Dear Sir/Madame:
Please include the following colloquium announcement in your calendar for
next week.
Thanks very much,
Sherry Lassiter
Program Manager
Center for Bits and Atoms
MIT Media Lab
20 Ames Street, E15-404
Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel.#617-253-4651
Fax#617-253-7034
lass media mit edu
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CBA Colloquium
Artisans are Instrumental to Science: Why 19th Century Germany
Got it Right
Myles Jackson
Associate Professor, Willamette University
Fellow, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and
Technology at MIT
Monday, February 23 2004
MIT Media Lab
20 Ames Streeet
The Bartos Theater
Building E15
Cambridge, MA
4:00-5:00
followed by refreshments
From the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, artisanal
knowledge
was deemed inferior to the knowledge of the savant or
experimental
natural philosopher. During the nineteenth century, however,
critical
social, economic, political, technological and scientific
changes
took place, which culminated in the recognition that
instrument
makers were critical to the scientific enterprise.
Nineteenth-century
Germany proffers historians a good example of the
collaboration
between artisans and scientists. I shall address how
optical
technology and musical instrument manufacture actually
proved
critical to the development and testing of scientific
theories.
to receive CBA Colloquium announcements, send email to:
cba_admin cba mit edu
MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) is an interdisciplinary initiative
that is looking beyond the end of the Digital Revolution to ask how a
functional description of a system can be embodied in, and abstracted from,
a physical form. These simple, profound questions date back to the
beginning of modern manufacturing, and before that to the origins of
natural science, but they have revolutionary new implications that follow
from the recognition of the computational universality of physical systems.
CBA was founded by Profs. Isaac Chuang, Neil Gershenfeld, Joseph Jacobson,
and Scott Manalis, with Marvin Minsky. It was launched by a National
Science Foundation award in 2001 (NSF CCR #0122419) that is supporting the
creation of a unique shared experimental resource that enables the creation
of form and function across nine orders of magnitude in length scales, as
well as an associated intellectual community drawn from across MIT's campus
spanning the historical divisions that have emerged between the study of
computer science and physical science, and between the development of
software and hardware. CBA's government funding is complemented by
corporate sponsorship for technology development and transfer.
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