Silvan S Schweber
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

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Publications (2)11.02 Total impact

  • Article: Science without laws.
    Silvan S Schweber
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    ABSTRACT: During the 1970s, something deeply consequential happened in the cultural, economic, and social relationships between science and technology. Paul Forman has proposed that the abrupt reversal of the culturally ascribed primacy in the science-technology relationship circa 1980 be taken as a demarcation of postmodernity from modernity. Modernity's most basic cultural presuppositions-the superiority of theory to practice, the elevation of the public over the private and that of the disinterested over the interested, and the belief that the means sanctify the ends-were ascribed to science. In postmodernity, science is subsumed under technology, and the status of technology relative to science reflects our pragmatic-utilitarian subordination of means to ends. These cultural changes have resonated with deep epistemological and ontological changes within the sciences themselves, and all these have manifested themselves in universities becoming entrepreneurial, and the consequences thereof. Science Without Laws insightfully illustrates some of the changes within the life and human sciences by analyzing the role played by model systems and case studies.
    Perspectives in biology and medicine 02/2009; 52(1):141-52. · 1.34 Impact Factor
  • Source
    Article: The sources of Schwinger's Green's functions.
    Silvan S Schweber
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    ABSTRACT: Julian Schwinger's development of his Green's functions methods in quantum field theory is placed in historical context. The relation of Schwinger's quantum action principle to Richard Feynman's path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics is reviewed. The nonperturbative character of Schwinger's approach is stressed as well as the ease with which it can be extended to finite temperature situations.
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 06/2005; 102(22):7783-8. · 9.68 Impact Factor

Institutions

  • 2009
    • Harvard University
      • Department of History of Science
      Cambridge, MA, USA
  • 2005
    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
      Cambridge, MA, USA
    • Brandeis University
      Waltham, MA, USA
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