, claim as a chemical (...) discoverer in the case of the composition of water. In this paper, I argue that Watt himself, and his contemporaries, saw the centrepiece of his steam engine work—the separate condenser—as a chemical invention. I also suggest more broadly that Watt understood the steam engine as a chemical device. For Watt and his Scottish friends, the study of steam and heat was a chemical enquiry. The subsequent changes in the place of heat in chemical enquiry in the early nineteenth century led to a reclassification of Watt's chemical investigations as ‘physics’. This, in turn, produced the sharp separation of his chemical and engineering activities characteristic of modern historiography. Watt's steam engine, which is usually placed in the lineage of machines understood as heat engines, and explained by the laws of thermodynamics, is better seen in context as a chemical device. Watt's ‘indicator diagram’ is reassessed in the light of this. (shrink)

Summary The rhetorical uses of discovery and invention stories are legion, but of particular concern in this paper are those that are deployed for economic or commercial reasons, especially in claiming intellectual property rights, usually in the form of patents. The case of stories about Dr Irving Langmuir (1881–1957) of the General Electric Research Laboratory, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1932 and was the first industry-based laureate from the United States, is examined. Langmuir won the prize for (...) his ‘outstanding discoveries and inventions within the field of surface chemistry’, which also happened to underlie the virtual monopoly that General Electric gained in the supply of electric light. Langmuir was the inspiration for the stereotypically absent-minded and disinterested character of Dr Felix Hoenikker in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Cat's Cradle (1963). My case study focuses on this and other representations of Langmuir as a discoverer, especially those generated by the General Electric Company, and explores the utility of these representations for Langmuir himself, and for his employer, in corporate PR, in ongoing struggles over patents, and in the post-war organisation of R&D. It is argued that, while the era of corporate research produced new collective modes of discovery and invention their description in heroic, individualistic terms long continued, and for good reason. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis examination of an important paper by Sydney Ross is the first in a projected series of occasional reflections on ‘Annals of Science Classic Papers’ that have had enduring utility within the field of history of science and beyond. First the messages of the paper are examined, some well known but others, particularly Ross's own contemporary concerns about the use of the word ‘scientist’, less so. The varied uses made of the paper by scholars are then traced before Ross's biography (...) is examined in order to try to understand how a figure professionally marginal to the field of history of science came to write such a significant piece. Ross’s interest in the topic appears to have been informed by a romantically tinged scientific progressivism and a deep concern with the importance of linguistic precision in science and in public affairs. The inspirations of the author and the interests of his audience have been only partially aligned, but the paper's insights remain of broad historical interest and have wider ramifications since the denotation ‘scientist’ and its proper application are much debated today in contests over the authority of science. (shrink)

What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. These essays, all of which are previously unpublished, provide students in (...) moral philosophy with essential material and ask key questions on just what the criteria for an adequate moral theory might be. (shrink)

© Ginn et al. 2016.The indexing methods currently used for serial femtosecond crystallography were originally developed for experiments in which crystals are rotated in the X-ray beam, providing significant three-dimensional information. On the other hand, shots from both X-ray free-electron lasers and serial synchrotron crystallography experiments are still images, in which the few three-dimensional data available arise only from the curvature of the Ewald sphere. Traditional synchrotron crystallography methods are thus less well suited to still image data processing. Here, a (...) new indexing method is presented with the aim of maximizing information use from a still image given the known unit-cell dimensions and space group. Efficacy for cubic, hexagonal and orthorhombic space groups is shown, and for those showing some evidence of diffraction the indexing rate ranged from 90% to 151%. Here, the indexing rate refers to the number of lattices indexed per image. (shrink)

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

The 'Art of Life' is John Stuart Mill's name for his account of practical reason. In this volume, eleven leading scholars elucidate this fundamental, but widely neglected, element of Mill's thought. Mill divides the Art of Life into three 'departments': 'Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Æsthetics'. In the volume's first section, Rex Martin, David Weinstein, Ben Eggleston, and Dale E. Miller investigate the relation between the departments of morality and prudence. Their papers ask whether Mill is a rule (...) utilitarian and, if so, whether his practical philosophy must be incoherent. The second section contains papers by Jonathan Riley and Wendy Donner, who explore the relation between the departments of morality and aesthetics. They discuss issues ranging from supererogation to aesthetic pleasure and humanity's relationship with nature. -/- The papers in the third section consider the Art of Life's axiological first principle, the principle of utility. Elijah Millgram contends that Mill's own life refutes his claim that the Art of Life has a single axiological first principle. Philip Kitcher maintains that Mill has a dynamic axiology requiring us to continually refine our conception of the good. In the final section, three papers address what it means to put the Art of Life into practice. Robert Haraldsson locates an 'Art of Ethics' in On Liberty that is in tension with the Art of Life. Nadia Urbinati plumbs the classical roots of Mill's view of the good life. Finally, Colin Heydt develops Mill's suggestion that we regard our own lives as works of art. (shrink)