[4] February 4 - Nature's Storehouse, or, Beer and thermodynamics
Assigned reading:
Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the interaction of the natural forces,” Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. D. Cahan (1995 [1854]), 18–45. (Cf. original German text; Hungarian translation (1874); Russian translation (1897); Czech chemist Vojtěch Šafařík's gloss of Helmholtz in Časopis Musea království Českého [1855].)
Crosbie Smith, “‘The epoch of energy’: The new physics and the new cosmology,” The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (1998), 126–149.
Take a brief walk through a late-eighteenth-century beer brewery and think about the potential challenges when scaling up such an enterprise for a burgeoning urban population. How might the process go awry?
Suggested reading:
Otto Sibum, "Reworking the mechanical value of heat: Instruments of precision and gestures of accuracy in early Victorian England," Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. A 26 (1995): 73-106.
Yehuda Elkana, The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy (1974), 114-145.
Thomas S. Kuhn, "Energy conservation as an example of simultaneous discovery," The Essential Tension (1977), 66-104.
Hermann von Helmholtz, Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (1847).
James Joule, "On matter, living force, and heat" (1847).
Balfour Stewart, The Conservation of Energy, being an Elementary Treatise on Energy and its Laws (1873).
James Sumner, Brewing Science, Technology & Print, 1700-1880 (2013).
Mikuláš Teich, Bier, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft in Deutschland 1800-1914: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Industrialisierungsgeschichte (2000).
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