Positioning the History of Science ppt

Thesetensions as well as several others are also reflected in the views of the authors.The essays in this volume address some of the major questions presentlyconcerning the community of

Positioning the History of Science

BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Editors

ROBERT S COHEN, Boston University JÜRGEN RENN, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

KOSTAS GAVROGLU, University of Athens

Editorial Advisory Board

THOMAS F GLICK, Boston University ADOLF GRÜNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh

SYLVAN S SCHWEBER, Brandeis University

JOHN J STACHEL, Boston University MARX W WARTOFSKY†, (Editor 1960–1997)

VOLUME 248

POSITIONING THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Edited by

Kostas Gavroglu,

University of Athens, Greece

andJürgen Renn

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,

Germany

A C.I.P Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

www.springer.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved

© 2007 Springer

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exceptionnl

of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed

on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Positioning the History of Science

Challenges in Writing About Twentieth Century East Asian Physicists

Why Should Scientists Become Historians?

From the Social to the Moral to the Spiritual: The Postmodern Exaltation

of the History of Science

Between Science and History

The Search for Autonomy in History of Science

Discarding Dichotomies, Creating Community:

Sam Schweber and Darwin Studies

Public Participation and Industrial Technoscience Today:

The difficult question of accountability

Table of Contents vii

Science As History

Postscript

KOSTAS GAVROGLU AND JÜRGEN RENN

POSITIONING THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

The present volume, compiled in honor of an outstanding historian of science,physicist and exceptional human being, Sam Schweber, is unique in assembling

a broad spectrum of positions on the history of science by some of its leadingrepresentatives Readers will find it illuminating to learn how prominent authorsjudge the current status and the future perspectives of their field Students will findthis volume helpful as a guide in a fragmented field that continues to be dominated

by idiosyncratic expertise and still lacks a methodical canon The essays werewritten in response to our invitation to explicate the views of the authors concerningthe state of the history of science today and the issues we felt are related to itsfuture Although not all of the scholars whom we asked to write have contributed

an essay, this volume can nevertheless be considered as a rather comprehensivesurvey of the present state of the history of science All of the papers collectedhere reflect in one way or another the strong influence Sam Schweber has exertedduring the past decades in his gentle way on the history of science as well as on thelives of many of its protagonists worldwide All who have had the opportunity ofencountering him have benefited from his advice, benevolence and friendship SamSchweber’s intellectual taste, his passion for knowledge and his erudition are allencompassing It therefore seemed fitting to honor him with a collection of essays

of comparable breadth; nothing less would suffice

The history of science, like any other established academic discipline, is subject

to tensions that are well reflected in the papers presented here Whether thesefunction as a driving force for its future development or risk tearing it asunder may

be judged differently by different readers, and will in any case remain a topic to bedebated among historians of science Principal among these tensions is that betweenhistory and science Both scientist and historian, Sam Schweber has experienced thistension, even embodied it and has shown us through his life’s work how to resolve

it in a productive way This tension, so essential for anyone entering the history

of science, which encompasses different interests, cultural values, historiographicalperspectives and methods, is touched upon in many of the essays Another tension

is that between the focus on content and on context, responsible for much of theacrimony presently prevailing in our field Should a historian of science concentrate

on what makes science a human enterprise, that is pomp, power, passion andcircumstance, or rather on what makes science unique among all human enterprises,that is, its historically situated quest for knowledge? Once again, in his work, Samhas shown ways to successfully transform this tension into a medium of deep

K Gavroglu and J Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, 1–5.

© 2007 Springer.

historical insights Yet, that tension is still with us and continues to shape currentintellectual debates and institutional struggles No wonder then that the issuessurrounding this particular tension are a prevailing topic of many of the papersincluded in this volume Other tensions are perhaps less prominent but no lessvital, for instance that between collaborative ventures in the history of science andindividual intellectual pursuits or between a more methodologically-oriented history

of science and an approach governed by personal taste and connoisseurship, orthat between a history of science focused on the European and American traditionsand a global history of knowledge covering also non-European traditions Thesetensions as well as several others are also reflected in the views of the authors.The essays in this volume address some of the major questions presentlyconcerning the community of historians of science, such as the question as to howscience has gone through dramatic transformations in recent decades and what thischange means for doing history, or the question of how history of science as aninterdisciplinary discipline has changed For instance, have some of the themes thatwere so prominent in the research agendas of historians of science in the relativelyrecent past actually become themes without a future? What has been the outcomefor historians of science of more than two decades of historiographical controversieswith, at times, strong philosophical and ideological contentions? What possiblesyntheses are we envisaging for the not so distant future? And, most importantly,

to what extent have the range and content of questions to be examined within, say,the coming decade, been re-defined by these controversies?

Historians of science were always very sensitive and aware of the changeshappening in science and the essays in this volume reflect this awareness Some

of them explicitly address the question of whether we are facing the emergence of

a new paradigm of science Several ways of characterizing such a new paradigmare being explored: the end of reductionism, the expanding role of techno-scienceand industrialized science comprising a tendency towards the privatization andcommercialization of knowledge, the changing role of the sciences in the structure

of universities, but also the emergence of a new epistemology of processes oflearning and evaluation and the increasing role of historical explanations in thenatural sciences

Naturally, the changes in science mentioned above constitute major challengesfor the history of science demanding new ways of dealing with its historical objects.Even the sheer smallness of the number of historians of science when set intorelation to the vastness of scientific activities represents such a challenge Also,

in an age of industrialized science, moral reflections as they have been part ofsome of the best scholarly work in the history of science including that of SamSchweber, can no longer be causes championed by individual scientists, whatevertheir prestige Whole communities of scientists are obliged to become aware ofthe wider consequences of their work and of the very character of what it is theyare producing At the same time, this need for awareness represents an importantchallenge for the community of historians of science, and can be addressed only

by enlarging the interface between science and the history of science But can thisinterface be really enlarged without, at the same time, ensuring that historians ofscience are capable of speaking the same language as the scientists themselves?

As a matter of fact, precisely because of the pluralism at every level in the history

of science, characteristic of almost every established academic discipline, there isthe real danger that typical core activities of the history of science such as detailedreconstructions of technical arguments, biographical accounts, and other genres inwhich scientist-historians such as Sam Schweber have excelled, may have no future.Several essays express concern about what seems to be a growing consensus amongthe younger generation that dealing with the technical and cognitive dimensions ofscience has largely become obsolete

After more than a century, the history of science is still in search of a wideraudience, of its canons, its shared questions and in many cases of its institu-tional autonomy In any case, the history of science today has turned out to bedramatically different from what its founding fathers imagined Its developmenthas been marked by disappointments as well as contributions through which wecame to understand the extreme complexity of scientific developments While ithas become ever more clear how cognitive, social, ideological and political factorsinteract in the development of science, the grand dream of intellectual synthesis hasremained unfulfilled Institutional diversity still prevails, scientists have after all notbecome the sought for allies of the historians of science; the dominance of idiosyn-cratic expertise has often prevented focusing on larger questions relevant to wideraudiences, yet the subject itself has been solidly established and both scientists andhistorians appear (alas, very slowly) to be less indifferent to our pursuits Though,

on the whole, scientists still think of historians of science as having a “soft” take

on science and historians think of our work as hopelessly technical for their skills,there are progressively more scientists and historians who have actually come intodirect contact with the relevant scholarship in the history of science

The methodological debates of the last 20 years have deeply split the field andpartisan views have done a disservice to all those who were entering the field Onthe other hand, such controversies underlined the maturity of the field itself, andlooking at these controversies, now that passions seem to have somewhat subsided,gives reason for hope Extreme believers and fundamentalist convictions, of anycreed, appear to have been marginalized The sensitivity for the complementaryrelationship between content and context has been increased The emergence ofmajor institutions has stabilized the field without inhibiting the positive effects ofits institutional and disciplinary biodiversity The fact that the history of science

has become not only faute de mieux, but by inner necessity a multidisciplinary field

is being recognized more and more

There are at least two aspects within history of science that have expressedthe new dynamics of the discipline The first is the emerging communities ofhistorians of science in countries where most of the related works for many

years could not overcome an antiquarian problematique Members of the emerging

communities – from Latin America to countries at the European periphery to Korea –are recasting what have often, and for many years, been local topics in ways thatare being linked to contemporary historiography of science New areas of researchare being successfully investigated; there are dynamic institutional initiatives andpromising challenges in the charting of new research agendas

The second aspect is the amazing impact of the information revolution and theintroduction of electronic media for the way the history of science is being pursued

In particular, new possibilities have emerged for crossing boundaries of ization imposed by a fragmented landscape of sources, which are distributed overarchives, libraries, and museums, but can now be united in virtual working spaces forthe history of science Also the traditional separation between theoretically-orientedsurveys and source-oriented case studies can now be overcome by integrating inter-pretations and sources within the electronic medium, where footnotes referring tosources located a continent away can now be turned into links to digital libraries just

special-a mere click special-awspecial-ay But the respecial-alizspecial-ation of this vision presupposes the special-avspecial-ailspecial-ability ofand free access to the sources themselves, the vast number of archival collections,

of instruments and of old issues of scientific journals that give rise to unimaginableresearch opportunities as well as to totally new possibilities in the teaching ofhistory of science The number and quality of the digitization processes presentlyundertaken by museums, research institutes and universities are impressive but willultimately come to fruition only if the temptation to commercialize cultural heritage

is withstood and historians join forces with the scientists that have made the openaccess movement such a success

From the multi-faceted character of research and education in the history ofscience, some qualities have emerged which will last as criteria for work, asexemplified by the contributions of Sam Schweber To these criteria every disci-pline that has been over time interrelated with the history of science has contributed

a number of values of its own From the essays in this volume, what clearlyemerges is the ‘moral integration’ of the history of science, which has been oftenoverlooked due to its controversies There clearly is a common engagement in thegoal among historians of science of quite different types, to contribute to a greaterreflectiveness about science, to highlight the moral and edifying aspects of science,

to remind us that social choices are at the core of science and to stress the communalaspects of the history of science, including the need for the public accessibility

of knowledge A related moral issue emerging as a common denominator is thestriving for the accountability of science with regard to society and the realizationthat such accountability also needs structures, including an institutional role for thehistory of science This may also be an argument for bringing the scientist backinto the history of science: as science has to face history, scientists have to facehistorians of science

The values mentioned above together with issues of style, such as modesty,tolerance, tact and taste – which have always been the hallmark of excellent contri-butions to the history of science – can only be upheld if the community is prepared

Positioning the History of Science 5

to stand up for its principles under the new challenges described above Growingspecialization and industrialization of science will make ever-higher demands onspaces for multi-disciplinary autonomous work, not hiding in intellectual nichesand shying away from the burning issues that are also relevant to society Theprivatization of knowledge makes it necessary that historians of science add theirvoices in order to defend and secure knowledge in the public domain, strugglingfor public access to scientific knowledge The globalization of knowledge makes

it necessary to take into account the interests and perspectives of the emergingcommunities of historians of science addressing the challenges of cultural diversity.There can be no doubt that the way toward the future exemplified by the works

of Sam Schweber will give encouragement and enlightenment to the brave whoaddress these challenges

BABAK ASHRAFI

BIG HISTORY?

Historians have described extensively the dramatic changes in the organization ofphysics research during the twentieth century To what extent do these changesforeshadow changes in the organization of history of physics?

In the afterword of the collection of essays in Big Science: The Growth of Large

Scale Research,1Bruce Hevly summarized some of the new features of large-scaleresearch that arose in physics Big Science, he wrote, was more than just an increase

in relative or absolute size of science projects or scientific institutions Other factorsinclude the increased concentration of resources in fewer research centers, increasedworkforce specialization, increased attachment of social and political significance

to scientific projects Furthermore, new forms of relationships have arisen betweenscience and technology, as well as new kinds of interactions between scientistsand engineers and the military For the historian, Hevly observed, studying bigscience requires renewed attention to institutional contexts and the importance ofcollaborative research.2Opinions vary as to whether these changes occurred duringand after World War II, or throughout the twentieth century, or have always beenoccurring

In any of these three periodizations, several questions arise about possiblerelations between changes in the practice or organization of physics and history ofphysics As Hevly notes, “History, like physics at the turn of the century, has beenseen as essentially the province of individual researchers, perhaps working at timeswith mentors and apprentices.” But he claims, “for many historians the traditionalsetting is beginning to change.”3 Hevly called on historians to reflect further onthese changes Drawing out the analogy in the increase in sponsored research, thebeginnings of change from a mentor-apprentice organization to larger collaborativestructures and the increasing complexity in the objects of study, Hevly concludesthat, “Scholars engaged in such projects [history of recent science] should remainsensitive to the impact of these arrangements on our own work – arrangements thatcould influence the choice of topics, modes of presentation and training of students

We historians should not imagine that we are any more free of our own complexinstitutional and cultural contexts than are the scientists and engineers.”4

1 Galison, Peter and Bruce Hevly, eds., Big Science, The Growth of Large-Scale Research Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1992.

Sam Schweber has been one of the historians examining changes in the culturaland institutional contexts of physics and how physics went from being a craft ofindividuals to a profession involving large-scale organizations These transforma-tions are interesting in their own right, and they may also foreshadow the future ofhistory of science For example, in his “The Empiricist Temper Regnant: Theoreticalphysics in the United States 1920–1950,”5 Schweber examined transformations

in the institutional relationships between experimentalists and theorists He alsocontrasted such relationships in America with those in Europe Schweber observedthat the European physicists who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s and1940s did not so much remake American physics as become participants in changesthat were already well underway or in place, changes resulting in a mutual transfor-mation of American physics and immigrant physicists The ingredients comprisingthis transformation were the following: the increasing complexity of the topics

of research, including the advent of quantum mechanics and the rise of atomicand nuclear physics; the rapidly changing institutional setting, including the largesize and rapid growth of American physics departments; and American physicists’prevailing habits of pragmatism and empiricism that encouraged theorists to betterintegrate their work with that of experimentalists

Schweber’s “The Mutual Embrace of Science and the Military: ONR and theGrowth of Physics in the United States after World War II”6describes the efforts tomove the large-scale structures developed for doing war-time research into a postwarenvironment In this article, as in the “Empiricist Temper Regnant,” Schweberexamined the interplay between changes in the personal, institutional and politicalspheres He described also physicists’ loss of (their perception of) control over theirown research as their dependence on sponsored research grew

In a third article, “Big Science in Context: Cornell and MIT,” which was

Schweber’s contribution to the volume Big Science, he contrasted the attempts of

two research universities to reconcile their different ideologies of basic or appliedscience with the broader interests and trends that drove sponsored research in theUnited States during and after World War II

We can believe that the complexity of Big Science, the increase of sponsoredresearch, and impending challenges to historians’ dearly held ideologies aboutthemselves present new obstacles But historians have faced new obstacles before.The nature and volume of sources, for example, have been changing all along, andhistorians have developed new skills to cope Perfectly familiar responses, such asproducing more historians in larger departments with more funding, may sufficethis time as well If historians could multiply as quickly as scientists, then wecould create more case studies and more biographies Perhaps keeping up with the

5 Schweber, Silvan S “The Empiricist Temper Regnant: Theoretical Physics in the United States,

1920–1950.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17 (1986): 55–98.

6 Mendelsohn, Everett, Merritt Roe Smith, and Peter Weingart, eds., Science, Technology and the

Military, pp 3–45 Sociology of Sciences Yearbook, 1988 Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1988.

growth in the scientific community is not as easily done as said Nor is it clearthat more individual studies will lead to more or better historical insight If, onthe other hand, the changes occurring in science and history of science reallyare deeper than just an increase in scale, then historians should consider how toenhance their effectiveness in the new environment, regardless of the size of thecommunities involved Greater effectiveness could involve refining and refocusinghistorical questions, using technology like every other sector of society to increaseproductivity, and working together more often, more closely, and more effectively.There are several examples of attempts to address the obstacles that Big Science

presents to historians In 1992, a large international collaboration published Out

of the Crystal Maze,7 a study of the history of solid state physics The project isinteresting both for its pioneering work on the history of solid state physics andfor its scale of collaboration, which is so rare in the history of science, or thehumanities more generally for that matter The project was undertaken becausethe investigators, both historians and scientists, felt that the topic of their interest

is “huge and varied and lacks the unifying features beloved of historians.”8 Theyembarked upon a collaboration because “given the breadth and complexity ofsolid-state physics, progress in the traditional mode of research would be painfullyslow.” The participants held meetings to discuss how to work together, which

is common in other disciplines The fact that such organization does not happenautomatically or by accident seems to be a lesson often relearned The fact thateffective collaborations need to be planned and actively organized is worth notinghere because humanists, who spend so much time studying how other communitiesorganize, seem to be such determined individualists

In contrast with historians, those in allied professions, such as archivists and curators,are more familiar with collaborative endeavors One way for historians to learn how toorganize more effectively would be to see how these allies have organized themselves

to explore some of the features of Big Science that are of mutual interest For example,

in 2001, the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics reportedthe results of a ten year study of documentation practices in multi-institutional collabo-rations.9This study was motivated by the observation that as multi-institutional collab-orations are becoming more common, their archives might be scattered or destroyed.Although this study was about documentation rather than history and resulted inpublications in sociology journals, it is interesting for historians because it was anattempt to address one of the aspects of the rise of Big Science It is also interesting

as a collaboration involving, in part, historians of physics The study was aimed atidentifying the patterns of collaboration, defining the scope of the documentation

7 Hoddeson, Lillian, Ernest Braun, Jürgen Teichmann, and Spencer Weart, eds., Out of the Crystal

Maze, Chapters from the History of Solid-State Physics New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

8 Ibid, viii.

9 Warnow-Blewett, Joan, Joel Genuth and Spencer Weart, AIP Study of Multi-Institutional

Collabora-tions: Final Report College Park: American Institute of Physics, 2001.

problems, working with institutional archivists to locate and preserve records, testing proposed solutions, and making recommendations about documentation Theinvestigators prepared a census of collaborations; interviewed hundreds of partic-ipants in those collaborations including those with “special perspectives,” such aswomen and minorities, as well as pivotal individuals such as directors and programofficers; conducted a qualitative analysis of these interviews; and conducted focusedcase studies of a few collaborations

field-The study itself had some of the features that mark Big Science projects field-Therewere five sponsors, and several more institutions that were the sites of multi-institutional collaborations, such as Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, FermiNational Accelerator Laboratory and Brookhaven, provided support of variouskinds The researchers consisted of eight Center staff and six main outside consul-tants There was a working group for each of the three stages of the study, numbering

27, 33 and 19 members, respectively The members of the working groups werescientists, historians, archivists and sociologists drawn from academia, businessand government Each working group met once or twice a year, but each of themembers was expected to respond individually to queries and requests for advice.The working groups designed the project’s methodology and reviewed its findingsand recommendations Those findings continue to influence the Center in its efforts

to preserve the archives of physics and physicists

The final example of a project addressing obstacles that historians face whenstudying large and sometimes widely dispersed projects with many participantsgenerating vast archives in various media is one that involved the preservation

of archival materials as well as the production of historical narratives In 2000,Schweber joined a collaborative Web-based project called the History of RecentScience and Technology Project (HRST), for which I served as one of the historiansand the project manager This project was commissioned by the Alfred P SloanFoundation (with matching support provided by the Dibner Fund) as one of a range

of experiments in the history of recent science and technology We attempted tofoster collaborative teams of historians, encourage collaborations between historiansand the scientists and engineers involved in the projects we wished to study, andused Web-based tools to support these collaborations We developed a suite ofdatabase-backed Web applications to extend the reach of historians across large anddispersed formations and to help them design and establish flexible, interdisciplinarycollaborations for collecting and annotating digital archives

We faced technical, historiographic and organizational problems in HRST Thetechnical problems were straightforward to address The historiographic issues aboutthe use and reliability of evidence, narratives of recent science and collaborationswith the subjects of our studies are more interesting But here too, we face questions

to more than a temporary change – if that – in how historians work The features

of Big Science have not translated well to history of science Specialization of theworkforce in history has been on topics such as the study of particular periods ordisciplines, rather than on skill sets that could be applied to various topics This is

reflected, for example, in the structure of Out of the Crystal Maze Collaboration

has been much less common among historians than among museum curators orarchivists and librarians Individual historians of science and technology are stillnot inclined to move to organizational models beyond scholar-and-assistant, andthe institutions that house historians are not set up to facilitate, support and rewardcollaborations One of the lessons of the HRST project was how highly historiansvalue their intellectual and professional individuality and how difficult it currently

is for historians’ institutions to sustain collaborative projects

There is a deeper issue underlying these problems Almost no consensus exists

on a shared set of questions or research approaches among historians of science.Scholars and their readers would be justified in celebrating the resulting diversity

of perspectives, but they should also acknowledge the resulting obstacles to orative organization We might conclude from this robust individualism that thehistory of science and perhaps the humanities in general, will remain almost exclu-sively solitary endeavors Or historians may yet be pushed by their sponsors orpulled by their sources into doing more collaborative larger-scale work Alas, itseems, much kicking and screaming will ensue

collab-Center for History of Physics

American Institute of Physics

College Park, Maryland

10 Söderqvist, Thomas, ed., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, Studies in

the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, v 4 Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1997.

STEPHEN G BRUSH

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE STUDY OF SCIENCE

Recently, an education columnist in the Washington Post wrote that students should

be given some idea of “how the various disciplines fit together (the history ofscience, the mathematics of sport…)”.1 This reminded me once again of the greatpotential audience for our field In an age when education seems to be dominated

by relentless specialization and the testing of factual knowledge, many teachers,parents and other citizens are fascinated by the Big Questions: What is the originand structure of the universe? Are science and religion compatible? Did humansevolve from simpler organisms? Is human behavior determined by genes or culture?Why did European civilization come to dominate the world after the fifeteenthcentury? Do science and society influence each other?

If historians of science do not give intelligible answers to these questions,someone else will In fact, others already have done so In the general sciencesection of any comprehensive bookstore you will find many books that seem to usethe history of science to tell fascinating stories about how we arrived at our presentunderstanding of the world and the lively controversies along the way Plays about

physicists and mathematicians (Copenhagen, QED, Proof) have been popular The

authors of these works are often very good writers and some of them even read ourpublications However, few of them are historians of science in the modern sense.They repeat old myths and stereotypes about the history of science without makingthe effort to study original sources and do serious research in archives

Historians of science often write more accurate and interesting accounts than thetraditional stories but their language should appeal more effectively to students andthe public For many years, historians of science were reluctant to write textbooksand popularizations, perhaps because they realized how much research needed

to be done to get past the myths or because they feared that addressing issues

of current interest would legitimize the much-maligned “whig” interpretation ofhistory Recently however, there has been a revival of good expository writing for

a wide audience: several comprehensive textbooks and short monographs, readableand reliable, are now available

1 Karin Chenoweth, “Homeroom: Taking the Measure of Magnet’s Attractions,” Washington Post,

Prince George’s Extra (15 November 2001), p 6.

The first four paragraphs of this article are taken from “A Wider Audience for History of

Science” in the American Institute of Physics Center for History of Physics Newsletter, 34, no.

1 (Spring 2002), p 4, reprinted by permission of the American Institute of Physics I have also incorporated material from my Keynote Lecture, “Different Directions in the History of Physics in the 1990s” presented at the Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of the Physical Sciences, College Park, Maryland, 17 September 1999.

K Gavroglu and J Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, 13–25.

© 2007 Springer.

In science education, the historical approach can no longer be considered just

a distraction that takes time away from learning “real science” On the contrary,research done on the Project Physics course for high schools showed that thishistorically-oriented text, in combination with simulations of the experiments done

by Galileo and other great scientists, enhanced students’ understanding of the nature

of science while preparing them to do as well on standardized tests of subject-matter

as students taking a traditional course.2

Nor is there necessarily any conflict for a historian of science, between researchand educational or popularizing activities At least in my own case, the effort

to present an intelligible and accurate view of science to undergraduate studentsinspired me to undertake new research projects, and the results of those projectswere directly incorporated into my teaching

The purpose of this essay is not to persuade historians to put more effort intoteaching undergraduates or to write more books and articles for the public Instead, it

is to argue that more attention to the historical questions that interest non-historianswould stimulate research and analysis that is beneficial to us as professional histo-rians of science The problems we have been addressing during the last two or threedecades are important and worth studying, but it is time to look at other kinds ofproblems that have been neglected

I am not alone in my dissatisfaction with the present state of the discipline butothers have rather different reasons for being dissatisfed Let us begin with a recentassessment of the state of our field, as seen by one eminent practitioner, in a review

of Jan Golinski’s book Making Natural Knowledge:3

“The place of the history of science in the academy (in the United States as well as elsewhere, save perhaps for Holland) is appalling Only a few universities have free- standing departments; where these are lacking, history departments may employ one or two professors in this area Historians, by trade, know “nothing about science.” Thus, although we have learned quite a lot about women and workers, wars, political movements and other important aspects of ordinary life, science – the muscle of twentieth-century North America – has been understudied and poorly understood.

And for a number of reasons Chief among them is a prevailing epistemology that has lent privileged status to science as pure and objective, largely unsullied by the mess

of human subjectivities Jan Golinski explains how constructivism, which he defines

as a methodology that “directs attention to the role of human beings, as social actors,

in the making of scientific knowledge” (p 6), has exploded this foundational belief Constructivism has historicized science and in so doing has called for analysis of all its associated categories: discovery, evidence, argument, experiment, expert, laboratory,

2 See my article “History of Science and Science Education,” in Scientific Literacy Papers: A Journal

of Research in Science, Education and the Public (Oxford), Summer 1987, pp 75–87; reprinted

in Teaching the History of Science, edited by M Shortland & A Warwick (Oxford: The British Society for the History of Science/Blackwell, 1989), 54–66 and in Interchange: A Quarterly Review

of Education (Toronto), 20, no 2 (1989): 60–70 The success of the journal Science & Education: Contributions from History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science and Education (Kluwer, volume

12 published in 2003) documents the widespread international interest and activity in this enterprise.

3 Review by Londa Schiebinger in American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1554–1555.

Suggestions for the Study of Science 15

instrument, image, replication and law The heat of the current “science wars” – those unproductive tussles between scientists and their critics – reflects perhaps the success of the last thirty years of science studies.

This quotation raises some interesting questions Is the pitiful state of history ofscience worse than it was 30 years ago, and is this despite or because of the

“success” of constructivist science studies? Is constructivism the only acceptableway to “historicize science,” and is it in fact the dominant trend in history of science

at present? If the two sides in the science wars are identified as “scientists and theircritics” does that mean that constructivists are really anti-science, as some scientistsclaim and many constructivists indignantly deny?

Whatever may be the state of history of science as a whole, research in the history

of physical science is flourishing and highly regarded by scientists One reason

for this relative success is that physicists, chemists, astronomers and geologistshave strongly supported historical research through their societies (for example, theCenter for History of Physics, financed partly from the revenues of physics journals)and journals (one can publish historical articles not only in the relatively new

Physics in Perspective but also in the well-established Physics Today and Reviews

of Modern Physics) Historical sessions at meetings of these societies attract large

audiences Authors whose primary training is in science publish in professionalhistory of science journals, hold professorships in university departments of history

or history of science and win prizes offered by history of science societies Thus,the premise that there is some inherent hostility between scientists and historians iscertainly not universally valid

I begin by describing some trends in research on the history of science; onlyone of them, and not the most popular in the 1990s, is constructivism Two otherapproaches, which I call “modernism” and “contextualism,” dominate the publica-tions I am familiar with

Next, I propose a couple of unsolved problems that should, in my opinion, providefruitful research opportunities in the twenty-first century (although historians ofscience now seem reluctant to tackle them): explaining the Scientific Revolutionand elucidating the “nature of science” Finally, I mention a topic we already know

a lot about but have not made into a coherent theme: the role of mathematics in theintroduction of new ideas about the physical world

MODERNISM, CONTEXTUALISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM

Thirty or forty years ago one could clearly distinguish between publications byscientists, which were generally internalist and whiggish, and works by histo-rians, which were more likely to be externalist and contextual In fact, historiansproclaimed their rejection of the “whig interpretation of the history of science” todemonstrate their independence from the scientific community they were studying,while scientists simply ignored what historians were writing about them Sincethen the two groups have moved much closer together and their approaches can be

16 Stephen G Brush

regarded as complementary rather than antagonistic At the same time, scholars fromother disciplines – sociology, women’s studies and literary criticism to mention onlythree – have become interested in the history of science from their own perspec-tives and their work has greatly enriched the history of science by introducing newquestions, methods and sources

Lacking a generally-accepted term, I have used the term “Modernist” for thesuccessor to the old whig internalist history; it may be considered “presentist” in its

choice of subjects, but is no longer whiggish in its treatment of those subjects The

Modernist is still interested in long-term trends, revolutions and the role of ideas likecontinuity, atoms, force, progress, etc., in early as well as modern science However, thefocus is on the development of the science itself, with the technical details explained in

a way that engages the attention of experts as well as general readers Sam Schweber’s

magnificent history of quantum electrodynamics (QED, 1994) is a good example

of a Modernist history, although he has also written in the Contextualist mode

“Contextual” is a familiar term for the analysis of science in relation to otherfactors (social, institutional, economic, political, psychological, etc.) pertaining to

a particular time and place; it is the successor to the old “externalist” approach,having been enriched by much greater attention to the technical aspects of thescience However, it is more limited to particular times and places (thus giving rise

to the complaint that the “Big Picture” is ignored) Contextualism is not the same

as “Social Construction,” though there is obviously some overlap between the two:both may use the same kind of evidence but interpret it with different assumptions.The Contextualist, like the Modernist, assumes that scientists are discovering factsand laws that correspond at least approximately to some reality in the physical world;the Social Constructionist does not Among other approaches are the “Artistic”(studies that emphasize the role of visual presentation, musical harmony or aestheticfactors in the development of science) and the “Feminist/postcolonial” (studiesthat discuss the development of science from the perspective of disadvantagedgroups such as women, ethnic or racial minorities and third world populations)

I am especially interested in “Philosophical” approaches that analyse phenomenasuch as the acceptance or rejection of theories in terms of philosophical criteria(e.g., testing of novel predictions)

Most professional research in the history of science in the past couple of decadeshas been done in the Modernist or Contextualist mode Social Construction, despitethe large amount of publicity it has received and its apparently widespread influencewithin the larger community of Science and Technology Studies (STS), is found

in only a small number of publications This may reflect its faddish character:

by now most of the founders of Social Constructionism have either rejected orsubstantially modified their original radical positions.4The other three approaches

4 Thomas S Kuhn, whose famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions inspired many of the Social

Constructionists, explicitly rejected their work in “Reflections on Receiving the John Desmond

Bernal Award,” 4S Review 1, no 4 (1983): 26–30 and in The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy

of Science (Cambridge, MA: Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, 1992).

Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, whose book Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific

(artistic, feminist/postcolonial and philosophical) are also sparsely represented inthe general history of science journals, though they flourish in specialized journals.Another dimension is the subject-matter studied by historians of science A glance

at the contents of a journal like Isis shows that “science” does not usually include mathematics, technology or medicine (By contrast, the scope of Isis in its early years or of Social Studies of Science currently, seems much broader.) I think this

contraction of our field has been umfortunate; a historian of science should not have

to seek out specialized journals on history of mathematics, technology or medicine

to learn about the relevance of those subjects to physics, chemistry and biology

EXPLAINING THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

To me the most important question in the history of science is “why did theScientific Revolution happen in Europe in the 17th century”? It is also one thatundergraduates find fascinating, judging by class discussions and their choice oftopics for an assigned essay

Many factors have been proposed: social/economic/religious conditions in Europe

in the 15th and sixteenth centuries, recovery of ancient Greek science and matics, Humanism, the “natural law” concept, geographical discoveries, etc Buthow can we determine which of these factors is important, necessary or sufficient

mathe-Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979) is still a canonical text of the movement, pointedly omitted

the word “social” in the subtitle of their second edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) and Latour himself elaborated his view that STS based on Social Constructionism is

obsolete, in “One More Turn after the Social Turn,” in The Social Dimensions of Science, edited

by E McMullin, pp 272–94 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992) Harry M Collins first reduced his “relativism” from an ontological to a methodological position [compare

“Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism,” Social Studies of Science 11 (1981): 3–10

on p 3 with “Son of Seven Sexes: The Social Destruction of a Physical Phenomenon,” ibid 11

(1981): 33–62, on p 54]; he now seems to have abandoned it completely, in his article with

Robert Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience,” ibid.

32 (2002): 235–96, on pp 239, 240 David Bloor, founder of the social constructionist “Strong Program,” later admitted that this program seems to have been forgotten [“Remember the Strong

Program?” Science, Technology & Human Values 22 (1997): 373–85] and, with his colleagues,

explicitly rejected the radical anti-realism of other sociologists [Barry Barnes, David Bloor & John

Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996,

pp 76–77, 87] Andrew Pickering, in response to severe criticism by philosophers of his book

Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1984), did not defend it but changed his position in a way that seems to me to water down

Social Constructionism [“Knowledge, Practice, and Mere Construction,” Social Studies of Science

20 (1990): 682–729; The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1995)].

Challenged by Stephen Cole to give just one example in which established knowledge had been socially constructed, Bloor cited Andrew Warwick’s study of the reception of relativity theory at Cambridge University; however, this is not very convincing since Warwick covered only the period

up to 1911, when the theory had not yet become established knowledge and (as often happens

in research at the frontiers) there are different views about what the theory actually means See

S G Brush, “Why Was Relativity Accepted”? Physics in Perspective 1 (1999): 184–214.

on the basis of only one historical event? To do that we must analyze other tions where some but not all of those factors were present, just as Conrad Russelltried to eliminate proposed causes of the English Revolution by studying an earlier

situa-period in English history when that Revolution didn’t happen.5

In particular, you cannot plausibly explain why the Scientific Revolution did

happen in Europe in the seventeenth century – what has been called “The Grand

Question” – unless you try to explain why it didn’t happen in other places where a

very high level of science (and technology) had been reached earlier The leadingcandidates are Islam and China As Raymond Martin argued, we can learn somethingabout historical causation by studying counterexamples.6 But only a handful ofhistorians of science – notably Joseph Needham and H Floris Cohen – haveseriously considered the question in this way

One must deal with a set of questions that many historians do not want to discuss,for two reasons First, they tend to rule out hypothetical questions (why somethingdid not happen) as a matter of principle – “that’s not history” Cohen complains that

“quite a few scholars have indeed denied flatly” that the question “makes sense.”7Second, historians deem it offensive to ask why another civilization “failed” toachieve what the West did Doesn’t that presume that the West succeeded and theothers somehow took a wrong turn?

The biologist Jared Diamond dared to tackle the larger question: why didEuropean civilization dominate the rest of the world after the fifeteenth century? In

so doing, of course, he was careful not to insult the people who lost power, wealth

and their lives to the Europeans The commercial success of his book Guns, Germs

and Steel8suggests that there is a popular demand for explanations of major events

in history However, in this case the excuse “that’s not history” is unconvincing,since general historians (unlike historians of science) do regard this as a legitimatequestion, suitable for discussion in a professional journal as well as in a magazineedited for a broader audience.9

There is a small amount of historical analysis directed toward The Grand

Question; some of it is summarized in Floris Cohen’s historiographic book on The

Scientific Revolution But when I decided to include the topic in my undergraduate

course, I could not find any general books by historians of science suitable forstudents In fact, it is shunned by the handful of good textbooks on science and

5 Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990) See my article “Why Did (or Didn’t) it Happen? “Historically Speaking 4, no 5 (June 2003): 20–21, and the letter to the editor about this article by Roger L Williams, with my reply, ibid 5, no 1 (September

2003), 49–50.

6 Raymond Martin, “Historical Counterexamples and Sufficient Causes,” Mind 88 (1979): 59–73.

7 H Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (University of Chicago

Press, 1994), 381.

8 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1998).

9 Gale Stokes, “The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories,” American

Historical Review 106 (2001): 508–25; “Why the West? The Unsettled Question of Europe’s

Ascendancy,” Lingua Franca 11, no 8 (November 2001): 30–38.

technology in world history, as well as by books on the Scientific Revolution One

of the best such books in the first category calls the question “illicit” – “foreign tothe historical enterprise and not one subject to historical analysis.” So I have had

to use a book by a sociologist, Toby Huff’s The Rise of Early Modern Science:

Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge University Press, 1993), which is useful

but apparently not based on research using original sources.10

The challenge to historians of science is: if you do not provide a satisfactoryexplanation of why the Scientific Revolution happened in seventeenth centuryEurope but not at another time and place, someone else will do it.11My thesis isthat if you do undertake to explain why an event happened by invoking certaincauses, you should be willing to back up your argument by discussing counterex-amples – other situations in which some of those causes were present but theevent did not happen Otherwise you cannot claim that your explanation is satis-factory Although the task may involve more theoretical reasoning than historians

find congenial, it does not mean that the historian has to be scientific, either in the

sense of Popper (making predictions of future events) or in the sense of modernphysics (developing general laws and mathematical theories to explain or predictempirical facts) In fact, given the eagerness of many historians of science toemulate what they consider to be the methods of “general” historians, it is ironicthat my colleagues seem to avoid the kind of causal questions that specialists in, say,the seventeenth century English Revolution, find worthy of serious research anddebate

THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

In the 1970s there was a brief flirtation between historians and philosophers ofscience; each group thought it might learn something useful from the other Philoso-

phers of science were tired of arguing with each other about how science should work and decided they should take some account of how science actually does

work, now and in the past Historians of science welcomed this movement at first

because it promised to fill a perceived need for some theory to explain or at least

rationalize the large amount of descriptive data they had collected on the behavior

of scientists If it were possible to establish a philosophically-respectable theory ofthe nature of science by historical work, one might even be able to predict howscience would develop in the future

10 James McClellan and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p 137; see also pp 115, 139 Toby E Huff, The Rise of

Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999;

2nd ed., 2003)

11 One way to avoid the question is to deny that there was a Scientific Revolution in

seven-teenth century Europe Judging by the ever-increasing demand for and supply of books about the supposedly nonexistent event, I would say that strategy has not yet been successful.

Although the flirtation gave birth to some academic programs, books and journals

(one of which, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, has been quite

successful), it did not lead to a stable marriage Historians decided “science” is not

a well-defined entity that persists unchanged through time, hence it cannot have

a unique “nature” and there is no need for a theory of its historical development.Philosophers still believe that science does have a nature but decided the best way

to determine that nature is by logical analysis, rather than tedious archival research

on past science Science educators also want to know the nature of science becausethey think that’s what they should be teaching in the classroom, not just the results

of scientific research.12

Nevertheless, a few problems on the borderline of history and philosophy arestill generating research and discussion within both disciplines In particular, philo-sophical analysis of theory-confirmation has interacted with historical studies ofthe reception of theories For example, I claim that the following is an importanthistorical question, even though it is usually discussed only by philosophers, not byhistorians: in deciding whether to accept a proposed theory, do scientists (now and

in the past) give more weight to the successful prediction of new facts than to the successful explanation of known facts? Historians who study the reception of scien-

tific theories are best able to answer this question because they have the evidenceright in front of them; but unless they recognize the importance of the question they

may simply report who accepted or rejected the theory without investigating why.

We have here another causality issue, this time on the level of individual scientistsrather than entire socities or nations

Historians should not simply point the philosophers in the direction of the archives

of scientific writings (published and unpublished) because philosophers are notlooking for the kind of answer that would be useful to historians The philosopher

is likely to be an absolutist who wants the answer, valid at all times and places The

historian would suspect, rightly I believe, that the answer varies from one field ofscience to another, and within each field may change from one time to another It

is precisely the way in which it changes – whether, for example, nineteenth-centuryphysicists are more or less likely to judge theories by their successful predictionsthan seventeenth-century physicists or twentieth-century biologists – that tell ussomething worth knowing about the history of science

This particular historico-philosophical question also turns out to be of erable contemporary interest when it is used, as the philosopher Karl Popperproposed, as a criterion to demarcate science from pseudoscience If a theory doesnot make testable predictions – if it cannot be verified by an actual experiment orobservation – then it does not deserve to be called scientific The criterion has beenused by both sides in the creation-evolution debate; it has been used to undermine

consid-12 See Randy Bell et al., “The Nature of Science and Science Education: A Bibliography,” Science

& Education 10 (2001): 187–204.

the credibility of disciplines like psychoanalysis; and it has been enshrined in an

Opinion of the U S Supreme Court (the Daubert case).

In my opinion Popper’s “falsifiability criterion” is itself false: sciences widelyacknowledged as legitimate (evolutionary biology, historical geology and much ofastronomy) do not generally satisfy it: they deal with phenomena in large domains

of space and time, which cannot easily be brought into the laboratory for controlledexperiments As a historian I have to conclude (from my own research and that

of others) that even in fields where predictions can be tested, the results of thosetests do not usually determine whether the theory is accepted; other factors such asthe explanatory power and esthetic beauty of the theory may be equally or moreimportant Social and psychological factors may play a significant role.13

Nevertheless, the frequent public statements glorifying the hypothetico-deductivemethod as the key to the success of modern science have led some younger orinexperienced scientists to believe that confirmation of a novel prediction based

on a bold hypothesis is the quickest way to establish their reputation This beliefcan lead them astray As Joachim Dagg has suggested, “misunderstanding thepredictive power of science as a sort of guarantee to be right may be the primarymotive for forgery” Even without any dishonorable intent, a scientist may uncon-sciously focus on empirical data that support the hypothesis and ignore or minimizedata that refute it – behavior that psychologists call “confirmation bias” Thisphenomenon may explain some of the frauds involving apparently respectablescientists.14

Thus we have two propositions about the Nature of Science: (1) scientists donot in general accept a theory primarily because it has led to successful novelpredictions; (2) the belief that they do so because of publicity about the “scientificmethod,” is one reason why scientists may (unintentionally?) falsely report that atheory has been confirmed by experiment Neither proposition has been conclusively

established, but they are attractive targets for future historical research, even though they derive from a philosophical claim about science If the propositions turn out

to be valid and if their validity is made known to science educators and to the

13 See S G Brush, “Why was Relativity Accepted?” (cited in note 4); “Dynamics of Theory Change:

The Role of Predictions,” PSA 1994 2 (1995): 133–145; “How Theories Became Knowledge: Morgan’s Chromosome Theory of Heredity in America and Britain,” Journal of the History of

Biology 35 (2002): 471–535, and other papers cited therein.

14 Joachim L Dagg, “Forgery: Prediction’s Vile Twin,” Science 302 (2003); 783–784 On mation bias” see Ryan D Tweney, Michael E Doherty & Clifford R Mynatt, On Scientific

“confir-Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); M J Mahoney, Scientist as Subject: The Psychological Imperative (New York:: Ballinger, 1976); P C Wason, “On the Failure to

Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12

(1960): 1290–1340 The problem seems to have been recognized as early as 1933; see the remarks

by Ernest Rutherford about the discovery of the positron following its prediction by Dirac, at the

Solvay Congress held in that year, quoted by D V Skobeltzyn in Early History of Cosmic Ray

Studies, edited by Y Sekido & H Elliot, p 50 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985) Cf A P French, “The

Strange Case of Emil Rupp,” Physics in Perspective 1 (1999): 3–21.

public, the future of science itself might be affected.15 In this case, the historian

of science would be not just a passive observer of science but would play a moreactive role However, that happens only if the historian is willing to go beyond

mere description of what happened (in this case, a theory was accepted) and try to analyze why it happened.16

IS MATHEMATICS THE KEY TO THE UNIVERSE?

And what about the mathematics of sport, the other interdisciplinary subject

mentioned by the Washington Post columnist? As it happens, that subject is relevant

to a curious connection between recent and modern cosmology, a connection thatalso shows why historians of science should pay more attention to mathematics

In his Timaeus, Plato identified the regular solids (cube, icosahedron, octahedron,

tetrahedron) with the four elements (earth, water, air, fire); the fifth solid, the

dodecahedron, was identified with the cosmos Commentators on Timaeus have

suggested that Plato had in mind a popular game involving a ball made by sewingtogether 12 pentagonal pieces of leather (like a modern soccer ball) That would

be a dodecahedron if the pieces were rigid and flat but because of the elasticity ofthe leather, the pieces bulge out to form a sphere when air is pumped into the ball.This would be a simple, practical way to make a model of the celestial sphere but

15 “One big problem with science fairs is that everybody tries to force-fit students into the mold of what they call’the scientific method’ [hypothesis-testing]” – Randy Bell, University of Virginia,

quoted by Valerie Strauss, “Science-Fair Hypothesis Fraying”, Washington Post, 20 February 2001,

p A9 The notion that the validity of a philosophical concept like the confirmatory value of novel predictions could enter public discourse is not quite as far-fetched as it sounds Consider

the following exchange published in Parade magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement that

reaches millions of readers: “I recently read that the ancient Babylonians could accurately predict solar and lunar eclipses But how was that possible if it was not yet known that the Earth actually traveled around the Sun, rather than the other way around – Scott Morris, Highland, Ind.

[Reply:] “They didn’t need to know why the eclipse was occurring… [They] assembled

metic-ulous observational tables for so long that, even though they thought the Sun revolved around

the Earth, they still had great success in predicting eclipses This is an excellent example of how

prediction–widely accepted by scientists as the truest test of the accuracy of a theory–is utterly inadequate…” Marilyn Vos Savant, “Ask Marilyn,” Parade, 10 August 1997, pp 4–5 (italics in

original).

16 A well-known example is the influence of Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, published in

1962, on the rhetoric of geophysicists involved in the “Revolution in the Earth Sciences” that revived continental drift theory under the name of Plate Tectonics By appealing to [Kuhn’s view of] the history of science, they helped to establish [their view of] the history of the Earth It is consistent with one interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which any observation of a phenomenon has an effect on the phenomenon itself.

Two recent examples of attempts to go beyond descriptive narrative and analyze how science

works are: David L Hull, “Studying the Study of Science Scientifically,” Perspectives on Science

6 (1998) 209–231; Frank J Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative

Lives (New York: Pantheon, 1996).

the choice of the dodecahedron rather than some other solid involves theoreticalconsiderations in 3-dimensional geometry.17

All historians of science are familiar with Kepler’s use of the five regular solids

in his first model of the solar system and with the role of Platonic/Pythagoreanthinking in the works of Galileo and other physical scientists But now, we have amore specific question, which only an historian who takes mathematics seriously candiscuss: why did Jean-Pierre Luminet and his colleagues select the dodecahedron(more precisely, the sphericalized “Poincar´e dodecahedral space”, which looks like

a soccer ball) to represent the universe, in a paper that one of the world’s mostprestigious scientific journals not only accepted for publication but featured as its

cover story? Nature 425 (2003): 593–595 How is their reasoning related to that

of Plato? Having rejected the “whig interpretation of the history of science,” wecannot ignore this question just because other cosmologists are skeptical about thevalidity of the Luminet model, and it may be forgotten in a few months

The case of the dodecahedral universe is only an extreme example of a morecommon phenomenon that deserves more attention from historians of science: whatEugene Wigner called, in the title of a famous paper “The unreasonable effec-tiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”.18Some of the most revolutionaryideas in modern physical science were introduced first as purely mathematicalhypotheses that contradicted well-established views about the nature of the world,yet could not be ignored because they led to superior explanations and predictions

of empirical facts

Astronomers had to use the Copernican system in their calculations because the

planets seemed to move as if they were going around the Sun, not the Earth, even

though in the late sixteenth century most of them could not accept the absurd ideathat the Earth itself moves around the Sun as well as around its own axis They could

“exploit Copernicus’ mathematical system… while denying or remaining silent about

the motion of the Earth” with the result that “the final victory of the De

Revolu-tionibus was achieved by infiltration”.19Eventually, since the mathematical hypothesis

17 “The dodecahedron was familiar to anyone familiar with the construction of balls out of twelve pentagonal pieces of leather… Of the five solids inscribed in one and the same sphere the dodec- ahedron has the maximum volume and comes nearest to coinciding with the sphere, as well as

looking most like it in shape So the Phaedo (110 b6) compares the spherical Earth with… balls

made by sewing twelve [pentagonal] pieces of leather together.” Another possibility is an “allusion

to the mapping out of the apparently spherical heavens into twelve pentagonal regions for the

purpose of charting the constellations.” A E Taylor, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), pp 359, 377 See also F M Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus

of Plato translated with a running commentary (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1937), p 219.

18 E P Wigner, Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1960): 601–614.

19 Thomas S Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957),

pp 185–187 Kuhn argues that the “as if” attitude of these sixteenth-century astronomers was similar

to that of their predecessors: “Ptolemy himself had never pretended that all of the circles used in

the Almagest to compute planetary positions were physically real; they were useful mathematical

devices and they did not have to be any more than that” (p 187) Kuhn’s interpretation has been

of the Earth’s motion was incompatible with the physics of Aristotle, Galileoinvented a new physics that would be consistent with the mathematical hypothesis.Galileo, however, refrained from proposing a comprehensive philosophy to replaceAristotle’s; that task was left to Descartes Descartes developed a mechanistic picture

of the universe in which space was completely filled with matter; pieces of matter couldpush each other around by contact action but could not exert any forces over a finitedistance Indeed, the idea of “action at a distance” was condemned by the Cartesians

as an unscientific remnant of the “occult qualities” and magical mysticism popular inearlier centuries Isaac Newton agreed in principle with this view but found that hecould explain planetary motion and other phenomena quite effectively by postulating

a universal force of gravity Falling apples, the Moon, planets, comets and the oceans

behaved as if they were subject to a force acting through empty space, even though

everyone, including Newton, knew that there could not in reality be such a force Ofcourse, Newton did not consistently reject all non-contact forces, but he did express hisdistaste for the idea that the Sun could simply reach out over millions of miles to pull theEarth, without the help of an intervening substance According to Alexandre Koyrè,

“Newton… never admitted attraction as a “physical” force Time and again he saidthat it was only a “mathematical force”.20However, like the Earth’s motion, Newton’stheory of gravity was so successful that it had to be accepted, even though the majorcontinental physicists like Huygens and Leibniz did so with the stipulation that gravityitself does not exist as an inherent property of matter It was only when the next gener-ation had translated Newton’s theory into the language of Leibnizian calculus, andfound that it was also far superior to Descartes’ vortex theory in dealing with problemssuch as the return of Halley’s comet, the orbit of the Moon, and the shape of the Earth,that the Continentals shrugged off their antipathy to long-range forces; mathematicshad again infiltrated physics and forced it to change its fundamental principles.21

A similar story could be told about atomic randomness, the photon, quantum glement, antiparticles and general relativity – based, like the above examples, on factswell known to historians of science But in each case where historians find that aconcept was first introduced as a mathematical hypothesis that could not representphysical reality, then was later accepted as real because of its empirical success, there

entan-is a tendency to treat it as an anomaly, rather than an instance of what might be a general

rule What is lacking is an adequate recognition and analysis of the creative role of

somewhat modified by subsequent historical research but his basic premise, as applied to the reception

of Copernicus by German astronomers, is supported by the detailed studies of Robert S Westman; see for example “The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican

Theory,” Isis 66 (1975): 165–193.

20 Newtonian Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Poress, 1965; reprint, Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1968), p 7.

21 E J Aiton, “The Vortex Theory in Competition with Newtonian Celestial Mechanics,” in The

General History of Astronomy, Volume 2, Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Part B, The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, edited by R Taton &

C Wilson, 3–21 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Koffi Maggio, “The Reception

of Newton’s Gravitational Theory by Huygens, Varignon, and Maupertuis: How Normal Science

may be Revolutionary,” Perspectives on Science 11 (2003): 135–169.

Suggestions for the Study of Science 25

mathematics in the development of physical science Instead, the current fashion is to

emphasize the role of laboratory experiments Granted, this role has been neglected

in the past, when historians wrote mainly about theories and concepts and a lot moreresearch needs to be done to correct that imbalance My point is not that experimentsneed less attention from historians but that when we do discuss theories we shouldconsider mathematical concepts as more than just convenient fictions.22In particular,

we should recognize the possibility that at least in some cases, the mathematics is notmerely a tool to express a new physical idea and deduce its empirical consequences;rather, mathematics may run ahead of physics, forcing physicists to use and eventually

to accept a new concept they initially rejected

In short, historians of science have not really “taken on board” (to use a currentclich´e) the remarkable statement of Albert Einstein:

Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas I am convinced that we can discover, by means of purely mathematical constructions, those concepts and those lawful connections between them, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of physical utility of a mathematical construction But the creative principle resides in mathematics In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed 23

Institute for Physical Science & Technology and Department of History

University of Maryland

College Park, MD 20742, US

22 There is also a Contextualist aspect here, which is often forgotten (by me as well as by other historians): how did the scientist learn the mathematics that was to prove so useful? We now have some good accounts of the way physicists prepared for the Tripos examinations at Cambridge University, including what kinds of mathematics they would have encountered there James Clerk Maxwell certainly profited from this kind of education, yet he apparently got the idea for his remarkable derivation of the velocity-distribution law before he went up to Cambridge by reading John Herschel’s lengthy review of Quetelet’s books on social statistics It was the success of this law, which postulated

that molecules in a gas behave as if they moved randomly, that infiltrated the idea of atomic randomness

into physics at a time when physicists generally assumed that atomic motion was governed by deterministic Newtonian mechanics.

23 Albert Einstein, On the Method of Theoretical Physics: The Herbert Spencer Lectures delivered

at Oxford, June 10, 1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933) Part of the context for this statement

is Einstein’s own experience during the previous two decades: he followed a mathematical path

to deduce the equations of general relativity, then found that when applied to the universe they entailed an unacceptable consequence: a static collection of massive bodies would be unstable because there was nothing to prevent gravitational forces from making them collapse into a small

space So for physical reasons he added the arbitrary “cosmological constant,” in effect a long-range

repulsive force to prevent this collapse The subsequent discovery that the universe is expanding made this correction unnecessary, so Einstein retracted the correction Introducing the cosmological

constant was what he later called his “biggest blunder” [according to George Gamow, My World

Line (New York: Viking, 1970), p 44] – i.e., to let the physics override the mathematics Einstein’s

views on the role of mathematics in science are discussed by Christa Jungnickel and Russell

McCormmach, Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein, vol 2

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp 334–347.

To this generalization there is one great exception: Sam Schweber writing history

of science that is also physics history and is read by historians, physicists and thegeneral public too.1What all three of these histories of physics, however differenttheir audiences and their intents, have in common is – Einstein A ne plus ultra forthe historians, the most wonderfully human super-human for the public, Einsteininspires especially the efforts of those theoretical physicists committed to the goal

of elimination of the world’s apparent diversity through reduction to the propertiesand interactions of more elementary entities In their grand narrative of physicshistory as an epic of ever-grander unification of physical theory, Einstein is thesuper-hero

Of Einstein’s unparalleled prominence in all three histories of physics we hadstriking evidence at the recent International Congress of the History of Science

in Beijing Falling in fully with the celebration of the World Year of Physics as anexercise in Einstein idolatry, not only were there many, many papers about Einsteincontributed to the proceedings and several plenary lectures, but also the openingplenary lecture, again about Einstein, was given by C.N Yang, perhaps the greatestliving theoretical physicist

Moreover, this exaltation of Einstein was consistent with at least one side ofthe general theme of that history of science congress, namely “globalization anddiversity” In an important sense, globalization entails homogenization By means

of translation and diffusion, Einstein is now a hero not only in Germany andSwitzerland, Europe and the United States, but in all the West Einstein is now alsoregarded as a hero in China, India and Brazil He is indeed a global hero

Since nobody imagines that this process of globalizing various areas of humanactions can or will be arrested, we must suppose that in 2050 the world will bemuch more homogeneous than it is now Thus, were globalization the only story

1 S.S Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It (Princeton University Press, 1994), 784 pages;

In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist

(Princeton University Press, 2000), 256 pages.

K Gavroglu and J Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, 27–32.

© 2007 Springer.

So we have the question: Is science part of culture? Of course, it is But again,some would insist that even if science is part of culture, it is precisely that part withthe greatest universality, that part of culture with global characteristics and in thisregard, completely different from other parts of culture Religion, moral teachings orartistic ways of presenting human sentiments or reflecting on existential dilemmas –all these might keep their diversified forms of existence even in a globalized future(if they are strong enough to resist the conquering power of American popularculture) But not science, they say.

Just as I do not believe in the end of history, so also do I not believe that science

is, or can be, exempted from historical changes in cultural outlook Why can it not?Because all cultural thinking – scientific creativity included – has metaphor as itsultimate source And not only as the source but also as the grounding for its cogency

To take just one example, one that Sam Schweber has helped us understand, recallthat Darwin’s metaphorical appropriation of Malthus’s economic principle wascrucial not only to his conception of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution,but also to the persuasiveness of his argument for evolution

Consider then, with this fact of the grounding of science in metaphor in mind, thefollowing parallel: the conceptualization of our social and cultural world in terms

of globalization and diversity on the one hand, and the concepts of symmetry andsymmetry breaking as the guiding perspective in contemporary theoretical physics

on the other The two doublets in the parallel are metaphorical to each other andthus mutually supportive May we not then regard symmetry and its breaking aseven more than a prototypical conceptual framework? May we not regard it as astyle of reasoning of our current era, the style that characterizes the way peopleperceive and conceptualize the world today?

Certainly this is entirely consistent with the way we observe, and what weobserve in, the social and cultural world around us today Everywhere we see thatthe more globalization, the more diversity, not only in the cultural realm but also

in the realms of politics and economics Just think about the present political andeconomic development patterns in China, Russia and India

Similarly, in the development of theoretical physics in recent decades, the granderthe symmetry or the greater unification achieved, the more symmetry breakings are

sought – and are discovered Just think about the electroweak theory, the Higgsmechanism and the search for Higgs particles Should we not be persuaded by theseevident parallels of the deep connections between science and other parts of culture?And what if this inseparability of diversity on the one hand, and symmetrybreaking on the other, from the progress of globalization, on the one hand, andunification, on the other, continues to be characteristic of our culture as globalizationgoes forward in the coming decades? Then, I argue, Einstein cannot and will notretain his uniquely exalted place in physics history Einstein will inevitably be takendown from his super-hero pedestal and placed in the company of other merelyfirst-rank heroes such as Kepler, Galileo, Newton and Maxwell

Einstein made numerous historically significant contributions to physics, amongthem several that were revolutionary, such as the light quantum and the settlement

of the existence of atoms About this there is no controversy But what is Einstein’smost important and longest lasting contribution to physics – so enduring thatphysicists today appeal to it to guide their own research? If Einstein had made allhis other contributions but had not pursued the idea of symmetry and unification –and having succeeded, to some extent, in this pursuit, advocated it strongly as alofty goal worthy of pursuing – then Einstein would not have been able to catchthe imagination of so many great physicists in the twentieth century and would nottoday be regarded as a scientific icon worthy of worshipping

Einstein’s unification of mechanics and electrodynamics was based, ultimately,

on Poincare symmetry His success in unifying inertial systems and non-inertialsystems was based directly and heuristically upon general covariance or diffeo-morphism, an even wider symmetry However Einstein failed to unify gravity andelectromagnetism This is a sad story for him, and, for some while, a tragedy forthe dream of unification During the last thirty years of his life, this genius devotedall of his time and energy to this cause – all except the small but very importantpart that he devoted to political causes – without any real achievements and withoutsupport or participation by any but a very few of his fellow theorists

The idea remained however, and the ideal was later accepted by others who havecarried the torch further In particular C.N Yang regards himself and is regarded bymany other physicists, as Einstein’s successor in the sense of aiming at completingEinstein’s unfinished project, a project of establishing a unified understanding of thephysical world And with Yang and his collaborator Mills, the pursuit of unificationentered a new phase, the phase of the standard model

The standard model is wonderful but nobody knows how to make the standardmodel a really unified theory Yes, weak interactions and electromagnetic inter-actions can be treated in a unified way But how to unify QCD and electroweaktheory? Nobody knows

Then the string theorists, and Edward Witten in particular, appeared to carry thetorch Their heroic pursuit continues but the claims of progress made are ratherdubious in my judgment

Granted that the achievements of Einstein’s program of unification by enlarging, though incomplete, has been significant But if we ask about Einstein’splace in physics history in 2050, then of more significance for Einstein’s reputationamong theoretical physicists of the next generation are the prospects for reachingthe more ambitious goals of his program of general unification Let us thereforeconsider what, in principle, is indeed possible to achieve in this way?

symmetry-Any pursuit of unification through exploring larger and larger symmetries withoutcorresponding attention to symmetry breaking, although it might provide somebeautiful mathematical constructions, has only very limited meaning in deepeningour understanding of the physical world Thus, one of the most convincing aspects ofthe electroweak theory is its Higgs mechanism, without which we would have onlysome speculations but no physical theory – no physical theory in the sense that wewould have no theoretical means to guide experiment or to confront experimentaldata

Secondly, unification presupposes and entails reductionism The pursuit of areductive explanation is deserving of great respect Such explanations provide what

is perhaps the most illuminating mode of understanding But they succeed, generally,only when complemented by knowledge of the particular context in which theintrinsic properties of the ‘lower level’ entities – those to which what happens at the

‘upper’ or ‘phenomenal’ level are to be reduced – conspire to produce the reductivelyexplained phenomenon (’Context’ here refers to those special structures arisingfrom holistic characteristics or collective behaviors of the lower level ingredients.)That is, without being complemented by holistic knowledge, the reductive pursuitalone is not enough to causally understand what happens at any level

A more serious problem with reductionism is that knowledge of the propertiesand interactions of the lower level entities may not be relevant to what happens

at the upper level because of decoupling Thus, what happens in atomic nuclei atthe quark-gluon level has little or no impact on what happens between atoms atthe chemical level Recognition of the force of the decoupling argument has setvery severe limits to the relevance of reductive knowledge in understanding thebehaviors of ‘upper level’ entities, for those behaviors are dictated mainly by the

‘upper level’ context (Nonetheless, reductive knowledge remains relevant to theconstitution of upper level entities – although not, generally, to their behaviors –

if, as mentioned above, it is complemented by holistic knowledge of the context inwhich the upper level entities emerge.) Furthermore, decoupling is closely relatedwith symmetry breaking: the decoupling boundary is usually set by the mass scale

of the particles that are indicative of symmetry breaking

Thirdly, unification through reduction involves an implicit assumption aboutwhere fundamentality is to be found, namely, down ‘lower’, i.e., at higher energyscales But this is only an assumption And while one of the attractive features

of unification through reduction is that it establishes (through the renormalizationgroup) the precise connection between the physics operative at the lower and at thehigher energy scale, that very connection raises a fundamental question The physics

of which energy scale, with its characteristic entities, is the more fundamental This

is not good for reductionism

All these disturbances of the dream of reductive unification have arisen throughdevelopments in high energy physics in the late twentieth century.2Their relevance

to the regard in which Einstein will be held is this: they show that Einstein’sconceptual resources are very limited His major guiding principle was unifi-cation and symmetry Apart from some scattered phrases in his writings and someunexplored ideas, Einstein had no serious understanding of symmetry breaking,neither of its importance nor of mechanisms to implement it That was not hisfault, of course Physics had not yet then matured enough for the importance

of symmetry breaking to be understood and its implications explored The point,however, remains: Einstein’s conceptual resources are not enough even for latetwentieth century high-energy physics

The same verdict of insufficiency results from consideration of the limitations

of reductionism that are implied by the indispensability of contextual knowledgeand by the fact of decoupling and the reversible connections established throughthe renormalization group Briefly, we can say Einstein is wonderful because heleft us the legacy of pursuing unification by means of symmetry; but Einstein isnot wonderful enough His legacy is not sufficiently rich and powerful to sustain in

coming decades an attitude of Einstein-Bewunderung among theoretical physicists –

not, anyway, among those theorists grappling with diversity Einstein provided them

no guide to understanding differentiation, for which only the post-Einsteinian ideas

of symmetry breaking, decoupling and the renormalization group give means ofaccess and understanding

Stated in terms of style of reasoning in the globalization era, we may say thatEinstein is a cultural symbol for globalization but not for diversity And Einstein’sstatus in 2050 will be determined in large part by the relative strength of globalizingforces in comparison with diversifying forces It is this balance of forces that willdictate the relative degree of interest in pursuing unification versus differentiation.And it is my confident surmise that diversity will dominate – in theoretical physics,

as in culture and politics generally

Given the current concerns among active research physicists and assuming thatthese concerns will not be swept aside by another run of success of reductionism –such as, say, successfully reducing quantum mechanics to classical mechanics, or

2 T.Y Cao and S.S Schweber, “The conceptual foundations and the philosophical aspects of

renor-malization theory,” Synthese, 97: 33–108 (1993), gives a comprehensive review of these

develop-ments.

fully understanding complexity in terms of the behavior of individual entities – then

it is quite safe to anticipate that in 2050 Einstein will no longer be the super-hero

of theoretical physicists and physics history Einstein will certainly remain amongthe first-rank, heroes such as Kepler or Galileo or Newton But Einstein will nolonger be looked to as Yang and Witten look to him, as a guiding spirit in ourfundamental research in physics

Boston University

OLIVIER DARRIGOL

FOR A HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE

Paul Dirac once defined a philosopher as someone who, in order to figure out thegame of chess, would ask: “what are the pieces made of?” In recent years, somescientists have been worrying that the definition would apply to the new wave ofhistorians of science Indeed, some of our most prolific colleagues elaborate ontheir scientists’ diet, favorite sport, political intrigues, financial speculations, and soforth After all, they may be right to do so: in some cases such elements turn out tohave an impact on scientific activity For the health of our discipline, however, theimportant issue is not whether we should ask about the stuff the pieces are madeof; it is whether we have given up questions about the rules of the game

Any observer of the evolution of history of science during the last thirty or forty yearshas to be amazed by the diversification of its topics and approaches We have movedfrom a narrow history of scientific ideas to fully-fledged histories of scientific practicesand their multiple dimensions and contexts, and of the uses and representations ofthe sciences in society at large We have become critical toward cumulative, linear,heroic accounts of scientific discovery and instead pay attention to the competingforms of life within complex arrays of scientific subcultures We refuse to readworks of the past in present terms, even though the most subtle of us acknowledgethe inevitability and even the necessity, of presentist remnants of interpretation

As so many new perspectives opened in our field, its borders became blurred.While reading some of its trendiest output, we sometimes wonder: is this literarycriticism, sociology, anthropology or perhaps history of science? In so far assuch disciplinary indeterminacy signals innovative spirit and vitality, we can onlywelcome it Yet the dizzying multiplication of perspectives about science may have

an unfortunate consequence: the loss of any consideration of the specificity ofscience Even when it comes to hard-core science such as electric metrology orparticle physics, the interpretive categories of the up-to-date historian of scienceare often found to apply equally well to non-scientific disciplines such as music orreligion The cognitive power of science, its ability to predict and control naturalphenomena, has somehow slipped through the coarse net of our cleverest scholars.This failure at capturing the cognitive specificity of science has sometimes beenattributed to the influence of social constructivism, according to which the methodsand even the object of scientific investigations are matters of negotiation andpersuasion However, emphasis on the social nature of scientific activity does notnecessarily exclude inquiries into its cognitive power Even the staunchest construc-tivists have come to admit some sort of knowledge-producing resistance of nature inempirical investigations The problem is that when science so much resembles otherhuman activities, it becomes a challenge to identify its cognitively specific features

K Gavroglu and J Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, 33–34.

© 2007 Springer.

How can we hope to capture the elusive singularity of science in our historicalinvestigations? Certainly not by returning to normative epistemologies of the past,for those have been seriously discredited by post-Kuhnian historians of science

A more hopeful strategy is to focus on the technicalities of scientific practice, to

examine the rules of the game, to do a genuine history of knowledge The

above-mentioned diversification of history of science has pushed this demanding approach

to the margins This is especially true for the history of physics, in which surprisinglymuch has been said without engaging the more abstruse, codified parts of scientificwork Few historians of science now have a sufficient scientific background tomake sense of these aspects Most of them ignore the few histories that try to do

so and underestimate them as fossils of an outdated historiographical tradition

In reality, the last twenty years have brought a few methodologically innovativehistories of knowledge Unlike their old “internalist” forerunners, these histories havematerial and social texture; they strive to represent the actors’ moves in their ownterms, without rational or teleological projections; they avoid preconceived ideas ofscientific behavior The resulting insights into the nature of scientific knowledgecontradict the older normative epistemologies by historicizing the basic notions ofrationality, objectivity, and proof They also contradict the newer ideology of socialconstructivism by admitting long-term constraints affecting scientific practice as well

as important structural relations between successive or competing theories Perhaps

a proper way to historically approach the specificity of science would be to seek

a second-order rationality in the ways the criteria of scientificity have evolved

At any rate, much would be learned from a cognitively-oriented history of science.Why should we worry about the specificity of scientific knowledge? Why should

we take pains to revive old, intricate and abstruse ways of thinking? This sort

of inquiry could indeed degenerate into esoteric practice within a closed circle ofinitiates, as has happened with much analytical philosophy This will not happenhowever, if the historians who dwell on the technicalities of scientific worktake the time to process their conclusions such that they become accessible toother audiences On the contrary, the development of this type of history couldwell improve the sometimes problematic relations between history of science, thesciences, and philosophy Moreover, by providing a more balanced view of what

it is to be scientific, it would help us to assess the legitimate role of science in society.What should we do in order to protect and develop this threatened species ofhistory of science? First, we should avoid an institutional situation that wouldexclusively tie history of science to general history and we should encourage strongties with the sciences and with philosophy Second, we should make sure that

at least some of our students acquire advanced training in one science Third, afriendly, cooperative attitude should prevail between the promoters of the varioussorts of history of science Then and only then, will the history of knowledge retainthe central role it should have in the history and philosophy of science

CNRS: Rehseis (Paris)

LORRAINE DASTON

WORKING IN PARALLEL, WORKING TOGETHER

Sam Schweber’s work in the history of science, both lived and written, hasrepeatedly returned to the theme of how intellectual communities are createdand sustained He has written vividly and perceptively about the tight-knit andenormously productive communities of physicists in Göttingen in the 1920s, LosAlamos in the 1940s, Cornell in the 1950s and 1960s.1 These small, local, face-to-face communities have little in common with either the Enlightenment Republic

of Letters or the much-conjured Scientific Community, both of which stretch overcontinents and centuries, and whose members may well never meet, except in lettersand each other’s publications – Kant reading Hume in remote Königsberg or (totake an example from Schweber’s own work) Charles Darwin reading Adam Smithand Dugald Stewart.2 In contrast, the communities Schweber re-animates in hisdescriptions of twentieth-century physicists at work are populated by flesh-and-blood scientists, solving shared problems elbow-to-elbow, spurred on by emulation

and rivalry as well as esprit de corps, and inspired as well as organized by a

charis-matic leader – a J Robert Oppenheimer or a Hans Bethe Although Schweber iskeenly aware of the failings of such communities and of their leaders – especiallyhow collective ardor can silence better judgment, both intellectual and moral – henonetheless appreciates their more utopian aspects: these fleeting (for such commu-nities rarely endure for more than a few years) associations of talented, energetic,comradely intellectuals, all enlisted in a common cause, become in some sense ideal(though not idealized) communities

Much has been written since Thomas Kuhn (who was himself drawing on thelate writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein) about the central role of the exemplum,

as opposed to abstract rules, in teaching the next generation how science ought

to be done: “That process of learning by finger exercises or by doing continuesthroughout the process of professional initiation As the student proceeds from his

1 Silvan S Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feyman, Scwinger, and Tomonaga

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); idem, “Physics, Community, and Crisis in Physical

Theory,” in Kostas Gavroglu et al., eds, Physics, Philosophy, and the Scientific Community

(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), pp 125–152; idem, “Writing the Biography of a Living Scientist: Hans

Bethe,” in Ramesh S Krishnamurthy, ed., Pauling Symposium: A Discourse on the Art of Biography (Corvalis: Oregon State University Libraries, 1996), pp 159–196; idem, In the Shadow of the

Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2000), idem, “Robert Oppenheimer: Proteus Unbound,” Science in Context 16

(2003): 219–242.

2 Silvan S Schweber, “The Wider British Context in Darwin’s Theorizing,” in David Kohn, ed., The

Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp 35–69.

K Gavroglu and J Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, 35–38.

© 2007 Springer.