Killed by its own obituaries: Explaining the demise of the ether

Autor:	Jaume, Navarro
Rok vydání:	2021
Předmět:	Ethyl Ethers History and Philosophy of Science Anesthetics General Writing General Social Sciences Ether Ethers
Zdroj:	Science in Context. 34:209-225
ISSN:	1474-0664 0269-8897
DOI:	10.1017/s0269889722000175
Popis:	ArgumentIn this paper I follow the demise of the ether in the first half of the twentieth century to show how the first obituaries of the ether were instrumental in creating an object with specific and largely simplified properties related to, but different from, nineteenth-century ethers. I suggest that writing the history of dead objects (or objects an author wants to be dead) is not epistemologically neutral but, on the contrary, it involves a reformulation of the object itself. I show that this was indeed the case with the ether: those arguing for its demise in the early twentieth century tended to overlook as irrelevant one of the ether’s most important properties, namely being the seat for the transmission of electromagnetic waves. Instead, they emphasized the contradictions between other properties of previous ether(s), so as to advocate for its disappearance.
Databáze:	OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz:	https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_dedup___::0ffdd7446f33eb9de1a6b89a597aa252 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0269889722000175 Zobrazit plný text záznamu Plný text ve formátu PDF Plný text ve formátu HTML
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