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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

and

Jürgen 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.

ISBN-10 1-4020-5419-X (HB)

ISBN-10 1-4020-5420-3 (e-book)

ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5419-8 (HB)

ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5420-4 (e-book)

Published by Springer,

P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

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

Kostas Gavroglu and Jürgen Renn 1

Big History?

Babak Ashrafi 7

Suggestions for the Study of Science

Stephen G. Brush 13

Will Einstein Still be the Super-Hero of Physics History in 2050?

Tian Yu Cao 27

For a History of Knowledge

Olivier Darrigol 33

Working in Parallel, Working Together

Lorraine Daston 35

Challenges in Writing About Twentieth Century East Asian Physicists

Dong-Won Kim (Jhu) 39

Why Should Scientists Become Historians?

Raphael Falk and Ruma Falk 43

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

of the History of Science

Paul Forman 49

Between Science and History

Evelyn Fox Keller 57

The Search for Autonomy in History of Science

Yves Gingras 61

Without Parallels?: Averting a Schweberian Dystopia

Michael D. Gordin 65

The Intellectual Strengths of Pluralism and Diversity

Loren Graham 69

On Connoisseurship

John L. Heilbron 73

v

vi Table of Contents

Concerning Energy

Steve Joshua Heims 77

Reflections on a Discipline

Erwin N. Hiebert 87

The Woman in Einstein’s Shadow

Gerald Holton 95

The Mutual Embrace: Institutions and Epistemology

David Kaiser 99

History, Science, and History of Science

Helge Kragh 105

Parallel Lives and The History of Science

Mary Jo Nye 109

Discarding Dichotomies, Creating Community:

Sam Schweber and Darwin Studies

Diane B. Paul and John Beatty 113

Public Participation and Industrial Technoscience Today:

The difficult question of accountability

Dominique Pestre 119

The Character of Truth

Joan Richards 135

Schweber, Physicist, Historian and Moral Example

José M. Sánchez-Ron 139

What’s New in Science?

Terry Shinn 143

On the Road

Skúli Sigurdsson 149

Plutarchian Versus Socratic Scientific Biography

Thomas Söderqvist 159

Problems Not Disciplines

John Stachel 163

Physicist-Historians

Roger H. Stuewer 169

Letting the Scientists Back In

Stephen J. Weininger 173

Table of Contents vii

Science As History

M. Norton Wise 177

Postscript

Sam Schweber 185

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 leading

representatives. Readers will find it illuminating to learn how prominent authors

judge the current status and the future perspectives of their field. Students will find

this 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 were

written in response to our invitation to explicate the views of the authors concerning

the state of the history of science today and the issues we felt are related to its

future. Although not all of the scholars whom we asked to write have contributed

an essay, this volume can nevertheless be considered as a rather comprehensive

survey of the present state of the history of science. All of the papers collected

here reflect in one way or another the strong influence Sam Schweber has exerted

during the past decades in his gentle way on the history of science as well as on the

lives of many of its protagonists worldwide. All who have had the opportunity of

encountering him have benefited from his advice, benevolence and friendship. Sam

Schweber’s intellectual taste, his passion for knowledge and his erudition are all

encompassing. 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 these

function 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 be

debated among historians of science. Principal among these tensions is that between

history and science. Both scientist and historian, Sam Schweber has experienced this

tension, 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, historiographical

perspectives 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 the

acrimony presently prevailing in our field. Should a historian of science concentrate

on what makes science a human enterprise, that is pomp, power, passion and

circumstance, or rather on what makes science unique among all human enterprises,

that is, its historically situated quest for knowledge? Once again, in his work, Sam

has 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.

2 Kostas Gavroglu and Jürgen Renn

historical insights. Yet, that tension is still with us and continues to shape current

intellectual debates and institutional struggles. No wonder then that the issues

surrounding this particular tension are a prevailing topic of many of the papers

included in this volume. Other tensions are perhaps less prominent but no less

vital, for instance that between collaborative ventures in the history of science and

individual intellectual pursuits or between a more methodologically-oriented history

of science and an approach governed by personal taste and connoisseurship, or

that between a history of science focused on the European and American traditions

and a global history of knowledge covering also non-European traditions. These

tensions 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 presently

concerning the community of historians of science, such as the question as to how

science has gone through dramatic transformations in recent decades and what this

change means for doing history, or the question of how history of science as an

interdisciplinary discipline has changed. For instance, have some of the themes that

were so prominent in the research agendas of historians of science in the relatively

recent past actually become themes without a future? What has been the outcome

for historians of science of more than two decades of historiographical controversies

with, at times, strong philosophical and ideological contentions? What possible

syntheses 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 changes

happening 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 paradigm

are being explored: the end of reductionism, the expanding role of techno-science

and industrialized science comprising a tendency towards the privatization and

commercialization of knowledge, the changing role of the sciences in the structure

of universities, but also the emergence of a new epistemology of processes of

learning and evaluation and the increasing role of historical explanations in the

natural sciences.

Naturally, the changes in science mentioned above constitute major challenges

for 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 into

relation to the vastness of scientific activities represents such a challenge. Also,

in an age of industrialized science, moral reflections as they have been part of

some of the best scholarly work in the history of science including that of Sam

Schweber, can no longer be causes championed by individual scientists, whatever

their prestige. Whole communities of scientists are obliged to become aware of

the wider consequences of their work and of the very character of what it is they

are producing. At the same time, this need for awareness represents an important

challenge for the community of historians of science, and can be addressed only

Positioning the History of Science 3

by enlarging the interface between science and the history of science. But can this

interface be really enlarged without, at the same time, ensuring that historians of

science 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 is

the real danger that typical core activities of the history of science such as detailed

reconstructions of technical arguments, biographical accounts, and other genres in

which scientist-historians such as Sam Schweber have excelled, may have no future.

Several essays express concern about what seems to be a growing consensus among

the younger generation that dealing with the technical and cognitive dimensions of

science has largely become obsolete.

After more than a century, the history of science is still in search of a wider

audience, 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 be

dramatically different from what its founding fathers imagined. Its development

has been marked by disappointments as well as contributions through which we

came to understand the extreme complexity of scientific developments. While it

has become ever more clear how cognitive, social, ideological and political factors

interact in the development of science, the grand dream of intellectual synthesis has

remained unfulfilled. Institutional diversity still prevails, scientists have after all not

become the sought for allies of the historians of science; the dominance of idiosyn￾cratic expertise has often prevented focusing on larger questions relevant to wider

audiences, yet the subject itself has been solidly established and both scientists and

historians 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 into

direct contact with the relevant scholarship in the history of science.

The methodological debates of the last 20 years have deeply split the field and

partisan views have done a disservice to all those who were entering the field. On

the other hand, such controversies underlined the maturity of the field itself, and

looking at these controversies, now that passions seem to have somewhat subsided,

gives reason for hope. Extreme believers and fundamentalist convictions, of any

creed, appear to have been marginalized. The sensitivity for the complementary

relationship between content and context has been increased. The emergence of

major institutions has stabilized the field without inhibiting the positive effects of

its 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 expressed

the new dynamics of the discipline. The first is the emerging communities of

historians of science in countries where most of the related works for many

years could not overcome an antiquarian problematique. Members of the emerging

4 Kostas Gavroglu and Jürgen Renn

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 that

are being linked to contemporary historiography of science. New areas of research

are being successfully investigated; there are dynamic institutional initiatives and

promising challenges in the charting of new research agendas.

The second aspect is the amazing impact of the information revolution and the

introduction of electronic media for the way the history of science is being pursued.

In particular, new possibilities have emerged for crossing boundaries of special￾ization imposed by a fragmented landscape of sources, which are distributed over

archives, libraries, and museums, but can now be united in virtual working spaces for

the history of science. Also the traditional separation between theoretically-oriented

surveys and source-oriented case studies can now be overcome by integrating inter￾pretations and sources within the electronic medium, where footnotes referring to

sources located a continent away can now be turned into links to digital libraries just

a mere click away. But the realization of this vision presupposes the availability of

and 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 unimaginable

research opportunities as well as to totally new possibilities in the teaching of

history of science. The number and quality of the digitization processes presently

undertaken by museums, research institutes and universities are impressive but will

ultimately come to fruition only if the temptation to commercialize cultural heritage

is withstood and historians join forces with the scientists that have made the open

access movement such a success.

From the multi-faceted character of research and education in the history of

science, some qualities have emerged which will last as criteria for work, as

exemplified 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 clearly

emerges is the ‘moral integration’ of the history of science, which has been often

overlooked due to its controversies. There clearly is a common engagement in the

goal among historians of science of quite different types, to contribute to a greater

reflectiveness 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 communal

aspects of the history of science, including the need for the public accessibility

of knowledge. A related moral issue emerging as a common denominator is the

striving for the accountability of science with regard to society and the realization

that such accountability also needs structures, including an institutional role for the

history of science. This may also be an argument for bringing the scientist back

into the history of science: as science has to face history, scientists have to face

historians 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. Growing

specialization and industrialization of science will make ever-higher demands on

spaces for multi-disciplinary autonomous work, not hiding in intellectual niches

and shying away from the burning issues that are also relevant to society. The

privatization of knowledge makes it necessary that historians of science add their

voices in order to defend and secure knowledge in the public domain, struggling

for public access to scientific knowledge. The globalization of knowledge makes

it necessary to take into account the interests and perspectives of the emerging

communities 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 who

address these challenges.

BABAK ASHRAFI

BIG HISTORY?

Historians have described extensively the dramatic changes in the organization of

physics research during the twentieth century. To what extent do these changes

foreshadow 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,

1 Bruce Hevly summarized some of the new features of large-scale

research 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 factors

include the increased concentration of resources in fewer research centers, increased

workforce specialization, increased attachment of social and political significance

to scientific projects. Furthermore, new forms of relationships have arisen between

science and technology, as well as new kinds of interactions between scientists

and engineers and the military. For the historian, Hevly observed, studying big

science requires renewed attention to institutional contexts and the importance of

collaborative research.2 Opinions vary as to whether these changes occurred during

and after World War II, or throughout the twentieth century, or have always been

occurring.

In any of these three periodizations, several questions arise about possible

relations between changes in the practice or organization of physics and history of

physics. As Hevly notes, “History, like physics at the turn of the century, has been

seen as essentially the province of individual researchers, perhaps working at times

with mentors and apprentices.” But he claims, “for many historians the traditional

setting is beginning to change.”3 Hevly called on historians to reflect further on

these changes. Drawing out the analogy in the increase in sponsored research, the

beginnings of change from a mentor-apprentice organization to larger collaborative

structures and the increasing complexity in the objects of study, Hevly concludes

that, “Scholars engaged in such projects [history of recent science] should remain

sensitive to the impact of these arrangements on our own work – arrangements that

could 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 complex

institutional 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.

2 Ibid., 355.

3 Ibid., 362.

4 Ibid., 363.

K. Gavroglu and J. Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, 7–11.

© 2007 Springer.

8 Babak Ashrafi

Sam Schweber has been one of the historians examining changes in the cultural

and institutional contexts of physics and how physics went from being a craft of

individuals to a profession involving large-scale organizations. These transforma￾tions are interesting in their own right, and they may also foreshadow the future of

history of science. For example, in his “The Empiricist Temper Regnant: Theoretical

physics in the United States 1920–1950,”5 Schweber examined transformations

in the institutional relationships between experimentalists and theorists. He also

contrasted such relationships in America with those in Europe. Schweber observed

that the European physicists who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s and

1940s did not so much remake American physics as become participants in changes

that were already well underway or in place, changes resulting in a mutual transfor￾mation of American physics and immigrant physicists. The ingredients comprising

this transformation were the following: the increasing complexity of the topics

of research, including the advent of quantum mechanics and the rise of atomic

and nuclear physics; the rapidly changing institutional setting, including the large

size and rapid growth of American physics departments; and American physicists’

prevailing habits of pragmatism and empiricism that encouraged theorists to better

integrate their work with that of experimentalists.

Schweber’s “The Mutual Embrace of Science and the Military: ONR and the

Growth of Physics in the United States after World War II”6 describes the efforts to

move the large-scale structures developed for doing war-time research into a postwar

environment. In this article, as in the “Empiricist Temper Regnant,” Schweber

examined the interplay between changes in the personal, institutional and political

spheres. He described also physicists’ loss of (their perception of) control over their

own 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 applied

science with the broader interests and trends that drove sponsored research in the

United States during and after World War II.

We can believe that the complexity of Big Science, the increase of sponsored

research, and impending challenges to historians’ dearly held ideologies about

themselves present new obstacles. But historians have faced new obstacles before.

The nature and volume of sources, for example, have been changing all along, and

historians have developed new skills to cope. Perfectly familiar responses, such as

producing more historians in larger departments with more funding, may suffice

this time as well. If historians could multiply as quickly as scientists, then we

could 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.