History of Science

In the ever-evolving landscape of video game development, mythology serves as a rich source of inspiration, providing developers with a wellspring of narratives, characters, and themes that resonate with players. This article, "Gaming the Gods: How Mythology Inspires Game Development," explores the intricate relationship between ancient myths and contemporary gaming. By examining various titles that draw upon mythological elements—from the pantheons of Greek and Norse mythology to the folklore of diverse cultures—we uncover how these stories enhance gameplay, deepen character development, (...) and create immersive worlds. The article also discusses the challenges and responsibilities developers face when adapting these age-old tales, including cultural sensitivity and authenticity. Through case studies of popular games, we illustrate how mythology not only enriches storytelling but also fosters a deeper connection between players and the narratives they engage with. Ultimately, this exploration highlights the enduring power of myth in shaping the future of interactive entertainment, inviting both players and creators to embark on epic journeys through the realms of legend and lore. (shrink)

This article offers a cross-cultural analysis of two enigmatic figures from Indo-European mythologies: Tīrka Šavār, a lesser-known Persian omen of death or misfortune, and the Dullahan, Ireland’s iconic headless horseman. Both entities serve as harbingers of fate, embodying their cultures’ anxieties about mortality, the unknown, and the thin veil between the human and supernatural realms. Through comparative methodology, this study explores how these myths reflect distinct cultural values—Persian narratives often intertwine destiny with moral and cosmic order (aša), while Irish lore (...) emphasizes the inevitability of death and the capriciousness of the Otherworld. The analysis reveals striking parallels: both figures act as liminal beings, mediating between life and death, and their appearances are marked by omens (e.g., the Dullahan’s lantern, Tīrka Šavār’s symbolic manifestations). Yet their differences are equally telling: Tīrka Šavār’s role in Persian cosmology often ties to Zoroastrian dualism, where moral choices influence fate, whereas the Dullahan operates within a Celtic framework of inescapable doom. By situating these myths within their historical and religious contexts, this article illuminates how ancient societies grappled with existential fears and conceptualized the supernatural. (shrink)

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at CERN completed the experimental confirmation of the Standard Model particle spectrum. Current theoretical insights and experimental data are inconclusive concerning the expectation of future discoveries. While new physics may still be within reach of the LHC or one of its successor experiments, it is also possible that the mass of particles beyond those of the Standard Model is far beyond the energy reach of any conceivable particle collider. We thus have to (...) face the possibility that the age of “on-shell discoveries” of new particles may belong to the past and that we may soon witness a change in the scientists’ perception of discoveries in fundamental physics. This article discusses the relevance of this questioning and addresses some of its potential far-reaching implications through the development, first, of a historical perspective on the concept of particle. This view is prompt to reveal important specificities of the development of particle physics. In particular, it underlines the close relationship between the evolution of observational methods and the understanding of the very idea of particle. Combining this with an analysis of the current situation of high-energy physics, this leads us to the suggestion that the particle era in science must undergo an important conceptual reconfiguration. (shrink)

Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529–88) was a physician of the Spanish Renaissance. He wrote the Examen de Ingenios para las Ciencias, translated as The Trial of Men’s Wits (1989[1575–94]), a book that has been acknowledged as a precursor of educational psychology, organizational psychology, behaviorism, neuropsychology and psychiatry. Huarte suggested that before beginning a course of study, students’ intellectual capabilities (i.e. ingenio) should be matched up with the professional studies that best suit their aptitudes. His book had a great impact (...) in Europe from the late 16th century to the mid-18th century. The influence of the Trial spread throughout many areas including philosophy, politics, linguistics and literature. Although there has been a growing interest in Huarte’s work in recent years, biographical studies have been rare; as a result, the information about Huarte’s life is currently incomplete, scattered and sometimes inaccurate. This study presents a systematic archival research on Spanish original sources. We present a reconstruction of Huarte’s life-story based on 32 original documents (1549– c.1650), some of them first discovered during the present survey. Documents are described according to the General International Standard of Archival Description, ISAD(G). The documents uncovered allow for a reappraisal of Huarte’s biography. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of Johannes Swammerdam’s researches on the brain of the honeybee (Apis mellifera), on the basis both of his published texts and of (1) an early, manuscript version of his treatise on bees (broadly intended) (1673), and (2) a hitherto unedited autograph of his, containing the earliest depiction and description of an insect brain (1673–1677). Through a reconstruction of the genesis of Swammerdam’s texts on bees, both the novelty and accuracy of his observations are highlighted, as (...) well as his reliance on a Cartesian physiology in the interpretation and rendering of the observed parts. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic generated debates about how pandemics should be known. There was much discussion of what role the human sciences could play in knowing – and governing – the pandemic. In this article, we focus on attempts to know the pandemic through diaries, other biographical writing, and related forms like mass photography. In particular, we focus on the archiving of such forms by Mass Observation in the UK and the Everyday Life in Middletown (EDLM) project in the USA, and (...) initial analyses of such material by scholars from across the human sciences. Our main argument is that archiving the pandemic was informed by, and needs viewing through, the history of the human sciences – including the distinctive histories and human sciences of Mass Observation and Middletown. The article finishes by introducing a Special Section that engages with archiving the pandemic in two senses: the archiving of diaries and related forms by Mass Observation and the EDLM project, and the archiving of initial encounters between researchers and this material by History of the Human Sciences. The Special Section seeks to know the pandemic from the human sciences in the present and to archive knowing the pandemic from the human sciences for the future. (shrink)

This study examines the pursuit of immortality through a comparative analysis of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and Hindu mythology centered on Vishnu, the preserver god. Employing a literary and philosophical approach, the paper contrasts Gilgamesh’s personal, mortal-driven quest with Vishnu’s cosmic, eternal existence. In Gilgamesh, the semi-divine king seeks eternal life after his companion Enkidu’s death, only to confront the inevitability of mortality, reflecting a Mesopotamian view of death as a divine boundary. Conversely, Vishnu embodies immortality as an intrinsic (...) attribute, manifested through avatars like Krishna, aligning with Hindu cosmology’s cyclical view of existence and the eternal soul. The analysis reveals distinct cultural frameworks: Gilgamesh’s linear struggle for individual legacy versus Vishnu’s timeless duty to universal order. Results highlight that Gilgamesh’s journey ends in acceptance of human limits, finding meaning in earthly achievements, while Vishnu’s narrative offers transcendence through reincarnation and cosmic harmony. The study concludes that these contrasting perspectives—personal desperation versus divine continuity—mirror Mesopotamian pragmatism and Hindu metaphysics, respectively, yet both resonate with humanity’s universal longing to transcend death. This comparison underscores that the quest for immortality is less about evading mortality than redefining its significance across cultural and philosophical landscapes. (shrink)

The function of categories of the human sciences is a well-established field of scholarly inquiry, animated by debates over their capacity to reduce, exclude, determine, abstract, produce, loop, control, and/or restrain. This special issue takes an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate urgent questions about the ‘material force’ of categories as they operate in practice. Specifically, we emphasise the plasticity of categories and how their ambivalent boundaries can render their categorical forcefulness continuously operative. Categories morph and shift as they traverse different fields, (...) re-articulating difference as they interact with divergent institutions and epistemic infrastructures. The five interdisciplinary articles in this issue explore the material force of categories across varied contexts, including the prison system, digital culture, legal frameworks, psychiatric diagnostics, and applied governmental research. In so doing, the special issue as a whole emphasises the capacious yet persistent nature of categorisation, revealing how, in multiple ways, categories can stabilise the management of people precisely through their inherent structures of contingency and ambivalence. (shrink)

This article traces the history of the Susceptible, Infected, Recovered (SIR) model in early 20th-century epidemiology (1904–27). The aim is to test the hypothesis that the active stance taken by Ross, Hudson, McKendrick, and Kermack represents a turn in the history of modern epidemiology, shifting the classical method of statistical epidemiology from a data-based model to a theory-based model. The article shows that epidemiological modeling is based on a mathematical simplification of epidemics at the time of the microbiological complexification of (...) epidemiology. What were the implications of the mathematical theory of epidemics for the development of modern epidemiology? How can epidemic dynamics be expressed mathematically without compromising the biological representation? This is exactly what is at stake here: from the work of Ross to the standardization of the SIR model by McKendrick and Kermack, modeling has been confronted with the problem of relating its equations to the facts. (shrink)

Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1795–1876) researched living and fossil microbes (infusoria) from air, sediment, or food samples. His discovery around 1840 that infusoria from the Berlin underground would damage buildings caused an early public microbe scare. In the context of the cholera epidemic of 1848, Ehrenberg devoted his attention to blood-red discoloration of food, which he identified as an innocuous red microbe. Both cases allow understanding the goal of this natural history of microbes: Following up on Alexander von Humboldt, he aimed (...) at a full picture of microbes’ place in nature, such as for geological and biological processes, including humans. In a period of political instability, Ehrenberg’s investigations were more than an early chapter in the historiography of microbiology. His conservative-reformist perspective on materialism, religion, and the state sheds new light on the relationship of science and politics around 1848. Not least, Ehrenberg’s mid-nineteenth-century argument about the omnipresence and big impact of microscopic life resonates with contemporary debates about microbes’ planetary agency. (shrink)

In the early to mid-1960s, Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed gate control theory, the most enduring theory of pain of the twentieth century. Challenging the notion of pain as a pure sensation of injury, Melzack and Wall refigured bodily experience as a dynamic state of the entire nervous system, including the higher levels of the brain. Within a decade, their neurophysiological model had become the conceptual foundation for the burgeoning and multidisciplinary field of (...) pain medicine. This essay excavates the conditions of possibility for the invention of gate control theory. It shows how two intellectual cultures emerging across the postwar neuro and psy disciplines—namely, cognitivism and cybernetics—converged in a holistic understanding of patients’ reported experiences. In reframing gate control theory, this story reveals how postwar scientists were able to construct a vision of an integrated, post-Cartesian self. (shrink)

This essay aims to show the peculiar emergence of a culture of correlation in the field of observatory sciences that resulted from the experimental and philosophical currents of the Society of Jesus and Catholic culture in general. Building on the teaching of experimentalism and physico-chemical atomism at the Jesuit Collegio Romano (in a context of opposition to both the materialism and atheism of modern society and neo-Thomist currents within the Church), it examines the observational practice and the unitary conception of (...) physical forces introduced by the director of the Collegio’s Observatory, Angelo Secchi. It argues that his dynamist theory of the unified universe shaped his later articulation of the correlation between meteorological, magnetic, and astronomical phenomena. The essay suggests that the construction of correlations promoted in this context is not merely local in character but precedes and participates in the formation of the culture of prediction in Jesuit mission observatories. (shrink)

This article explores a key question in the history of science: Could untrained officials learn and apply practical knowledge by reading how-to books and collaborating with expert practitioners? Notably, historians of science have studied workplaces such as the mines as arenas of knowledge exchange between workers, expert practitioners, and learned humanists. This article uses a labor history approach to explore what this exchange meant in practice. It analyzes the attempts of an untrained official in the mines of the Medici family (...) to learn and reproduce practical knowledge about prospecting and surveying. By the mid-sixteenth century, this official read Georg Agricola’s (1494–1555) mining treatises and had access to the expertise of German miners from the renowned mining districts of Central Europe. The analysis of his reports based on the reading of the book, along with the hierarchical organization of labor established by the German experts in the Medici mines, reveals that the presence of craftsmen and scholarly works reinforced, rather than blurred, the boundaries of knowledge in early modern mines. (shrink)

Numerous studies over the past two decades have indicated that autism prevalence in China is lower than international estimates, believed to be around 1%. However, various publications, especially newspaper articles and activist reports, have still characterized autism prevalence in the country as 1%. This paper examines the discrepancy between data by writing the biography of the 1% estimate, exploring its sociopolitical implications and cultural significance. It highlights the attractiveness and power of the 1% value in China, hinting at a possible (...) role played by numbers in the “looping effect” described by Ian Hacking. Moreover, the author suggests that the emphasis on this specific estimate downplays the importance of questions opened up by the discrepancy in findings between Chinese and international autism research. (shrink)

The “Coefficient of Racial Likeness” (CRL) ascribed to Karl Pearson (1857–1936) was born in the Biometric Laboratory in London. It was developed with the purpose to determine the distance between two samples of different origins. Widely used but also distrusted before being ultimately replaced by a true statistical measure of divergence, the Mahalanobis distance (D2), the global biography of the CRL reveals the social, scientific, and historical forces at play that determined the lifespan of the coefficient, its success and fall (...) from grace. Closely linked to Pearson personally, he could no longer control its fate once the CRL had escaped his laboratory and gotten into the hands of critical mathematicians, or to China where results of racial classification based on a single number and the assumption of homogeneity did not please the audience. (shrink)

In 1932, Japanese psychologist Takano Kiyoshi conducted experimental research on vibratory sensations using hundreds of deaf schoolchildren as research subjects. This article examines the little-studied relationship between the global spread of oralism and the local formulation of knowledge about the vibratory sense—or senkaku 顫覚—in Japanese psychoacoustics. In the 1920s, American missionaries and educators helped spread oralism in Japan, and the Japanese state implemented the Blind and Deaf-Mute Schools Ordinance. There was also a notable development of experimental psychology in the country. (...) Influenced by German psychologist David Katz’s work, Takano viewed deafness as a physical “ability” or physiological “advantage” for his scientific project. A close reading of Japanese, German, and American psychologists’ works on the vibratory sense around the time reveals that it was considered not quite identical to hearing, nor to touch. The five senses framework—based on the ideas of touch, hearing, sight, smell, and taste—does not always function properly in sensory history; this prevalent framework can put aside the actual nuances and complexities of one’s varying understanding of the human sensorium across time and space. This study highlights the (anonymous) participation of deaf individuals as research subjects and draws attention to how people with impairments played diverse roles in the history of science. (shrink)

Even though agriculture was not the central thrust of planning in Mao-era China (1949–1976), starting in the 1950s, the party-state progressively nationalized land, reorganized social relations in the countryside, and instituted a universal system of wages that fundamentally reshaped rural China. Quantifying and measuring agricultural labor, in particular, developed into an increasingly important task as the state became not just the sole purveyor but also the sole provider of people’s incomes. At the heart of this measurement was the system of (...) work points. The Work Point System quantified every aspect of rural life by classifying every activity within the rural economy in terms of the number of points needed to perform it. Putatively, every activity was thus reduced to a single number (usually between 1 and 10 for men; and 1 and 9 for women), accounted for on a daily basis. As a result, people’s relationship to numbers and quantification changed in new and fundamental ways. In this paper, I explore the history of the Work Point System, tracing its rationale and how it came to influence rural life and rural imaginations. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that the organisation of the library and manuscript collections was crucial to George Biddell Airy’s reform of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, resulting in the creation of a vast archive that continues to this day. It analyses the official papers and reports Airy produced to identify the development of the library and the technique of document management. Airy understood that the systematic and orderly organisation of information, books, and papers was the foundation of scientific research and the running (...) of the observatory. He also attached great significance to the preservation of the archives, intending to hold a complete record of observations at the Royal Observatory since its foundation and contribute to the study of the history of science in the future. This article argues that the primary aim of collecting documents and observations was to tighten the link of the nineteenth-century Royal Observatory with its tradition and history. In doing so Airy sought to justify the observatory’s current status and research programmes and to forge its institutional identity. (shrink)

Historical objectivity is a polysemic concept whose genesis and validity merit more non-polemical attention than it usually receives. As a notion that encapsulates the special applications of the language of objectivity to methodological and ethical issues faced by historical scholars all across the human sciences, it will be addressed here from a perspective that combines conceptual history, history of ideas, and theoretical reflection. A peculiar mode of claiming objectivity will be at focus, one that assumes that historians can bring together (...) two attitudes often regarded as mutually contradictory: objectivity and engagement. My main assertion is that from at least the mid 19th century a new avenue for historical thought was opened, as a few intellectuals challenged the traditional requirement that histories be written sine ira et studio; and especially as they did so while at the same time upholding a strong commitment to the value of research. I intend to show how in the mode of engaged objectivity, a disposition like anger, which was traditionally taken to be a historiographical vice, was turned into a potential virtue. This general point will be illustrated with a case study of the underlying motives and the structural configurations of Alexandre Herculano's History of the Origin and Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal, a confessedly committed, utterly critical, and sometimes furious research-based historical account. (shrink)

This article highlights the personal and intellectual relationship between Bronisław Malinowski and Edvard Westermarck. In the interwar period, social anthropology went through a paradigm shift from evolutionism to functionalism. Malinowski put himself forward as a reformer, in contrast with Westermarck's more conservative and conciliatory approach. On the other hand, Malinowski always deferred to Westermarck and described himself as his disciple. Westermarck was Malinowski's teacher, his friend, and later his colleague at the London School of Economics. Our study of their personal (...) and intellectual exchanges questions the traditional perception of a sudden intellectual revolution in social anthropology. The paradigm shift was essentially a change of perspective: a refocusing away from cross-cultural comparisons and towards intensive local studies. Westermarck, as a pioneer of fieldwork, contributed substantially to that development. His notion of social origins was close to Malinowski's notion of function. Thanks to their friendship and constant exchange of ideas, Westermarck became the bridge that connected evolutionism to Malinowski's brand of functionalism. Our chief primary source is their correspondence, with additional material by Westermarck's Finnish contacts. (shrink)