Dorothy Stein: Ada: A Life and a Legacy (1987)

In this engrossing biography, Dorothy Stein strips away the many layers of myth surrounding Ada Lovelace’s reputation as the inventor of the science of computer programming to reveal a story far more dramatic and fascinating than previous accounts have indicated. Working with original sources, Stein clears up a number of puzzles and misinterpretations of Ada’s life and activities.

Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, was the only daughter of the poet Lord Byron and the close friend and associate of a number of the foremost scientific, literary, and artistic figures of the early Victorian period. She enjoys a growing reputation today for her report on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine—considered to be the first computer. Yet Stein shows how the often self-serving Babbage conspired to create the legend, using the Countess to promote his projects and make exaggerated claims for his engine. By placing Lady Lovelace’s report in the social and cultural context in which it was written, she finds that, far from being a clear and masterly exposition of the structure and logic of the computer, it was a rather mystical tract that dwelt on the inventor’s outdated philosophy of mathematics, and his mechanistic view of theology and the workings of capitalist economics.

Ada’s own life is vividly told, often in her own words, as Stein weaves into her narrative excerpts from letters, memoirs, and little-known documents to create an account that is at once black comedy, detective story, psychological drama, and scientific explanation. She examines the barriers and opportunities that Ada faced as she strove to develop her ambitions and search for truths that would free her of that shadow of her mysterious father and her overbearing and manipulative mother.

Stein reveals a turbulent and complex woman who tries to run away, who marries and bears three children, attempts to bury herself in the study of mathematics, and to find herself in a career in music or in writing. Ada corresponds and associates with men as diverse as Dickens, Chadwick, Quetelet, and Wheatstone. She sickens and attempts to find the cause of her malady by exploring the fringes of several sciences. Her interest in the use of electricity to treat nervous disorders involves her in the controversies over mesmerism and phrenology, and turns her from Babbage to Faraday and to Andrew Crosse, the “electrician” whose work served as the model for Frankenstein. With Ada, Stein examines the roots of the fear, fascination, and mystic awe with which we still regard the impact of high technology upon ordinary life.

Publisher MIT Press, 1987
History of Computing Series
ISBN 0262691167, 9780262691161
321 pages

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Paul N. Edwards: A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (2010)

“Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, “sound science.” In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these doubters: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations–even from satellites, which can “see” the whole planet with a single instrument–becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world’s climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere–to measure it, trace its past, and model its future.

Edwards argues that all our knowledge about climate change comes from three kinds of computer models: simulation models of weather and climate; reanalysis models, which recreate climate history from historical weather data; and data models, used to combine and adjust measurements from many different sources. Meteorology creates knowledge through an infrastructure (weather stations and other data platforms) that covers the whole world, making global data. This infrastructure generates information so vast in quantity and so diverse in quality and form that it can be understood only by computer analysis–making data global. Edwards describes the science behind the scientific consensus on climate change, arguing that over the years data and models have converged to create a stable, reliable, and trustworthy basis for the reality of global warming.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2010
Infrastructures Series
ISBN 0262013924, 9780262013925
xxvii+518 pages

Reviews: Noel Castree (American Scientist, 2010), Ronald E. Doel (American Historical Review, 2011), Myles Allen (Nature, 2010), Richard C.J. Somerville (Science, 2011), Gabriele Gramelsberger (Minerva, 2012), McKenzie Wark (White Review, 2014).

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The Rutherford Journal, Vol 1-4, incl. Alan Turing web-book (2005-2012)

The Rutherford Journal publishes invited articles from leading international scholars.

The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
Editor Jack Copeland
Publisher Department of Philosophy, The University of Canterbury, New Zealand
ISSN 1177-1380

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View online (Issue 4: Alan Turing web-book)