Wise / Smith / Weintraub Growing Explanations

Historical Perspectives on Recent Science
1. Auflage 2004
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9008-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 356 Seiten

Reihe: Science and Cultural Theory

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some understanding of how elementary objects get built up, or "grown up", into complex, objects whose

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wise, M. Norton

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein

Weintraub, E. Roy

Weitere Mitwirkende

Galison, Peter

Dalmedico, Amy Dahan

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Naturwissenschaften, Technik, Medizin
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: dynamincs all the way up / M. Norton Wise 1

Part I Mathematics, physics, and engineering

Elementary particles? `

1. Mirror symmetry: persons, values, and objects / Peter Galison 23

Nonlinear dynamics and chaos

2. Chaos, disorder, and mixing: a new fin-de-siecle image of science? / Amy Dahan Dalmedico 67

3. Forms of explanation in the catastrophe theory of Rene Thjom: topology, morphogenesis, and structuralism / David Aubin 95

Coping with complexity in technology

4. From Boeing to Berkeley: civil engineers, the cold war, and the origins of finite element analysis / Ann Johnson 133

5. Fuzzyfying the world: social practices of showing the properties of fuzzy logic / Claude Rosental 159

Part II The organism, the self, and (artificial) life

Self-Organization

6. Marrying the premodern to the postmodern: computers and organisms after World War II / Evelyn Fox Keller 181

Immunology

7. Immunology and the enigma of selfhood / Alfred I. Tauber 201

8. Immunology of AIDS: growning explanations and developing instruments / Ilana Lowy 222

Artificial Life

9. Artificial life support: some nodes in the Alife ribotype / Richard Doyle 251

10. The word for world is computer: simulating second natures in artificial life / Stefan Helmreich 275

11. Constructing and explaining emergence in artificial life: on paradigms, ontodefinitions, and general knowledge in biology / Claus Emmeche 301

Afterword 327

Contributors 333

Index 337

Über Autor(innen)

M. Norton Wise is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a coauthor of Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin and the editor of The Values of Precision.