Experiment - The Emergence Of Experiment, Two Experimental Traditions: Classical And Baconian, Galileo Galilei, The Baconian Program And Its Institutional Expression
century seventeenth rise collective
This entry traces the life of experiment from its emergence in the early seventeenth century to its transformation to a collective activity after World War II. The topics discussed include the rise of experimental philosophy and its institutional expression in the new scientific societies of the seventeenth century; the spread and character of experimentation in the eighteenth century; the quest for precision and the rise of laboratories in the nineteenth century; and the emergence of a new form a collective experimental life after World War II.
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The birth of experiment has been the subject of considerable debate among historians of early modern science. The received view is that experimentation emerged in the seventeenth century as part of an era of radical discontinuity in the methods and practices of investigating nature. Among the natural philosophers who developed and practiced experimentation, some of the most eminent were Francis Ba…
To understand the rise of experiment, it would be helpful to recall a significant distinction, drawn by Thomas S. Kuhn, between two different traditions in the development of the sciences. The first tradition, the classical sciences (mathematics, astronomy, harmonics, optics, and statics), had been well developed since antiquity. Those sciences were radically transformed in the sixteenth and seven…
The extent to which Galileo did experiments has been a controversial issue. The dominant view well into the twentieth century was that Galileo was among the first "scientists" who experimented extensively and developed his theories on the basis of his experiments. In the 1930s Alexandre Koyré disputed that view and argued strenuously that Galileo's engagement with experim…
Francis Bacon was one of the most eloquent advocates of the new experimental method. In The New Organon (1620), a logical treatise that was meant to supersede Aristotle's Organon, he stressed the importance of inductive reasoning for the investigation of nature. Bacon argued, however, that the starting point of inductive reasoning should not be the information obtained by the unaided senses…
Boyle was among the more eminent followers of the Baconian program. Many of the issues and difficulties faced by that program can be seen in his controversy with the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) over the character of knowledge in natural philosophy. For Boyle knowledge of nature should be descriptive and based on consensus. The aim of experimental inquiry had to be the establishmen…
Newton famously claimed that hypotheses are not admissible in natural philosophy. The proper method of inference was deduction from the phenomena: whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy, particular propositions …
The fortunes of experimentation in the eighteenth century were closely linked with the spread of Newtonianism. Opticks functioned as a model of a developing experimental tradition. Prominent representatives of that tradition were the Dutch Newtonians Willem Jacob's Gravesande (1688–1742) and Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692–1761), who wrote very influential books, whose main fun…
Experiment continued to be a significant driving force in the development of the physical sciences in the first half of the nineteenth century. The experimental discovery of novel phenomena (for example, electromagnetism) and the precise measurement of physical parameters (such as the mechanical equivalent of heat) were instrumental in the development of electromagnetic theory and thermodynamics. …
In the twentieth century perhaps the most significant break with respect to the character of experimentation came via World War II. The Manhattan Project for the development of the atomic bomb marked the beginning of experimentation on an enormous industrial scale. After the war a new form of experimental life, so-called big science, developed. Laboratories in certain areas of physics came to rese…
Bacon, Francis. The New Organon and Related Writings. Edited by Fulton H. Anderson. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Badash, Lawrence. "The Completeness of Nineteenth-Century Science." Isis 63 (1972): 48–58. Buchwald, Jed Z., and Sungook Hong. "Physics." In From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science, edited by David Cahan…
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