14 de desembre de 2008

Faidra Papanelopoulou Marie Curie post-doctoral Fellow, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Groupe GEMAS Faidra Papanelopoulou is a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. She received her DPhil on 'The emergence of thermodynamics in mid-19th-century France' in 2004 from the University of Oxford, and held a post-doctoral position at the Centre A. Koyré (EHESS) in Paris. She has taught history of science at the Greek Open University. Her main interests lie on the history of the physical sciences in the19th and early-20th centuries, and the popularisation of science. She is currently working on the history of low-temperature research and the emergence of physical chemistry in late-19th and early-20th centuries, as well as on the public image of science in early-20th-century Greece.

How has research in the low temperatures contributed to the becoming of physical chemistry? Abstract It is commonly assumed that the various developments in the liquefaction of gases led in a rather straightforward manner to the establishment of another sub-branch of physics that of low-temperature physics. It is, indeed, the case that after the discovery of superconductivity in 1911 and of the various properties of liquid helium below 2.9 degrees K in the early 1930s, research at low temperatures has been almost completely dominated by physicists. It should, however, be noted that this was not the case in the early stages where work was almost wholly devoted to the liquefaction of gases and the investigation of their properties at low temperatures. The most important landmarks of gas liquefaction are situated in a period characterised by the application of thermodynamics and chemical theory and the elaboration of increasingly complex equipment and skills. Chemists were, also, actively involved in early low-temperature research. This paper will attempt to show some aspects of a more general thesis: that the history of low temperature research, and especially the period between the liquefaction of oxygen in 1877 and the liquefaction of helium in 1908, has been an integral part of the history of physical chemistry. It was the period when physical chemistry was articulating its own autonomous language with respect to both physics and chemistry, when it was charting its own research agenda and formulating its own theoretical framework. It was the time when the (sub)disciplinary boundaries were drawn and re-drawn, and these processes had been deeply influenced by the different cultures of physicists and chemists. In this paper, I will try to bring to surface the involvement of the chemists, both in the actual researches in low temperatures as well as in the early days of the International Association of Refrigeration. En col·laboració amb la Residència d'Investigadors (CSIC). Lloc: Auditori de la Residència d’Investigadors, CSIC , 19h. Carrer Hospital 64.