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Book Cover
E-book
Author Wise, M. Norton, author

Title Aesthetics, industry, and science : Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society / M. Norton Wise
Published Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Intro; Contents; Introduction; 1. Parade auf dem Opernplatz; 2. Pegasus and the Muses (Museums) of Art, Industry, and Science: Section 1: Altes Museum, University, and Bauschule; 3. Pegasus and the Muses (Museums) of Art, Industry, and Science: Section 2: Gewerbehaus; 4. Modernizing Military Schools: Self- Acting Officers and Instruments; 5. What's in a Line?; 6. The Berlin Physical Society; 7. The Mechanism of Matter: Hermann Helmholtz's Erhaltung der Kraft; 8. ""A Spectacle for the Gods; Epilogue: Kunst-Technik; Acknowledgments; Bibliography; Index
Summary On January 5, 1845, the Prussian Cultural Minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small but growing group--which soon included Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brucke, Werner Siemens, and Hermann von Helmholtz--established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of natural science. How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings succeed in seizing the future? In Aesthetics, Industry, and Science, M. Norton Wise answers these questions not simply from a technical perspective of theories and practices but with a broader cultural view of what was happening in Berlin at the time. He emphasizes in particular how rapid industrial development, military modernization, and the neoclassical aesthetics of contemporary art informed the ways in which these young men thought. Wise argues that aesthetic sensibility and material aspiration in this period were intimately linked, and he uses these two themes for a final reappraisal of Helmholtz's early work. Anyone interested in modern German cultural history, or the history of nineteenth-century German science, will be drawn to this landmark book
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Helmholtz, Hermann von, 1821-1894.
SUBJECT Helmholtz, Hermann von, 1821-1894
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 1821-1894 fast
Helmholtz, Hermann von 1821-1894 gnd
Subject Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin.
SUBJECT Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin
Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin fast
Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. gnd
Subject Science -- Germany -- Prussia -- History -- 19th century
Science -- history
History, 19th Century
33.01 history of physics.
SCIENCE -- History.
Science
SUBJECT Germany
Prussia https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/D055787
Subject Germany -- Prussia
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780226531496
022653149X