00:00:00 That's why all the roads are blocked up, they had to scramble around to get here.

00:00:17 Hi.

00:00:18 Jack Johnson.

00:00:19 Where are you from?

00:00:20 I'm from Villanova.

00:00:21 I'm in the history department there.

00:00:22 I teach history of science and technology.

00:00:23 My name is Ching Foo.

00:00:24 I'm a graduate student.

00:00:30 Okay.

00:00:31 And did you have a copy of a paper?

00:00:32 I had a two-sheet thing.

00:00:33 I had only one copy.

00:00:34 I don't have it anymore.

00:00:35 Do you have an extra?

00:00:36 I'm trying.

00:00:37 Okay.

00:00:38 I think they put it in the mail to you, but you didn't have it.

00:00:39 It may have arrived, but I haven't checked my mail since we're on spring break.

00:00:40 Right, but that's something that we have extra stuff.

00:00:41 Yeah.

00:00:42 Conceptual and generational.

00:00:43 Yeah.

00:00:44 So, you're a graduate student.

00:00:45 I'm a graduate student.

00:00:53 Yeah.

00:00:54 Conceptual and generational change in German physics, column, the case of electricity,

00:01:00 1800 to 1826.

00:01:02 I think that's an archetypal dissertation topic.

00:01:05 It sounds like when we do things in the electrochemical society, I should read this dissertation.

00:01:14 Well, I think everyone should read it sometime around that time.

00:01:19 Use your contact information.

00:01:21 Right.

00:01:22 So, maybe if you tell us a little bit about your Robert Meyer researches and where they

00:01:29 are and how this paper relates to those.

00:01:32 Okay.

00:01:33 And you can choose.

00:01:35 Do you like people to interrupt you?

00:01:38 Or would you like to go for half an hour?

00:01:42 Either or both.

00:01:45 Okay.

00:01:47 Or should I explain?

00:01:48 I think you should do a spiel because I'm ready.

00:01:51 Okay.

00:01:52 This is a small aspect of a larger piece of work.

00:01:57 I thought I'd choose something topical for a group like this rather than to slog us through

00:02:02 all of Robert Meyer.

00:02:08 Perhaps I should introduce the work of this with a little bit of autobiography, but I

00:02:14 find it interesting how I get into it anyway.

00:02:18 My first graduate seminar at Princeton in the fall of 1967 was with Cohen on thermodynamics.

00:02:24 And having just spent a year in Germany, my German was better than everybody else's, so

00:02:29 I got all the German topics.

00:02:31 One of my early topics was Meyer and the Turf.

00:02:33 It was a big Meyer and Kant show.

00:02:35 It was people becoming one of the kind of, if small to be sure, nonetheless canonical

00:02:40 facts of the discipline that people could cite without, you know, just because everybody

00:02:43 knows this.

00:02:44 And so I thought it would make an interesting study, historiographical or whether or what,

00:02:48 to look at that.

00:02:50 And I'd been brewing this or that reflection on the turf laws of the open media, so I thought

00:02:56 it would give me a forum, a soapbox of sorts, to say some things I wanted to say about the

00:03:00 turf laws of the open media.

00:03:01 So that's how I got into the project.

00:03:03 And from there, the thing just exploded and expanded in front of me.

00:03:07 And what I thought was going to be a book, I have about 500 pages of Meyer stuff right

00:03:11 now already written.

00:03:13 Only one chapter remains to be written, ironically, the one on Meyer and the turf laws of the

00:03:17 open media.

00:03:19 The bulk of my work is a reconstruction of context, and then as much as I can do it,

00:03:25 a reconstruction of what I think is the likely course of his thinking over a period of one

00:03:31 or two years.

00:03:36 The entire course of his thought was shaped by a stream of analogies, some of them very

00:03:42 central and abiding.

00:03:44 Don't talk about it.

00:03:46 Others simply episodic, kind of serving to stake out some of the farther features of

00:03:50 his thought.

00:03:52 Some that were only in his unpublished writings because they really didn't work well, and

00:03:58 he was at least smart enough occasionally not to publish too much stuff that didn't

00:04:02 make sense.

00:04:04 Some of these things, they're still born analogies, but nonetheless serve to indicate at least

00:04:10 the direction that his thought was going in.

00:04:14 As I say, I only noticed these kinds of things gradually and ultimately extracted a theme,

00:04:22 which I think I dubbed something like the search for valid analogies, as a subsection

00:04:27 of the work.

00:04:29 It's really that explicit thematic identity.

00:04:37 With that, I hope not too long-winded introduction, let me turn to some of the specifics.

00:04:45 Appropriately enough, the chemical analogies, which were the most central and the most important

00:04:54 to Meyer, he saw himself as the reformer of physics.

00:05:07 I think like Lavoisier in chemistry, Meyer saw himself as the reformer of physics, as

00:05:15 basing physics on force, just as chemistry was the science of matter and its conservation,

00:05:21 which is the science of force and its conservation.

00:05:26 Having said this, it already suggests too much clarity and too much simplicity to pull

00:05:34 out with great coherence at this time, but I hope I can do a reasonable job at it, is

00:05:40 that Meyer's work with analogies was typically less the identification and incorporation

00:05:51 of an analogy than the creation of that analogy through time.

00:05:58 Let me explain what I mean.

00:06:00 Again, this is something I just noticed along the way and then went back and made a more

00:06:04 focused investigation.

00:06:07 There in fact was no explicitly stated principle of the conservation of matter in German chemistry

00:06:12 or physics in the early 19th century.

00:06:14 It wasn't one.

00:06:17 I've looked at enough stuff, I feel confident to assert that.

00:06:21 Only very occasionally does one find anything hinting in that direction, which is not to

00:06:27 say that chemists didn't de facto incorporate such an understanding in their work, but it

00:06:34 is to say that there was no explicitly stated principle.

00:06:38 I think it makes a difference whether something is an explicitly stated principle or simply

00:06:43 a task of understanding.

00:06:44 Certainly, if you're going to establish a principle as the central principle of your

00:06:48 science, it helps for someone to have identified it in a parallel form in another science,

00:06:54 but that didn't happen.

00:06:56 Can I just say one more sentence before you?

00:06:58 One more sentence?

00:07:00 Hence, Meyer's analogy between the conservation of matter and the conservation of force is

00:07:08 as much the creation of the principle of conservation of matter parallel with the conservation of

00:07:14 force for himself as it was a symbol adopted.

00:07:20 Is there somebody that it's not clear enough to say?

00:07:24 Well, it's clear.

00:07:25 Ted may remember the specific locus.

00:07:27 It's tucked away in some back chapter where he makes a clear statement, but it's in...

00:07:34 Do you remember the particular chapter, Ted?

00:07:36 No, I've checked some French chemistry and physics texts and have not found it anywhere.

00:07:46 I've checked more in German texts.

00:07:51 I mentioned ponderable matter.

00:07:56 I should have called it the imponderables, which are imponderable matter or imponderable

00:08:00 substances.

00:08:01 That's heat, light, electricity, and I don't know what the imponderables are.

00:08:06 He means that literally, right?

00:08:08 That they cannot be weighed, I take it.

00:08:10 Or is this something that...

00:08:12 Are we going a little further than that?

00:08:14 By heat, you mean Meyer?

00:08:15 Yeah.

00:08:16 Well, the concept of the...

00:08:18 I have a long section on the concept of the imponderables and how that goes.

00:08:26 Without being able to develop this at great length here, let me just state that I think

00:08:30 one of the reasons why...

00:08:33 I suspect one of the reasons why there was no explicit principle of the conservation

00:08:39 of matter was that the concept of matter itself was rather fuzzy on the edges.

00:08:46 If one takes the kind of historiographically classic understanding of early 19th century

00:08:52 physics and chemistry, it's a little oversimplified, but it'll do me here because I want to be

00:08:56 a little oversimplified here.

00:08:58 The so-called dynamists versus the atomists, the dynamists believing in the ontological

00:09:03 primacy of force.

00:09:04 If you really believe in the ontological primacy of force, there's no matter.

00:09:09 Matter is problematic.

00:09:11 Conservation of matter is conceptually very problematic if you're a thorough-going dynamist.

00:09:17 And there were such.

00:09:18 Again, I'm oversimplifying here somewhat, but that will allow me to escape on.

00:09:22 If I remember correctly, it's something like if the imponderables were as light relative

00:09:28 to hydrogen, as hydrogen is with respect to gold, we couldn't detect them.

00:09:34 We couldn't detect them.

00:09:35 And that's not Earth.

00:09:36 It was fudge.

00:09:38 Jacob Friedrich Friis was another person I could place in this category.

00:09:41 Although Friis was primarily a philosopher, he wrote a well-respected, deservedly well-respected

00:09:48 textbook in physics in 1826 in which he interprets the imponderables as the special state of

00:09:55 aggregation of matter.

00:09:57 In other words, on a continuum.

00:10:00 Hence, the kind of conventionally ponderable matter that chemists dealt with shaded over

00:10:09 perhaps into the things that they normally didn't think of weighing.

00:10:13 And so conceptually, matter was perhaps...

00:10:16 This was focused on the overthrow of the phlogiston theory that La Poissy showed that there wasn't

00:10:24 this imponderable phlogiston, thinking that he had removed the imponderables from chemistry.

00:10:32 But you find in his list of elements, the first four are imponderables.

00:10:37 So all he did was...

00:10:38 It was hollow, right?

00:10:40 All he did was to remove one of the imponderables.

00:10:44 That's right.

00:10:47 Let me say a few more things about the imponderables because it's in Myers coming to terms with

00:10:54 what the imponderables were that I think he forwards to some of the characteristics of

00:11:00 force, as I mentioned briefly in here.

00:11:08 Let me backtrack a little bit.

00:11:12 In a more coherent and expanded presentation of this kind of material, one would have to

00:11:18 distinguish two things roughly going on in parallel tracks and interacting.

00:11:25 There was no concept of force or energy or anything which was conceptually conservable

00:11:30 in his day.

00:11:32 So he had to create and demarcate a particular concept and distinguish it from all the other

00:11:38 kinds of entities, ontological entities in the universe.

00:11:43 Again, get a coherent concept of something which could be called force.

00:11:51 And then also entertain the possibility...

00:12:21 ...an institute of chemical engineers and the University of Pennsylvania.

00:12:36 The center was established in 1982 to discover and disseminate information about historical

00:12:42 resources and to encourage research scholarship and popular writing in the history of chemistry,

00:12:48 chemical engineering, and the chemical process industries.

00:12:52 The Beckman Center developed out of a growing awareness that our chemical heritage must

00:12:56 be preserved and made known for the benefit of future generations.

00:13:01 The center strives to increase the public's understanding of the contributions of the

00:13:05 chemical sciences to society.

00:13:08 The existence of the Edgar Foss Smith Collection and the strength of its Department of

00:13:13 History and Sociology...

00:13:15 I'm sorry.

00:13:18 Foss, not...

00:13:20 Foss.

00:13:22 The Beckman Center developed out of a growing awareness and a little bit slower on that

00:13:26 pacing, just a little bit slower in that background.

00:13:28 Okay.

00:13:31 What do you want to call this?

00:13:33 Just take two, take two graph two.

00:13:38 We're running, rolling?

00:13:40 Okay.

00:13:42 Okay, this is take two, second paragraph.

00:13:46 The Beckman Center developed out of a growing awareness that our chemical heritage must

00:13:50 be preserved and made known for the benefit of future generations.

00:13:55 The center strives to increase the public's understanding of the contributions of the

00:13:59 chemical sciences to society.

00:14:03 The existence of the Edgar Foss Smith Collection and the strength of its Department of History

00:14:08 and Sociology of Science make the University of Pennsylvania an ideal location for the

00:14:13 center.

00:14:16 The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center overlooks Philadelphia from its location at 3401 Walnut

00:14:21 Street in a modern building in the heart of the University of Pennsylvania campus.