Ether And Modernity

Ether and Modernity offers a snapshot of the status of an epistemic object, the "ether" (or "aether"), in the early twentieth century. The contributed papers show that the ether was often regarded as one of the objects of modernity, hand in hand with the electron, radioactivity or X-rays, and not simply as the stubborn residue of an old-fashioned, long-discarded science. The prestige and authority of scientists and popularisers like Oliver Lodge and Arthur Eddington in Britain, Phillip Lenard in Germany or Dayton C. Miller in the USA was instrumental in the preservation, defence or even re-emergence of the ether in the 1920s. Moreover, the consolidation of wireless communications and radio broadcasting, indeed a very modern technology, brought the ether into audiences that would otherwise never have heard about such an esoteric entity. The ether also played a pivotal role among some artists in the early twentieth century: the values of modernism found in the complexities and contradictions of modern physics, such as wireless action or wave-particle puzzles, a fertile ground for the development of new artistic languages; in literature as much as in the pictorial and performing arts. Essays on the intellectual foundations of Umberto Boccioni's art, the linguistic techniques of Lodge, and Ernst Mach's considerations on aesthetics and physics witness to the imbricate relationship between the ether and modernism. Last but not least, the ether played a fundamental part in the resurgence of modern spiritualism in the aftermath of the Great War. This book examines the complex array of meanings, strategies and milieus that enabled the ether to remain an active part in scientific and cultural debates well into the 1930s, but not beyond. This portrait may be easily regarded as the swan song of an epistemic object that was soon to fade away as shown by Paul Dirac's unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate some kind of aether in 1951, with which this book finishes.

This book sheds new light on the biographical approach in the history of physics by including the biographies of scientific objects, institutions, and concepts. What is a biography? Can biographies also be written for non-human subjects like scientific instruments, institutions or concepts? The respective chapters of this book discuss these controversial questions using examples from the history of physics. By approaching biography as metaphor, it transcends the boundaries between various perspectives on the history of physics, and enriches our grasp of the past.

The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.