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How scientists used transformative new technologies to understand the complexities of weather and the atmosphere, told through the intertwined careers of three key figures. “The goal of meteorology is to portray everything atmospheric, everywhere, always,” declared John Bellamy and Harry Wexler in 1960, soon after the successful launch of TIROS 1, the first weather satellite. Throughout the twentieth century, meteorological researchers have had global ambitions, incorporating technological advances into their scientific study as they worked to link theory with practice. Wireless telegraphy, radio, aviation, nuclear tracers, rockets, digital computers, and Earth-orbiting satellites opened up entirely new research horizons for meteorologists. In this book, James Fleming charts the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of atmospheric science through the lives and careers of three key figures: Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862–1951), Carl-Gustaf Rossby (1898–1957), and Harry Wexler (1911–1962). In the early twentieth century, Bjerknes worked to put meteorology on solid observational and theoretical foundations. His younger colleague, the innovative and influential Rossby, built the first graduate program in meteorology (at MIT), trained aviation cadets during World War II, and was a pioneer in numerical weather prediction and atmospheric chemistry. Wexler, one of Rossby's best students, became head of research at the U.S. Weather Bureau, where he developed new technologies from radar and rockets to computers and satellites, conducted research on the Antarctic ice sheet, and established carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. He was also the first meteorologist to fly into a hurricane—an experience he chose never to repeat. Fleming maps both the ambitions of an evolving field and the constraints that checked them—war, bureaucracy, economic downturns, and, most important, the ultimate realization (prompted by the formulation of chaos theory in the 1960s by Edward Lorenz) that perfectly accurate measurements and forecasts would never be possible.
Although the product of a self-proclaimed consensus politics, the British Empire was always based on communications supremacy and the knowledge of the atmosphere. Using the metaphor of a thread of five pieces representing the categories science, industry, government, the military, and the education, this is the first book to study the relations between wireless and Empire throughout the interwar period. It is also the first to make full use of the abundant archive material and rich sources existing in Britain and the Dominions. The book examines the evolving connection between the development of imperial radio communications and atmospheric physics; the expansion and strength of the British radio industry and its relationship with the elucidation of the ionosphere; and the different extent to which Australia, Canada and New Zealand managed to emulate the British model of radio R&D in the interwar years. The book ends with a highly original and provocative epilogue: 'The realist interpretation of the atmosphere'.
With over 300 entries from the ancient abacus to X-ray diffraction, as represented by a ca. 1900 photo of an X- ray machine as well as the latest research into filmless x- ray systems, this tour of the history of scientific instruments in multiple disciplines provides context and a bibliography for each entry. Newer conceptions of "instrument" include organisms widely used in research: e.g. the mouse, drosophila, and E. coli. Bandw photographs and diagrams showcase more traditional instruments from The Science Museum, London, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The essential guide to the history, current trends, and the future of meteorology This comprehensive review explores the evolution of the field of meteorology, from its infancy in 3000 bc, through the birth of fresh ideas and the naming of the field as a science, to the technology boom, to today. The Evolution of Meteorology reveals the full story of where meteorology was then to where it is now, where the field is heading, and what needs to be done to get the field to levels never before imagined. Authored by experts of the topic, this book includes information on forecasting technologies, organizations, governmental agencies, and world cooperative projects. The authors explore the ancient history of the first attempts to understand and predict weather and examine the influence of the very early birth of television, computers, and technologies that are useful to meteorology. This modern-day examination of meteorology is filled with compelling research, statistics, future paths, ideas, and suggestions. This vital resource: Examines current information on climate change and recent extreme weather events Starts with the Ancient Babylonians and ends with the largest global agreement of any kind with the Paris Agreement Includes current information on the most authoritative research in the field of meteorology Contains data on climate change theories and understanding, as well as extreme weather statistics and histories This enlightening text explores in full the history of the study of meteorology in order to bring awareness to the overall path and future prospects of meteorology.
This volume presents the preliminary results of the work carried out by the interdisciplinary cultural techniques research lab at the University of Erfurt. Taking up an impulse from media studies, its contributions examine —from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—the interplay between the formative processes of knowledge and action outlined within the conceptual framework of cultural techniques. Case studies in the fields of history, literary (and media) studies, and the history of science reconstruct seemingly fundamental demarcations such as nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, and materiality and the symbolical order as the result of concrete practices and operations. These studies reveal that particularly basic operations of spatialization form the very conditions that determine emergence within any cultural order. Ranging from manual and philological "paper work" to practices of opening up and closing off spaces and collective techniques of assembly, these case studies replace the grand narratives of cultural history focusing on micrological examinations of specific constellations between human and nonhuman actors.
'Getting Real' is the first book to simultaneously study the emergence of realist attitudes towards the entities (layers) of the ionosphere and the earth's crust. It proposes a new kind of realism: a realism of social and cultural origins, an entity realism responding to specific commercial and engineering interests.
Did industry and commerce affect the concepts, values and epistemic foundations of different sciences? If so, how and to what extent? This book suggests that the most significant influence of industry on science in the two case studies treated here had to do with the issue of realism. Using wave propagation as the common thread, this is the first book to simultaneously analyse the emergence of realist attitudes towards the entities of the ionosphere and of the earth's crust. However, what led physicists and engineers to adopt realist attitudes? This book suggests that a new kind of realism --a realism of social and cultural origins- is the answer: a preliminary, entity realism responding to specific commercial and engineering interests, and a realism that was neither strictly instrumental nor exclusively operational. The book has two parts: while Part I focuses on the study of the ionosphere and how the British radio industry affected ionospheric physics, Part II focuses on the study of the Earth's crust and how the American oil industry affected crustal seismology.