Moments of Science: Ideological and Technological Aspects

怀斯教授正在探索如何使专业 科学中的解释策略植根于 特定的文化在特定的时间。 这些文化 “瞬间”不应该被理解为纯粹的智力 思想史的意义，但在更大的 人类学意义上的，包括政治经济学， 社会结构和物质技术文化。 事实上，技术似乎发挥了重要作用， 更大的文化和更窄的关注之间的调解人 特定学科，如物理，数学，或 生物学 这种中介作用是本研究的重点。 怀斯教授正在分析四个被称为“静力学”的时刻， “动力学”、“概率论”和“混沌”， 在启蒙运动的法国，工业化的英国，威廉 以及魏玛德国和当代美国。 标签 指定广泛的战略， 将自然系统解释为平衡、引擎、 随机但整体的结构，或者无限重复的代码， 分别 这些战略受到以下因素的刺激，和/或 已经激发了足够的技术， 寻找。 正是这些技术上实现的平衡，引擎， 统计技术和迭代代码的方法， 研究接地。

Professor Wise is exploring the ways in which major explanatory strategies in the sciences are rooted in particular cultures at particular times. These cultural "moments" are to be understood not in the purely intellectual sense of the history of ideas, but in the larger anthropological sense, which includes political economy, social structure, and material and technological culture. Technologies, in fact, appear to play a major role as mediators between the larger culture and the narrower concerns of particular disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, or biology. This mediation is the focus of this study. Professor Wise is analyzing four moments, labelled "statics," "dynamics," "probabilism," and "chaos," centered historically in enlightenment France, industrializing Britain, Wilhelmian and Weimar Germany and contemporary America. The labels designate broad strategies employed over a wide range of disciplines to explain natural systems as balances, engines, random but holistic structures, or endlessly repeated codes, respectively. Such strategies have been stimulated by, and/or have stimulated, technologies adequate for the knowledge sought. It is these technically achieved balances, engines, statistical techniques, and means of iterating codes that ground the study.