![]() Hobbes ridiculed the air-pump demonstrations, which Boyle had completed in front of the brand new Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Through what we now call experimentation, competing claims to knowledge and authority could be judged without recourse to violence. The stakes were unimaginably high in the midst of violent crises over authority and control in England and on the Continent (both the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War raged during the Hobbes-Boyle debate).īoyle, using a vacuum pump-a seriously cutting-edge technology in those days-was trying to make the case that a radically new form of demonstration promised secure, indisputable knowledge. It pitted Thomas Hobbes, the arch political theorist, against Robert Boyle, a fashionable aristocrat, in a fight about the very meaning and demonstration of certainty. In 17th-century England the existence or non-existence of the vacuum was at the center of one of the greatest controversies of the modern era. ![]() The CRT is technologically fundamental to modern seeing, yet its inner workings depend on something completely invisible: a vacuum. What kind of life did the CRT lead? An extraordinary one, and an extraordinarily long one for a technology integral to an age of obsolescence. What does it mean that we think of the CRT as something with a life-something that was born, lived, died? The obvious play on words conjoins an industrial mythos with a Christian burial rite in a requiem for an object that had, not long before, been the primary screen on which many of us experienced television, video, and computing. “Rust in peace,” ministered the New York Times in its 2009 catalogue of obsolescence for the aughts.
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