Auflösung der Nebel – Leben in Sicht!
Abstract
Resolving Nebulae – Life in Sight! While in the second half of the 19th century astrospectroscopy and -photography had contoured new objects of investigation like nebulae, the debate among astronomers about extraterrestrial life intensified. Images did not only play a key role in uprising popular astronomical magazines at that time, they also served as arguments or even as evidence in controversial debates about the nature of nebulae or of planets' surfaces. These debates were not restricted to academic astronomers, on the contrary, amateurs and popularisers were among the most active disputants. Photos and images published in popular magazines were more intensively retouched or manipulated than when they were used in academic communication about astronomy. But the practices of interpretation and speculation, based on drawings and images, stemmed from academic communities. Far reaching conclusions relying on unclear features of astronomical pictures, like in the case of Martian canals, have not only been criticised by other academics. History shows that the ability to scrutinise imaginations about evidence of life in space or about the forming of the solar system was due more to tacitly knowing how images were produced than to having an encyclopaedic recall in astronomy.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002%2Fbewi.201301645
“Ehrlich färbt am längsten”. Sichtbarmachung bei Paul Ehrlich
Abstract
“Staining is the Best Policy”. Visualization in the work of Paul Ehrlich. For nearly all of his life, the biomedical scientist Paul Ehrlich dedicated himself to work on dyes and staining at the interface between so-called color-chemistry and histopathology. The article begins by sketching out the field of histopathology at the junction of pathological anatomy, microtechniques, and the development of chemical dyes in the early 1870s when Ehrlich began his training as a medical student. The article explores Ehrlich's work staining first tissue and blood, and then pathogens and vital staining in the 1880s. In the late 1880s and 1890s, Ehrlich experimented with dyes as therapeutic agents. Staining made the invisible visible, revealing cell structures, pathogens, or vital physiological processes within the cell itself. The article shows how visualization became an essential – albeit laborious and painstaking – element in the epistemic process of Ehrlich's work. The production of histological specimens required special skills acquired through extensive practice, especially in the techniques of visualization, manipulation, observation, and tacit understanding. These practices were needed because it was increasingly necessary to produce objective results once the various techniques of visualization came to be assessed within a discourse on objectivity. Visualization itself became an epistemic object and was ultimately “more important than the subject matter itself”.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002%2Fbewi.201301648
Geordnete Verhältnisse. Mathematische Anschauungsmodelle im frühen 20. Jahrhundert
Abstract
Sorted Geometry. Mathematical Models on Display around 1900. By 1870, around the same time that mathematics turned away from intuitive Euclidean geometry, increasingly three-dimensional geometric models were being incorporated into mathematical education at German universities and technical colleges. Connected to the increasingly specialized nature of engineering education as well as the growing demand for students in the fields of mechanics, kinematics, and statics in 1900, mathematics education at all levels called for the inclusion of more practical applications, often via the use of objects or images. Examining the works of the Darmstadt-based professor of descriptive geometry Hermann Wiener (1857–1939), this essay discusses the various ways that three-dimensional mathematical models were presented – both in combination with text and image, as well as part of an arranged series of objects in a showcase. As a mathematics professor, Wiener dedicated himself to the construction and use of models. He produced several series of wire models and sold them with an accompanying catalogue containing price lists and images. The models and the images were explicitly meant to serve as tools for enhancing students' intuitive mathematical knowledge. The visual knowledge thus generated was therefore cultivated not only through the research style of professors, but also as a result of the way in which things were presented and shown in a variety of non-academic contexts around 1900, such as shop windows and exhibition showcases. This essay reveals that these various new ways of arranging mathematical models had an epistemic value that was deeply connected to visual concepts of that time period.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002%2Fbewi.201301644