Geopolitics & Prussian technical education in the late-eighteenth century

Technical instruction in eighteenth-century Prussia?both military and civilian? faltered for most of the century. In the military, promising technical achievements, such Leonhard Euler?s application of the calculus to Benjamin Robins? ballistics, were accompanied by weak institutional settings for training military engineers, with the result that much of the best military technical training continued to take place by apprenticeship. Civilian technical instruction fared better thanks to the expansion of Prussia. Obtaining control over Prussia?s territorial acquisitions in many respects demanded greater technical expertise than the wars that yielded them. This essay argues for the importance of Prussian territorial expansion from 1742, when Prussia acquired Silesia, to the three Polish partitions in 1772, 1793, and 1795, in shaping Prussian technical instruction in civil engineering. Specifically, the geography of the North European Plain?with its marshes and bogs, lakes and lagoons, and numerous waterways? presented formidable challenges, especially in hydraulic engineering. Field experiences in that region were decisive in shaping Prussian civil engineering practices that, at the end of the century, became the foundation of technical instruction at the Bauakademie, Prussia?s technical school for civil engineering and architecture, established in 1799. The Bauakademie was the earliest predecessor of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin (1879)

Whose Mass is it Anyway? Particle Cosmology and the Objects of Theory

Physicists in different branches of the discipline were puzzled by the problem of mass during the 1950s and 1960s: why do objects have mass? Around the same time, yet working independently, specialists in gravitational studies and in particle theory proposed that mass might arise due to objects’ interactions with a new (and as yet undetected) field. Although the questions they posed and even the answers they provided shared several similarities - and even though both proposals quickly became ‘hot topics’ in their respective subfields - virtually no one discussed one proposal in the light of the other for nearly 20 years. Only after massive, unprecedented changes in pedagogical infrastructure rocked the discipline in the early 1970s did a new generation of physicists begin to see possible links between the Brans-Dicke field and the Higgs field. For the new researchers, trained in different ways than most of their predecessors, the two objects of theory were not only similar - some began to proclaim that they were exactly the same. Charting the histories of these two objects of theory illuminates the complicated institutional and pedagogical factors that helped to produce a new subfield, particle cosmology, which today ranks at the very forefront of modern physics