Growing Explanations
Historical Perspectives on Recent Science
1st Edition
Published on 24. November 2004
356 pages
978-0-8223-9008-4 (ISBN)
Description
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
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11/2004
Duke University Press
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11/2004
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Persons
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.
Content
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
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
