Book Reviews
Agamemnon R. E. Oliveira, A History of the Work Concept: From Physics to Economics. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 2014, 239 pages, $109.00.
Jennifer Karns Alexander*
Agamemnon R. E. Oliveira has given us a provocative survey of the work concept in physics, mathematics, and early industrial theory. It is propelled by a trans-formative goal: to reveal how contemporary capitalism, dominated by finance capital, still preserves the contradictions that motivated the analysis of Marx and others in the middle period of industrialization. The book is more physics and math than Marx—Oliveira teaches applied mechanics and structures in the Polytechnic School of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro—but the pairing of industrial theory with rational and applied mechanics is itself a potent intellectual statement.
Oliveira’s book has two functions. It gives an overview of the principal pub-lished works of the figures under discussion and it identifies and clearly elucidates a variety of primary sources that historians of science, physicists, and engineers may find useful in their teaching or in their own review of concepts. His book is also a sustained argument that matter in motion matters, as demonstrated by the many historical vignettes punctuating the parade of theories, such as those on the French Revolution and technical education and on Alexandrian and Islamic machine traditions. The book occasionally engages classic work by historians and philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Charles Gillespie, but does not engage the work of historians of technology, who have also been interested in work and machine theory. Aside from the discussion of Marx, Oliveira’s concept of economy concerns the economy of machines, meaning methods of under-standing and accounting for their performance.
Oliveira’s stated objective is ‘‘to follow the physical concept of work as a the-oretical elaboration in the fields of classical mechanics and mathematics…and then to follow the development of a general theory of machines and finally, the process of incorporating the concept of mechanical work into economic theory’’ (69). The
* Jennifer Karns Alexander is an associate professor in the Program for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. She is the author ofThe Mantra of Efficiency: From Water-wheel to Social Control(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
book opens with an introductory survey of Marxist theory and foundational writings in epistemology, ecological economics, historiography, and the history of science. The two sections that make up the body of the book are devoted first to the conceptual and second to the instrumental basis of work studies. Oliveira’s conceptual discussion opens with brief histories of concepts of space, time, force, and mass, as prelude to the historical development of two quite different approaches to work: the principle of virtual work, which grew out the study of equilibrium, and the search for a quantity that remained constant even after a system had left a state of equilibrium.
The first of these approaches, the virtual work principle, was associated with the heavily abstract and mathematical French tradition of the E´ cole Polytechnique and with the names of Joseph Fourier, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Gaspard de Prony, and Louis Poinsot. The second, the search for a conserved quantity, is of greater interest to Oliveira; it presaged the development of the energy theory and was motivated in part by the attempt to understand machines. Oliveira is heavily influenced by Thomas Kuhn’s celebrated article on the four scientists who are commonly understood to have simultaneously hypothesized the conservation of energy, particularly by Kuhn’s argument that one of the most influential factors uniting these figures was their interest in machines. Oliveira returns to the energy concept in the second half of the book, after examining the failure of rational mechanics, under the influence of Lagrange, to formulate a theory of machines, despite the short-lived influence of Pierre-Simon Laplace and his concern for physical phenomena.
All this serves as an introduction to Oliveira’s detailed study of how Lazare Carnot made possible a true science of machines by analyzing sudden and dis-continuous displacements and changes in velocity, rather than dis-continuous processes. Oliveira’s discussion of Carnot makes up two thirds of the second part of the book, with a close analysis of the memoires of 1779 and 1781 and of Carnot’s 1803 magnum opus,Principes fondamentaux de l’e´quilibre et du mouvement.
From his analysis of Carnot, Oliveira moves to a discussion of the incorporation of the work concept into economic thought, by which he means theories of the economy of machines, or of how to measure machine performance both in doing useful work and in using up resources of one sort or another. This includes an overview of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb’s work on machines’ internal move-ments and their associated loss of motive power, Claude-Louis Navier’s attempt to quantify a machine’s ‘‘useful effect,’’ Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis’s rigorous use of the concept of living force (vis vivaor kinetic energy) in quantifying machine performance, and Jean-Victor Poncelet’s teaching of applied mechanics to grad-uates of the E´cole Polytechnique pursuing military careers at the Metz School of Artillery and Engineering.
repercussions’’ (219). Critics of industrial society are surveyed—Jacques Ellul and Harry Braverman—and Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure, early theorists of manufacturing, appear as influences on Marx. A discussion of Marx’s analysis of machines inDas Kapitalcloses the volume.
These last pages analyzing Marx are a highlight of Oliveira’s contribution, displaying the careful analysis of how things move that characterizes the entire volume. A human being has two hands and so can move two tools; a machine quickly passes this organic barrier (combined with a powerful engine and parts designed for smooth, continuous motion) comes to form a whole, even an organic whole, as Oliveira notes (237). Oliveira’s gloss on Carnot’s discussion ofvis vivaor living force in thePrincipes fondamentauxis as clear as I have seen. His evaluation of the significantly different approaches to machines of Carnot and Coriolis turns on what they think about how machines move.
The exegesis of classic texts that is the strength of Oliveira’s book gives it an air of pristine fundamentalism. Oliveira engages the work of few contemporary his-torians and philosophers, and he engages them to continue the hermeneutical exercise rather than to further our understanding of the complex historical situ-ations within which theories of work and machines developed. There exists a large body of pertinent literature within which Oliveira’s project may be placed, and a short survey will show that it is not necessary to focus on Marx to discuss physics, work, machines, and economic theory. Especially pertinent to a broader discussion is the work of Philip Mirowski on physics and economics, one book memorably titled More Heat Than Light(Cambridge, 1987), and a series of classic articles from Norton Wise and Crosby Smith on nineteenth-century changes in concepts of work, waste, balance, and equilibrium. Donald S. L. Cardwell has long studied thermodynamics, machines, and concepts of power, work, and energy, and Maxine Berg works explicitly on machines and theories of political economy. Oliveira recognizes the significance of practical artisanship to developing scientific theories, which is a long-running theme in the work of Pamela Long (who was recently honored as a MacArthur Fellow), Larry Stewart, and Margaret Jacob, among others.
The Conservatoire was more strongly connected to vocational schools than to the E´cole Polytechnique and may be argued to have had much greater influence on the actual design and building of working machines than did the Polytechnique. James Edmondson and Ivor Grattan-Guinness have written on this subject, as have I, and there was an outpouring of literature in celebration of the Conser-vatoire’s bicentennial, including important work by Antoine Picon, Claudine Fontanon, and Andre´ Grelon. For the British case, it is worth looking at John Smeaton, the prominent eighteenth-century English engineer whom Oliveira mentions in passing. Smeaton deliberately sought methods to quantify the per-formance of machines in a way useful to practical men; his work on waterwheels earned him the Copley Medal of the Royal Society and was credited with having so greatly improved the performance of waterwheels that it long delayed the widespread introduction of steam power. Kevin de Berg has argued that Smea-ton’s waterwheel experiments are useful for teaching because they illustrate an exceptionally clear understanding of the physical concept of mechanical work. There is much fruitful historical work into which Oliveira’s study may be integrated.
It does not appear that Springer has given Professor Oliveira much assistance in bringing out his book, which is overly long and would have benefitted from careful editing. Each of the chapters in the first half of the book begins with the ancients— Hero of Alexandria, Aristotle, Euclid—as the starting point for a sweeping view, whichever concept the chapter has in play, up into the early modern period. Careful editing of sources was also needed. The strength of the book lies in its exegesis of the published works of the theorists under discussion, but it is not always clear where quotations from the original leave off and Oliveira’s exegesis begins, particularly in the chapters on Carnot. Chapters are not laid out uniformly; the epigram in Chapter Two looks like part of the main text. The book is part of Springer’s series on the history of mechanism and machine science; a preface from the series editor promises an analytical index and a concluding list of references that do not appear (there are some references at the ends of chapters). This volume is overly expensive for all these reasons and one more: it is not physically robust. Though Springer lists this book at more than $100, the spine on my hardcover copy cracked right away.
University of Minnesota
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine 1100 Mechanical Engineering
Olival Freire Jr., Quantum Dissidents: Rebuilding the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics(1950–1990). Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2015, 356 pages, $99.00.
Antonio A. P. Videira*
Quantum Dissidents: Rebuilding the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1950–1990) constitutes an important contribution to the history of quantum mechanics. Olival Freire Jr., a professor of physics at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, and an acclaimed researcher and teacher of the history of science, considers how both theoretical and experimental research endeavored to com-prehend the foundations of quantum mechanics. The book is the result of Freire’s thirty years of direct involvement with the history and philosophy of quantum mechanics. His work began with a master’s thesis on Paul Langevin at the University of Sa˜o Paulo, supervised by physicist and historian Ame´lia Impe´rio Hamburger (1932–2011), followed by a doctoral thesis on David Bohm (1917–1992) at the same university under the supervision of Shozo Motoyama and Michel Paty.
The book explains how the foundations of quantum mechanics, once regarded as a marginal research area, came to kindle the interest of physicists, philosophers, and even science communicators. Quantum information, the most notable product of this turnaround, is now seen as a field capable of revolutionizing science and technology, leading to frontiers beyond the realm of physics. How, then, did a topic young researchers avoided until the early 1970s for fear of the detrimental impact it would have on their careers come to be honored by a Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Frenchman Serge Haroche and American Daniel J. Wineland in 2012?
To answer this question, Freire draws on techniques favored by those historians of science who deliberately avoid writing either internalist or externalist history. Keen to overcome this longstanding dichotomy, Freire considers the realms of history, sociology, philosophy, and political science without giving precedence to one or another. The secondary references are various, though he shows a pref-erence for the ideas of Timothy Lenoir and the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), while still considering other perspectives, such as those of Bruno Latour and David Kaiser. Freire understands that the historical intelligibility of science does not come merely from comprehending its technical aspects. He nevertheless shows himself to be a shrewd technical historian, fully versed—or, more appropriately,entangled—in the physics of the story he tells. This history reinforces the idea that, as it circulates, science is transformed by circulation itself. Most of the book consists of articles published previously, mostly inStudies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, some of which were coauthored by Freire’s colleagues and students. But this book is more than a compilation; indeed,
the articles were modified to make the whole more coherent, organized, and engaging. An introduction and a conclusion were specially written, and each chapter begins with an abstract giving a concise statement of the chapter’s subject matter. There are nine chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. The time frame covered stretches from 1950 to 1990, although some more recent information is included, such as the mention of the 2012 Nobel Prize.
The first chapter is methodological in nature. Freire sets forth the concepts and theoretical principles he uses to comprehend the emergence of quantum infor-mation research, which he sees as the most visible and significant example of the validation of the foundations of quantum theory as an area of study. Freire restates his belief that science is a dynamic structure (in the broadest sense of the word) in this chapter.
In the second chapter, the history of the reconstruction and reconfiguration of the foundations of quantum mechanics begins. Freire’s recounting of quantum mechanics in the second half of the last century focuses on David Bohm and those who shared his views—no surprise if we recall the topic of Freire’s thesis. Although Bohm is one of his favorite dissidents, Freire resists any temptation to raise him above his station. In line with his narrative goals, Freire holds that Bohm was unsuccessful in his efforts to break the dominance of the Copenhagen inter-pretation, which supposedly had ruled quantum theory since the 1920s.
The third chapter is devoted to a different unorthodox interpretation, which was contemporary to Bohm’s hidden variable theory. Formulated by an American physicist at Princeton, Hugh Everett III (1930–1982), this interpretation, like Bohm’s, was severely criticized, to the degree that Everett ultimately abandoned a conventional academic career. It follows from Freire’s analysis, though, that Everett did not suffer too much when he transitioned from academia to his work for the Pentagon. It seems that Everett’s thesis was a subject that was much more important for his mentor (J. A. Wheeler) than it was for Everett.
Chapter Four recounts the appearance of the first cracks in the Copenhagen interpretation’s hegemony, spreading from the measurement problem, which shook its foundations. A character from whom just about anything but unortho-doxy could be expected led the assault. Hungarian-born American physicist Eugene P. Wigner was an outspoken conservative, involved in scientific alterca-tions with some young Italian physicists who supported Marxism, an ideology he strongly rejected. Wigner, who had made seminal contributions to nuclear physics, realized that the measurement problem was not resolved and reintroduced it to the physics community. He thus he shook up the whole field of quantum mechanics.
backing) or the right (most powerful) scientific allies. A physicist who clings to issues the discipline’s leaders have designated as peripheral can end up being marginalized. Tausk’s unhappy fate reminds us that intellectual accomplishment and scientific know-how are not enough to assure legitimate participation in domains as divisive as the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
The sixth chapter investigates how the political conditions of the late 1960s influenced physicists interested in studying foundations. Here, Freire discusses efforts made to organize and run a summer school in Varenna, Italy, devoted to discussing the foundations of quantum mechanics. He describes how political, cultural, and ideological commitments emerged in the core of physics in order to sustain the thesis that politics is not always an obstacle to the development of good science.
In Chapter Seven, Freire first touches on the historical circumstances that prompted the physics community to change its attitude towards the foundations of quantum physics. Freire locates this change in optical experiments conducted in the late 1960s, which were designed to test such bizarre consequences of quantum mechanics as entanglement. Touching on John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Bell’s famous theorem—named after Northern Irish physicist John Bell (1928–1990)— Freire shows how philosophy penetrated the field of physics. Even so, this was, as Freire himself notes, a transitional period. The foundations of quantum physics had not yet earned the respectability they would enjoy from the 1970s on.
This transitional period did not end with the publication of Aspect’s experi-ments in 1981 and 1982 but continued throughout the decade and even stretched into the 1990s. This is the subject of chapter eight, which emphasizes that this transition lacked a single focal theme rallying the many groups that had started to devote their energies to the foundations of quantum mechanics. Further, this era included a new series of conferences held specifically to discuss the experimental consequences of issues previously regarded as ‘‘philosophical.’’ The moral of this chapter is that respectability cannot be acquired overnight.
The final chapter is given over to a prosopographical description of some of the protagonists involved in rebuilding the foundations of quantum mechanics. Freire perhaps does this to provide an ending for the metaphor he uses to structure his story: the foundations of quantum mechanics as built in an area frequented by dissidents. After all, how can a research area whose practitioners have been awarded some of the most prestigious prizes in physics be looked down on? The story Freire tells of the foundations of quantum mechanics, from its roots in philosophy to its expression in quantum information, is rich, informative, and instructive.
between the two books, of course, and I want to emphasize one: Freire’s book is more technical than Kaiser’s. This can be explained by the fact that Quantum Dissidentswas written principally for historians of science and physicists, whereas Kaiser targeted a wider audience. In this sense, these books can be regarded as complementary.
By way of conclusion, I note the foreword to Quantum Dissidentswritten by Silvan S. Schweber, one of the foremost experts in the history of physics today, endorsing the historiographical originality and quality of this work. Schweber recommends the book to all physicists keen to improve their practice, suggesting that Freire’s book has real educational value. May his words be heeded.
Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Rua Sa˜o Francisco Xavier 524, sala 9027B Rio de Janeiro, RJ 20550–013
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