Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science started its work in March 1994. The original board of directors, as envisaged by the Max Planck Society, consisted of Lorraine Daston, Lorenz Krüger, and Jürgen Renn. Jürgen Renn assumed his duties in March 1994, Lorraine Daston in September 1994. Presently, she is an External Member of the Institute, before assuming her directorship at the Institute in mid-1995. Due to health problems, Lorenz Krüger was unable to accept his call, but nevertheless took part intensively in the initial phase of planning the Institute. His death in September 1994 was a great loss to the Institute. The Institute will preserve his memory by offering in 1996 the Lorenz-Krüger-Award for Historical Epistemology to an outstanding philosopher of science working in the history of science.
The Institute will consist of three research groups. A first group, directed by Jürgen Renn, began its work in March 1994, a second group, directed by Lorraine Daston, has also started work already in 1994, but will not be in full operation before July 1995. A third group will be built up in the near future.
At the end of its first year of existence, the regular, permanent staff of the Institute consists of 23 persons, including support staff. In addition to the permanent and regular staff, there has been a varying number of pre- and postdoctoral research fellows, researchers working on externally funded projects, and visiting scholars, altogether 11 scholars in the period from April 1, 1994 to March 31, 1995. Furthermore the two Service Units of the Institute, the Library and Documentation Unit and the Computing Services Unit, as well as the Institute's Administration have been set up during the year.
The Institute for the History of Science is devoted to the development of a theoretically oriented history of science which studies scientific thinking and knowledge acquisition in their historical development and their interaction with the cultural, technical, and social contexts of science. While mathematics and the natural sciences form the principal objects of research at the Institute, the methodologies applied are rooted in the humanities, and in particular in studies of human culture and cognition. The development of an "historical epistemology" is a central research goal. It should comprise an historical understanding of the development of fundamental categories of scientific thinking, such as "number," "force," "causality," "experiment," "deductivity," "objectivity," "determinism," and "probabilism." The study of such overarching notions, based on detailed studies in disciplinary histories, grounds generalizations and comparative analyses beyond the conclusions which can be achieved by disciplinary histories alone. In order to further this interdisciplinary approach by broadening its empirical basis, the Institute will also explore new ways of making the sources of the history of science accessible, in particular by using the new media of information storage and retrieval.
The following report is aimed at giving an overview of the research projects which have already started or are in preparation in order to show how some of the goals described above are going to be realized in the near future.
Beurton, Peter J. ( Dr. rer.nat., 1973 [biology], Humboldt-Universität Berlin; habil. phil. 1987, Universität Potsdam): Research strategies in biological evolutionary theory; modern Darwinism and the philosophy of science (E. Mayr, K. Popper, T.S. Kuhn); population genetics, the biological species, and reductionism.
Damerow, Peter (associated), Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (Dr. math. 1977, Universität Bielefeld; habil., 1994, [philosophy], Universität Konstanz): History of Science and Education, genesis of writing and arithmetic, individual and historical development of cognition, mathematical modelling in the sciences.
Daston, Lorraine, (A.B. Harvard University 1973, Dipl. University of Cambridge 1974, Ph.D. 1979 [History of Science], Harvard University; Assistant Professor Harvard University (1980-83) and Princeton University (1983-1986); Dibner Associate Professor Brandeis University (1986-1989); Professor at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (1990-1992); Professor University of Chicago (1992-1995): history of probability and statistics (16th-19th cs.); history of forms of scientific evidence and objectivity (16th-20th cs.).
Lefèvre, Wolfgang (Dr. phil., 1971 [philosophy], Freie Universität Berlin; habil., 1977 [philosophy in connection with history of science], Freie Universität Berlin; APL-Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin [philosophy]): History of science in connection with history of philosophy on the basis of social history; sciences in Greek antiquity; early modern physics and chemistry; history of biology, 1600 to 1900.
Parnes, Ohad (M.A. 1993, [history and philosophy of science], Tel-Aviv University); history of bacteriology and immunology, German epistemology and philosophy of science at the beginning of the 20th century.
Renn, Jürgen (Dipl. Phys. 1983, Freie Universität Berlin; Dr. rer.nat. 1987 [mathematics], Technische Universität Berlin). Collaborator resp. co-editor of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (1986-92); Assistant, since 1993 Associate Professor at Boston University (1989-93) [philosophy and history of science, physics]; Simon Silverman-Guest Professor at Tel-Aviv University (1993) [history of science]; Guest Professor at the ETH Zürich (1993-1994) [philosophy]: history of early modern mechanics, history of relativity theory; interaction between cognitive and contextual factors in the history of science.
Schoepflin, Urs (Dipl.-Soz., 1975, Freie Universität Berlin; director of library): Scientific information systems; scientific communication; sociology and history of science; scientometrics.
Schüller, Volkmar (Dr. rer.nat., 1972 [physics], Universität Greifswald): history of 17th and 18th century mathematics and physics.
Vogt, Annette (Dipl.-Math., Dr. rer.nat., 1986, Universität Leipzig): History of mathematics; history of mathematics in Germany in the 19th and 20th century; history of female scientists.
Dr. Leo Corry, Tel-Aviv University, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (August 15, 1994 - February 28, 1995)
Prof. Dr. Yehuda Elkana, Tel-Aviv University, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and ETH Zürich, Visiting Scholar (June 1, 1994 - October 31, 1994)
Prof. Dr. Jöran Friberg, University of Göteborg, Visiting Scholar (January 15, 1995 - July 15, 1995)
Dr. Catherine Goldstein, CNRS and Université de Paris Sud, Visiting Scholar (February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995)
Dr. Mario Helbing, ALTES-project at the ETH Zürich, Visiting Scholar (January 16, 1995 - January 15, 1996)
Prof. Dr. Jens Høyrup, Roskilde University, Visiting Scholar (August 20, 1994 - January 31, 1995)
Michel Janssen, University of Pittsburgh, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (May 20, 1994 - July 20, 1994)
Shaul Katzir, Tel-Aviv University, Predoctoral Research Fellow (July 26, 1994 - October 20, 1994)
Dr. Peter McLaughlin, Universität Konstanz, Visiting Scholar (August 1, 1994 - January 31, 1995)
Prof. Dr. Jim Ritter, Université de Paris 8, Visiting Scholar (February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995)
Prof. Dr. John Stachel, Boston University, Visiting Scholar (June 1, 1994 - August 31, 1995)
The work of the research group of Jürgen Renn is mainly dedicated to the understanding of the historical processes of structural changes in systems of knowledge. This goal comprises the reconstruction of central cognitive structures of scientific thinking (both primary and second-order structures), the study of the dependence of these structures on their experiential basis and on their cultural conditions (in particular on instruments and external representations), and the study of the interaction between individual thinking and institutionalized systems of knowledge. Thus the interaction of three major factors in the development of scientific thinking has to be reconstructed: (1) the experiential basis of scientific thinking in a given period (including technical practice as well as scientific experiments), (2) the scientific means and external representations employed (including language, graphical representations, and formalisms), and (3) the cognitive organization and social conditions of the structures of scientific knowledge and thinking. This theoretical program of a historical epistemology is the common core of the different investigations and research projects pursued and planned by the research group.
Historical epistemology in this sense requires an integration of cultural and cognitive studies of science. While methods and results of the cognitive sciences, of the structuralist tradition of psychology, as well as of philosophical theories of concept development can help to compensate theoretical deficits in the history of science in a narrow sense, in particular when it comes to explaining thinking processes, the history of science can, inversely, contribute to overcoming the limitations of theoretical approaches whose claims have so far not been systematically confronted with the results of historical research. However, an historical epistemology would not only have to add the models and scientific arms of the social and cognitive sciences to the traditional methodological arsenal of the history of science, but also to seek a theoretical coherency that goes beyond exploiting historical case studies in order to flesh out preconceived philosophical opinions.
In order to achieve a broad historical basis for dealing with these theoretical problems and to cover at least some of the major developmental steps in the history of science, research has been inaugurated or is planned in four different areas: (1) the emergence of formal sciences such as mathematics, (2) the emergence of empirical sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology, (3) structural changes in sciences with developed disciplinary structures and integrated theoretical foundation, and (4) the role of reflective thinking and second-order concepts in science.
(1) The emergence of formal sciences. In order to reconstruct the emergence of sciences such as mathematics and logic it is necessary to investigate the development of mathematical thinking in ancient civilizations. No projects have been established until now in this research area, but several steps of preparation have been made in order to clarify the theoretical and technical preconditions.
-- In September 1994, the Institute in collaboration with Peter Damerow from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education organized a workshop on Babylonian mathematics. This workshop was dedicated to exploring the possibilities of standardizing transcription conventions of mathematical cuneiform texts in such a way that all extant documents which are dispersed in numerous collections and publications can be stored in a unified electronic database.
-- Distinguished scientists in this field have been invited as visiting scholars, Jens Høyrup (Roskilde University), Jöran Friberg (University of Göteborg), and Jim Ritter (Université de Paris 8).
(2) The emergence of empirical sciences. This area of research, in particular the investigation of preclassical mechanics, is one of the major topics already present in the earlier work of Jürgen Renn. In the new Institute he has extended the scope of his research in this area. Three projects have been launched concerning
-- the emergence of classical mechanics (Wolfgang Lefèvre and Jürgen Renn in cooperation with Peter Damerow),
-- the sources of Newton's Principia (Volkmar Schüller)
-- the emergence of microbiology and immunology (Ohad Parnes).
In addition, activities have been undertaken in order to explore other aspects of research in this area which may become a focus of future work at the Institute.
-- A workshop on the emergence of classical chemistry to be held in June 1995 has been prepared by the Institute in cooperation with Ursula Klein (Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftstheorie).
-- Mario Helbing (ALTES-project at the ETH Zürich), an expert in Latin and Italian sources of early modern science, is working as a visiting scholar for one year at the Institute. In close connection with his ongoing research activities, he is examining the feasibility of a lexicon of technical and scientific terminology in early modern science.
(3) Structural changes in sciences with developed disciplinary structures and integrated theoretical foundations. This area of research is also closely connected to earlier and ongoing research of Jürgen Renn on the transition from classical to modern physics. Although no dedicated new projects on this topic have been established at the Institute, it was a major topic already from the beginning of its research activities.
-- Jürgen Renn is heading, together with Peter Damerow, the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein at the Center for Development and Socialization of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education.
-- In April 1994, the Institute organized a workshop on Einstein's "Zürich Notebook" and the development of general relativity.
-- Distinguished scientists as well as pre- and postdoctoral research fellows working on the history of relativity theory have been invited as visiting scholars: John Stachel (Boston University), Michel Janssen (University of Pittsburgh), Shaul Katzir (Tel-Aviv University), and Leo Corry (Tel-Aviv University).
-- The Institute is organizing the Fourth International Conference on the History of General Relativity, to be held in Berlin July 31- August 3, 1995.
-- A systematic collection of sources related to the history of relativity theory has been started.
-- Furthermore, related research has also been started with regard to structural changes of knowledge in a quite different developed discipline. A project has been launched (Peter Beurton) aiming at the investigation of concept formation in evolutionary biology.
-- In January 1995, the Institute organized a workshop on "Gene concepts and evolution."
(4) The role of reflective thinking. Research in this area is presently concentrated on the historical role of overall theories of nature and of explanatory ideals (causal versus functional or contextualist explanations).
-- A project has been started (Wolfgang Lefèvre) focusing on the investigation of philosophical integrations of classical science using the example of Kant's natural philosophy.
-- Distinguished scholars working on explanatory ideals have been invited as visiting scholars, Yehuda Elkana (Tel-Aviv University, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and ETH Zürich) and Peter McLaughlin (Universität Konstanz).
In the following, short descriptions of the projects will be presented. Additionally various research activities in cooperation with the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein centered on the development of relativity theory deserve special attention. These activities will be described in some detail first.
Jürgen Renn and Tilman Sauer (Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein) in cooperation with John Stachel (Boston University), Michel Janssen (University of Pittsburgh), Shaul Katzir (Tel-Aviv University), and Leo Corry (Tel-Aviv University)
The conceptual framework of classical nineteenth-century physics had to be restructured and reinterpreted in its very fundamentals in order to arrive at a consistent relativistic theory of gravitation. It is this process which characterizes the conceptual breakthrough to Einstein's general theory of relativity in 1915 as a genuine scientific revolution. Einstein's path towards establishing a general theory of relativity has been an important topic in the history of 20th century physics over the past few years, but it is only now, after his unpublished research notes have been reconstructed in detail, that a comprehensive reassessment from the point of view of an historical epistemology becomes possible.
Einstein's path to General Relativity begins in the year 1907 with the formulation of the equivalence principle and ends in the Fall of 1915 with the discovery of generally covariant field equations for gravitation. The theory of a static gravitational field, which he had developed on the basis of the equivalence principle, was completed in the Spring of 1912. This static theory was based on a scalar field equation modelled after Newtonian physics. It was still formulated without making use of any mathematics more sophisticated than standard differential calculus. Only in 1912 Einstein did realize the relevance of Gaussian surface theory and somewhat later that of the absolute differential calculus of Ricci and Levi-Civita for his problem, identifying the metric tensor as representing the gravitational field.
The impact of this considerably more sophisticated mathematics on Einstein's thinking was crucial for the development of the theory. Fortunately, the reconstruction of this period can be founded on a rich empirical basis. Apart from a number of rather explicit publications and a well-documented scientific correspondence, it is in particular one unpublished research notebook dating from the years 1912-1913, the so-called Zürich Notebook, which allows a direct and undisguised view into Einstein's thinking at that time.
Following groundbreaking papers by John Stachel, John Norton, and a few other scholars, the investigation and reconstruction of this notebook has been the object of various research activities at the Institute in cooperation with the scholars of the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein. The identification of two distinct heuristic strategies in the notebook turned out to be an important interpretative tool for the understanding of Einstein's search for gravitational field equations. One strategy was to take physical considerations derived from classical physics, such as energy-momentum conservation and the recovery of Newton's gravitational theory in a suitable limit, as the starting point; the other strategy was to begin from mathematical considerations concerning the covariance group of candidate field equations and then to attempt to find a consistent physical meaning for the mathematical objects under consideration. The reconstruction of the calculations in the notebook has shown in particular that, following this latter strategy, Einstein had considered already in 1912 the correct field equations of 1915 (albeit in linearized approximation) and had thus come within a hair's breadth of the final general theory of relativity. But he failed to recognize the physical meaning of these equations, and turned to the alternative strategy.
The research on the notebook hence throws new light on the complex process of interaction between mathematical representation and the construction of physical meaning. In particular, the establishment and stabilization of the new physical concepts that emerged with general relativity required a minimal state of elaboration of the mathematical formalism going considerably beyond the finding of the correct field equation. Paradoxically, this state of elaboration itself had to be reached under the guidance of concepts and heuristic strategies which were themselves still rooted in classical physics. It is therefore not surprising that Einstein first published in 1913 an erroneous field equation which seemed, however, satisfactory from the point of view of his heuristic strategies rooted in classical physics, and that it took him more than two years before he returned to the correct equation which he had found in 1912. In these more than two years he elaborated the consequences both of his erroneous field equation of 1913 as well as of the other candidate field equations he had already considered in his research notebook of 1912. It was only after this exhaustive elaboration of the possibilities which were opened up by the available formalisms that the network of physical and mathematical relationships thus established had become sufficiently dense to shape and stabilize the new concepts which finally allowed him to identify the correct field equation of general relativity.
The detailed reconstruction of how Einstein discovered in 1915 that he had to give up the field equations of 1913 was one of the research topics on which Michel Janssen (postdoctoral research fellow) worked during his stay at the Institute in collaboration with the members of the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein.
The research on Einstein's development of general relativity has been complemented by various studies of both the narrower and wider context of Einstein's research:
John Stachel (visiting scholar) is working on a project supported by the American National Science Foundation aiming at documentation and interpretation of the development of relativity theory in general. While in no way slighting the magnificent contributions of Einstein, his project will analyze the more general scientific, technological, and social conditions which made the development of the theory of relativity possible. In an attempt to get away from any sense of inevitability, the historical account will be supplemented at a number of crucial points in the development by "alternate scenarios," that is, indications of alternate paths that the historical development might have taken resulting in rather different developments of the theory. During his stay at the Institute John Stachel is focusing in particular on the history of the special theory of relativity, which started from the problem of reconciling the relativity principle of mechanics with the results of the optics and electrodynamics of moving bodies in the nineteenth century, and concluded with the acceptance of the special theory by the physics community as an indispensable working tool in many fields by the middle of the twentieth century.
Shaul Katzir (predoctoral research fellow) has worked on a comparison between Poincaré's and Einstein's treatment of the electrodynamics of moving bodies and of the principle of relativity, with the aim of exploring alternative developments in the area of special relativity.
Jürgen Renn has finished a study of alternative strategies for approaching the conceptual problems solved by the theory of general relativity. He showed, in particular, that around the time of Einstein's research on general relativity, essentially two other alternative strategies were pursued in order to address the problem of gravitation, one rooted in the tradition of mechanics, the other in the tradition of field theory. On this background, Einstein's formulation of general relativity can be identified as a "third way," a peculiar mixture of field theoretical and mechanical elements. The consequences of this mixed constitution of the heuristic roots of general relativity for its conceptual development are analyzed, concentrating on the role of Mach's Principle for the physical interpretation of the theory, both in its intermediate and its final versions. Having established that the development of general relativity was not uniquely determined by the intrinsic nature of the problems to be solved, the study also includes an analysis of contextual factors that shaped Einstein's perspective on these problems, in particular his philosophical views on the foundations of physics.
Finally, Leo Corry (postdoctoral research fellow) has studied David Hilbert's work on relativity, and, in particular, his formulation of a generally relativistic field equation for gravitation, in the context of Hilbert's attempts to develop a unified axiomatic approach to the whole of physical science. One of the goals of Corry's research is to enlarge the view of the field of possible pathways which could lead to a theory such as general relativity, in close association with the research pursued by Jürgen Renn and John Stachel.
Wolfgang Lefèvre and Jürgen Renn (responsible) in cooperation with Peter Damerow
According to a distinction made by Thomas S. Kuhn experiences during the scientific revolutions of early modern times should be less important for the emergence of modern "classical" sciences (mathematics, astronomy, mechanics etc.) than for the "Baconian" sciences (chemistry, magnetism, studies of thermal phenomena etc.). The close connection between practical and scientific mechanics in early modern times is, on the other hand, well known since the work of Olschki and Zilsel. The way in which the knowledge of the early modern engineering tradition interacted with the concepts and theories acquired from the tradition of theoretical mechanics during the emergence of classical modern mechanics is, however, not yet sufficiently understood.
The exploration of the respective roles and mutual relationships of practical and theoretical knowledge in the emergence of classical mechanics is a central research goal of the project dedicated to the history of mechanics. The project comprises (1) an analysis of the technical terminologies both in scientific texts and treatises of engineers at the time of Galileo in order to reconstruct the mental models involved and their historical roots and (2) the reconstruction of the emergence of the deductive structure of classical mechanics out of new experiences assimilated to these cognitive preconditions.
This project is pursued in close collaboration with the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, and the "ALTES-Project" at the ETH Zürich.
Many of the sources documenting the emergence of classical mechanics are kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence under the responsibility of Isabella Trucci. Great efforts are presently under way to make these documents electronically accessible. In particular, a project has begun which is headed by Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, and which aims at producing electronic editions of such documents on CD-ROM which will also include the results of the work of historians of science on these texts.
At the ETH Zürich the "ALTES-Project" (Archivio del lessico tecnico e scientifico tra il Cinquecento e il Seicento), which has been launched recently and is headed by Ottavio Besomi, is dedicated to the creation of archives for the European technical and scientific terminology of the early modern period in several languages. In the framework of this project, a glossary for Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems has already been completed which is based on a new critical edition of Galileo's Dialogue by Ottavio Besomi and Mario Helbing.
The project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science uses results of these two projects and has, in particular, received copies and electronic reproductions of relevant sources. Mario Helbing from the ETH Zürich has been working since the beginning of 1995 for one year as a visiting scholar at the Institute.
The reconstruction of the emergence of classical mechanics as it is presently pursued at the Institute comprises the following aspects:
(1) Technical and scientific terminology. The investigations in this area focus on the relationships between the terminologies used in various literary traditions: early modern translations (into Latin, Italian, French, and German) of treatises on mechanics from Antiquity (e.g. those by Pseudo-Aristotle, Archimedes, Heron, and Pappus) and from the Middle Ages (in particular by Jordanus), early modern engineering treatises such as those by Ramelli, Fontana, Specklin, etc., and early modern treatises on mechanics which had a significant impact in the period from 1550 to 1650, such as those by Tartaglia, Cardano, Benedetti, Guidobaldo del Monte, Stevin, and Galileo. It is the primary goal of this research to analyze the initial basis and the further development of technical terminology in several European languages (scholar's as well as layman's languages), conceived as representations of mechanical knowledge. The work has started with an analysis of the "Quaestiones mechanicae" of Pseudo-Aristotle. This treatise, almost unknown in the Middle Ages, was translated into several modern languages in the sixteenth century, was circulated widely and quoted and discussed by many authors. The works related to the "Quaestiones mechanicae" are hence a well-defined corpus and the analysis of its technical vocabulary will form a basic nucleus for the reconstruction of mechanical terminology with which other texts can be compared.
(2) Emergence of deductive classical mechanics. The investigation of the emergence of classical mechanics aims at a comprehensive reconstruction of the conceptual and deductive structures of preclassical mechanics and their relations to the later classical concepts. The current research concentrates on a reconstruction of the deductive structures elaborated by Galileo in his manuscripts on mechanics, Mss. 72, of the Galilean collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. The collection documents Galileo's work on mechanical problems during a period of more than 40 years in which his thinking developed from its scholastic beginnings to the publication of the Discorsi, an essential contribution to classical mechanics. The manuscript collection Mss. 72 comprises some 300 pages and consists of short texts in Italian and Latin, representing sketches of proofs, but also extended drafts intended for publication, calculations, tables of calculated numbers, diagrams, and even some documents pertaining to experiments performed by Galileo. A first rough transcription and translation of Mss. 72 into English as well as a systematic study of Galileo's use of abbreviations has been almost completed. The deciphering, chronological ordering, and interpretation of this collection constitutes a necessary step in the reconstruction of the structural change of mental models initiated by the work of Galileo. In fact, a comprehensive reconstruction of the development of the conceptual and deductive structures shaping this development has not yet been accomplished, in spite of many important contributions by scholars such as Caverni, Drake, Galluzzi, Naylor, and Wisan. The results of the systematic analysis of the material will be compared with arguments in ancient and medieval texts on the same subject, with experiences documented in the contemporary technical literature, and with the outcome of modern experiments and the structures of modern proofs.
(3) Tools for the computer-assisted analysis of sources. The work on the text material is supported by systematic text acquisition using optical character recognition techniques and by the development of electronic working environments supporting the transcription, translation as well as the linguistic analysis of manuscript collections. A toolbox has been developed which allows the creation of working environments linking images, text corpora, lists of words, and technical terms.
Volkmar Schüller (responsible)
There is still a wide-spread misunderstanding concerning Newton's work on physics, according to which it can be identified with the classical physics of modern textbooks. In fact, however, so-called Newtonian mechanics was created by later scientists, such as Jakob Herrmann, Leonhard Euler, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and many others who further developed Newton's physical and mathematical principles. Only at that point was the terminology of classical mechanics created and Newtonian mechanics received its canonical form. If one wants to understand the historical conditions of the genesis of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, this work should hence not only be considered as the beginning of an entirely new classical physics but also as representing a culminating achievement of early modern physics. The investigation of the sources of Newton's physics, especially of his knowledge of the ancient authors and of his knowledge of early modern physics is, in spite of the considerable research efforts by scholars such as Rosenberg, Koyré, I. B. Cohen, Westfall, and others, a task still far from being completed.
In the context of the general goal of the research group to reconstruct the emergence of classical mechanics, Volkmar Schüller is working on Isaac Newton's Principia. He has prepared a new German translation which will be finished by February 1996. Based on his familiarity with Newton's work, he is now preparing a glossary of Newton's technical and scientific terminology. This glossary will be integrated with work done in the work group on the development of scientific terminology in early modern mechanics.
In a commentary, Volkmar Schüller describes the complex genesis of Newtons Principia and analyzes the sources used by Newton. Furthermore, in order to document the reception of the Principia by Newton's contemporaries, the reviews published in contemporary scientific journals, such as Acta Eruditorum, Journal des Savans, and others are investigated.
Ohad Parnes (responsible)
The research project of Ohad Parnes deals with the origins of immunology, comprising the development of early microbiology as a basis for its establishment. The most basic concepts underlying immunology - like microscopical agents and infection - as well as the theoretical presuppositions - mainly the demonstration of the causal role of germs in disease - were in fact developed between 1830-1875, the period of the establishment of bacteriology. These years are currently in the focus of his research while, in a later stage, he will also address the various theoretical schemes envisaged to explain the process of immunological reaction in the years 1880-1910.
Today, the demonstration of medical causality is usually associated with "Koch's postulates." These postulates (although never formulated as such by Koch himself), appear in different forms in Koch's own writings. They essentially claim that, in order to demonstrate the causal role of a parasitic agent, it has (1) to be isolated, (2) to be re-introduced by way of inoculation, and (3) to reproduce the disease under examination, typically in a laboratory animal. Koch's postulates were introduced, at least in a de facto fashion around 1876.
The postulates, as self-evident as they might appear today, embody, however, a considerable corpus of theoretical and experimental knowledge which was assembled if not generated in the few decades preceding Koch. The postulates are, in particular, based on numerous conceptual presuppositions which were established in this period, such as "parasitism," "pure-culture," "bacterial species," and "life-history" (Entwicklungsgeschichte) of micro-organisms.
These conceptual innovations in turn have been developed on the background of a process of integration of various long-range traditions of knowledge, both scientific and practical. The invention of the microscope, as well as observations of microscopical organisms date back to the seventeenth century. Practical knowledge about the process of fermentation was even older. Medicine was, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, well aware of the phenomena of epidemic and endemic diseases. The integration of these different traditions of knowledge and the ensuing consequences for conceptual innovations took place in the framework of a research program which established a structured relationship between these layers.
In fact, from about 1835 on, several scientists, most of them young, German, and in loose institutional association with each other, attempted to establish a new science of life, based on microscopic explanations. These scientists shared a program to establish a new, rigorous but also distinct science of life: rigorous - in the sense of being based on causal explanations comparable to the established science of physics; distinct - in the sense of offering a life-specific mode of explanation, independent of the prevailing physical and chemical ones (such as those of the Liebig-Wöhler school). In this context, microbiology offered a way to establish a genuine science of life, based on strict laws of causality.
Several areas of technical as well as of conceptual development are currently being examined in order to identify the conditions which made the creation of the new science possible: e.g. the development of microscopy (in particular the introduction of the achromatic microscope), the observation and classification of micro-organisms (in particular the transition from the pre-microbiological classification schemes to the gradual differentiation of the group "bacteria"), and the study of fermentation (in particular the discovery of the role of yeast in fermentation by Theodor Schwann in the years 1835-1838).
Peter Beurton (responsible)
The debate on the foundations of evolutionary biology over the last twenty-five years provides an important opportunity for the investigation of structural changes in a discipline with an integrated theoretical foundation and a developed disciplinary structure. In the history of evolutionary biology the year 1970 was a turning point, when the neo-Darwinian paradigm, which aimed at providing such a framework and which was founded in the 1930's by scientists like R.A. Fisher, S. Wright, T. Dobzhansky, or E. Mayr, gave way to a plurality of approaches to evolution. Since then, and in contrast to what may be called retrospectively the "complacent past," even the most fundamental concepts of evolution which had been developed or re-affirmed by neo-Darwinism have been called into question. No longer are there unequivocal answers to such questions as: what is meant by "adaptation," by "gene," by "species," or, in fact, by "Darwinism"? Although biology has not lost the integrative character as a discipline which it achieved in the nineteenth century, evolutionary biology can no longer be considered a conceptually unified science. Neo-Darwinian thinking remains, on the other hand, indisputably this century's major contribution to evolutionary theory. It provided the population genetic underpinning of Darwinian evolution: populations are, genetically speaking, gene pools which comprise a neverceasing resource of genetic variation for selection to act upon. However, modern alternative views of evolution pay, for example, rather greater attention to holistic properties of organisms which become manifest during individual development. Principles of self-organization which come into play via genomic structure and organismic Baupläne are seen as more important features for guiding the evolution of species than brute adaptation of populations to environmental circumstances.
These developments in evolutionary biology provide the framework of the research project. Presently, this project concentrates on the analysis of the history of the concepts of "species" and "gene."
Species. The "biological species definition" was coined in the early 1940's within the newly developed neo-Darwinian (population genetic) paradigm by Ernst Mayr who was - and still is - probably the major figure in this field. The merits of his species definition have been called into question with the crumbling of this paradigm since 1970. At present, there are some half-dozen competing species concepts, one of which has been proposed by Peter Beurton. He developed his views on the foundations of evolutionary biology in close relationship with his historical studies; he has, for instance, undertaken an analytical investigation of Ernst Mayr's publications in order to reconstruct how the latter's views of the species concept have evolved over half a century, while his species definition has remained unchanged. Although it is common to refer in matters of the species concept (positively or negatively) to Ernst Mayr, this evolution of his views has largely remained unnoticed. Peter Beurton has shown in particular that Mayr's understanding of his own species definition can be interpreted in the context of his responses to the changing intellectual climates in which he variously found himself. This interpretation has set the stage for a parallel investigation of Mayr's growing awareness of the pitfalls of reductionism in evolutionary biology across the last half century.
Gene. While in the population genetic perspective of the neo-Darwinian paradigm genes continue to be treated as "last particles," this is definitely not the case from a molecular-biological and developmental perspective. The present situation is somewhat reminiscent of that of the atom at the turn of the century: the more molecular biologists learn about the gene, the less they seem to be able to integrate their increased knowledge into one coherent concept. At the same time, the present situation has opened up the perspective of new questions about the past history of the gene concept and its old paradoxes. In order to explore the challenges posed by this development of the concept of gene, the Institute, in collaboration with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg), organized in January 1995 a workshop on "Gene Concepts and Evolution." In view of the outcome of the workshop, it has been decided to create an international working group focusing on the history of the gene concept and to plan a volume with interrelated contributions from members of this working group. The next intermediate step will be a second workshop which will be based on precirculated draft contributions to this volume.
Wolfgang Lefèvre (responsible) in cooperation with Falk Wunderlich
The classical modern sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth century consisted not only of single theories - for instance of motion in free fall, of percussion, of gravity etc. - which reached, on the basis of experiments and methodically controlled observations, a hitherto unknown level of intersubjective acceptance. The classical sciences also comprised attempts to construct overall theories of nature based on such single theories, which should be able to overcome the universal natural philosophy in the tradition of Aristotle. Examples are Kepler's "Weltharmonik," Descartes' mechanistic cosmology, Newton's speculations on "active principles," Leibniz' philosophy of "monads," Boscovic' and Kant's dynamism, and Le Sage's atomistic theory. But these overall theories failed to achieve a status of being intersubjectively shared. In retrospect it seems to be clear that the contemporary level of modern sciences provided too small a basis for these ambitious enterprises. Except among historians of philosophy these overall theories are forgotten today or mentioned only as metaphysical egg-shells of this early stage of the modern sciences.
These overall theories do deserve attention, however, if one wants to reconstruct a full picture of the emergence of the modern sciences. In particular, these theories represent, despite their entirely obsolete scientific basis, outstanding examples of the role of reflective thinking in integrating disparate chunks of scientific knowledge. From the perspective of an historical epistemology, it is especially interesting to study how first-order concepts of the scientific theories which were to be integrated interacted with second-order concepts in the construction of these global theories. Reflections based on first-order concepts from the whole range of science played in fact a role both for integration as well as for concept formation in single fields of scientific knowledge.
These processes are being investigated using the example of Kant's natural philosophy. Currently, a detailed documentation of the scientific concepts in Kant's precritical writings is being prepared based on an electronic access to the entire body of writing involved. This documentation comprises in particular a list of Kantian notions used in his writings until 1780. Most of the notions will be supplemented by glossary entries, clarifying their meaning and showing parallels to contemporary usage. References to Kant's writings will be given which contain definitions or give particular insights into the Kantian use of a notion. Furthermore the notions will be provided with cross-references, thus obtaining a net of interrelations among them. In order to show the diachronic dimension, each notion will be associated with brief information about the work (represented by year of appearance) in which it occurs.
The work of the research group of Lorraine Daston is directed towards an historical epistemology understood as the history of the categories that structure scientific thought, pattern arguments and proofs, and certify standards of explanation. Historical epistemology thus conceived can be (indeed, must be) instantiated by the history of specific scientific ideas and practices, but it poses a different kind of question: not the history of this or that particular use of infinitesimals in mathematical demonstrations of the seventeenth century, but rather the history of the changing forms and standards of mathematical demonstration during this period; not the history of how this or that particular fact was established in, say, nineteenth-century physiology, but rather the history of the competing forms of facticity - statistical, experimental, and observational - forged in the laboratory; not the historical judgement that this or that discipline has attained objectivity, but rather the historical investigation into the multiple meanings and concrete scientific manifestations, from photographs to standardized observation protocols, of objectivity.
Because Lorraine Daston will not officially assume her duties as director until July, 1995, her research group has not yet fully begun as a research unit: to date, only one scholar, Annette Vogt, is engaged in fulltime research in this group. The following report therefore describes planned as well as ongoing research. The group plans two investigations into historical epistemology for 1995-1997: an exploration of the varieties of scientific experience, and a study of the history of the ideals and practices of scientific objectivity, including a special project conducted by Dr. Annette Vogt on the status of women in mathematics and the natural sciences. In addition, three conferences are planned on related themes: "The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Scientific Objects" (September 1995); "The Varieties of Scientific Experience" (summer 1996); and "Proof and Demonstration" (summer 1997).
Lorraine Daston (responsible)
Empiricism is a house with many mansions. The field observation and the laboratory manipulation, for example, both constitute scientific experience, but each grounds a different form of investigation and inference. The history of science is strewn with confrontations between rival forms of experience: Aristotelian universals about what happens always or most of the time when nature is unconstrained clashed with experiments performed under deliberately artificial conditions in early modern studies of pneumatics and electricity; the clinical tact of the seasoned physician vied with self-registering instruments like the sphygmograph in nineteenth-century physiology; the legitimacy of introspection and other modes of self-experimentation still exercise psychologists and biologists. Each of these forms of scientific experience has its distinctive techniques and evidentiary standards. Historians of science have only recently begun to explore experiment as an entity with a logic and culture semi-independent of theory; the full variety, history, and interrelationships of other forms of scientific experience still await thorough study. In 1995-96 an international group of historians, with research specialties ranging from Renaissance anatomy to eighteenth-century scientific voyages to nineteenth-century experimental design, will gather at the Institute to construct in common a more refined taxonomy of scientific experience in historical context.
In the framework of this project, Lorraine Daston's research focuses on a history of the scientific fact, as it emerged as a primary category of experience in seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Although natural philosophy had been empirical at least since Aristotle, it became factual only in the seventeenth century. This claim does not conflate the factual with the experimental, although many seventeenth-century experiments were sterling examples of the new facts. Rather, what distinguished the new empiricism of facts from the old empiricism of experience was chiefly its relationship to explanation, illustration, and conjecture. Observations on everything from spawning fish to meteors abound in Aristotelian natural philosophy, but they almost always make their entrance in a demonstrative or pedagogical context. They are mustered in support or illustration of a given claim or conjecture. In contrast, the empiricism of the seventeenth century is grainy with facts, full of observations and experimental results conspicuously detached from explanatory or theoretical moorings. Indeed, the prototypical fact of this period is the singular or even bizarre event - a monstrous birth, an aurora borealis, or the luminescent Bologna stone - that steadfastly defied all attempts at explanation and theorizing. The first scientific facts were stubborn not because they would not go away - indeed, they were so ephemeral, rare, and capricious that the problem was rather to make them stay - but rather because they could not be subsumed under extant theory. Although the category of the factual remained central to scientific empiricism ever after, the prototypical fact continued to mutate: the singularities reported in the annals of seventeenth-century academies became the commonplaces of a Humean induction ("fire always burns") and later the homogeneous, countable facts of the statistical tabulation.
Lorraine Daston (responsible)
Modern usage of the word "objectivity" is hopelessly but revealingly confused. It refers at once to metaphysics, to methods, and to morals. We slide effortlessly from statements about the "objective truth" of a scientific claim, to those about the "objective procedures" that guarantee a finding, to those about the "objective manner" that qualifies a researcher. What process of historical fusion soldered the metaphysical, the methodological, and the moral into the amalgamate concept of scientific objectivity? The project centers on the mid-nineteenth century, when two distinct forms of objectivity, the mechanical and the communitarian, emerged as epistemological ideals or averages, methodological practices, and moral imperatives.
Mechanical objectivity countered the subjectivity of projection onto nature, including judgment and aesthetic idealization. It was nominalist in its metaphysics, mechanical in its methods, and self-restrained in its morals. Scientific images were no longer of types or ideals for averages, but rather of concrete individuals; wherever possible, image-making and observational procedures were mechanized, through photographs, statistical data reduction, and self-registering instruments; scientists exhorted themselves and their colleagues to refrain from premature intervention and interpretation of data. In contrast, communitarian objectivity countered the subjectivity of idiosyncrasy and parochialism, not only of individuals but also of local research groups. Proponents of mechanical objectivity worried that human intervention might distort natural phenomena; proponents of communitarian objectivity fretted about how anthropocentric scales of time and space might fail to register certain phenomena altogether - the path of a storm system, the shape of an isotherm, the distribution of a species. Communitarian objectivity preferred composites of many observations to individuals, standardized to mechanical techniques, and an ethos of solidarity to one of authenticity. The project traces these two forms of scientific objectivity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a broad span of disciplines, from astronomy to meteorology to palaeontology, paying especially close attention to the characteristic images produced by each tradition. If the emblem of mechanical objectivity was the unretouched photograph, the emblem of communitarian objectivity was the global map pieced together by a community of farflung observers.
Annette Vogt (responsible)
One core sense of scientific objectivity is epistemological: as philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it, one "view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world, or on the particular type of creature he is." What difference does the "specific" of gender make to the bare possibility of a scientific career, to selection of research topic, and/or to style of scientific reasoning? In the project a comprehensive survey of women scientists who worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft and at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität Berlin 1899-1945 will be prepared. The survey seeks preliminary answers to these and other questions concerning the involvement of women in German science in the early decades of the twentieth century. These women have all but disappeared from the histories of their disciplines, and intensive archival work is required to reconstruct their professional and private lives. Ultimately, this data base will be supplemented with comparison samples from several foreign universities and polytechnics, in the hope of highlighting cultural differences. In addition to establishing the identities and biographies of this surprisingly large group of women researchers, the study aims to discover: (1) whether women gravitated to certain institutions and specialties within science and mathematics, and if so, the reasons for such patterns; (2) what ideals and practices of early twentieth-century scientific research (including those of objectivity) helped or hindered the recruitment and participation of women; and (3) what role changing cultural views of femininity during this period in Germany played in the careers of these women scientists.
Peter Beurton
Participation in the annual meeting of the "Gesprächskreis Phylogenetische Systematik," Zoologisches Institut der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, December 11, 1994.
Address "Ernst Mayr und der Reduktionismus", conferral of an honorary doctorate in philosophy to Ernst Mayr by the Universität Konstanz and on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Konstanz, September 5, 1994.
Peter Damerow
Lecture "Number as a Second-Order Concept," international workshop on "Images of Knowledge, Two-Tier Thinking and Higher Education," The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University, April 4-7, 1994.
Participation and Lecture on "Symbol und Zahlbegriff" at the interdisciplinary colloquium on "Mediale Grundlagen der Kognition," Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Philosophy, summer semester 1994.
Lecture (Antrittsvorlesung) "Kannten die Babylonier den Satz des Pythagoras?," Universität Konstanz, October 24, 1994.
Director of the Arbeitsstelle "Albert Einstein" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (together with J. Renn).
Editor of the series "Materialien zu den frühen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients (MSVO)" (together with R.M. Boehmer, R.K. Englund und H.J. Nissen).
Teaching activities:
- Probleme der Begriffsentwicklung in der Geschichte der Nataurwissenschaften. Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Philosophy - Research Colloquium. (3 hours per week, together with W. Lefèvre).
- Epistemologie der Zahlbegriffsentwicklung. Universität Konstanz. (Kompaktseminar, 30 hours per semester).
Lorraine Daston
Lecture "Anthropomorphism and Anthrocentrism in Early Modern Science," conference on "Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Philosophy," University of Chicago, April 1994.
Lecture "A History of Scientific Objectives," University of Pittsburgh, April 1994.
Lecture "Hermaphrodites and the Order of Nature," Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, May 1994.
Lecture "Scientific Objectivity with and without Words," conference on "Die Prosa der Objektivität," Wolfenbüttel, August 1994.
Lecture "The Vertigo of Scientific Progress," conference on "Looking Back to the Future," Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., November 1994.
Member of the Advisory Editorial Boards for the international journals "Critical Inquiry" and "Science in Context" and of the series"Ideas in Context," Cambridge University Press.
Member of "American Historical Association."
Member of the "Committee on the Status of History and Philosophy of Science," University of Chicago (1994-95).
Member of the International Advisory Board of the "Einstein Forum," Potsdam.
Member of the Beirat "Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften."
Member of "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte."
Member of "History of Science Society."
Member of the Network "Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte," Berlin.
Referee for "National Science Foundation," "Volkswagen Stiftung," and the "National Endowment for the Humanities."
Referee for the international journals "Isis," "Philosophia Naturalis," "Journal of the History of Ideas," "Studies in History and Philosophy of Science," "Configurations," and "Perspectives on Science."
Referee for Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Chicago, and California University Presses.
Wolfgang Lefèvre
Lecture "Galilei und die Ingenieurwissenschaft", Congresso Internazionale Galileo Galilei, organized by the Istituto Italiana di Cultura Berlin, Berlin, November 10-15, 1994.
Lecture "Material and Social Conditions in an Historical Epistemology of Scientific Thinking", "Scienza e Potere. La politica della scienza in Europa e le sue radici storiche," Convegno promossa dalla Commissione Ricerca della Comunità Europea, Firenze, December 8-10, 1994. (Available as Preprint of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science).
Member of the Board of the "Internationale Hegel-Gesellschaft."
Teaching activities:
-- Probleme der Begriffsentwicklung in der Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften. Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Philosophy - Research Colloquium (3 hours per week, together with P. Damerow).
-- Philosophie - Wissenschaft - Gesellschaft. Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Philosophy - Research Colloquium (3 hours per week, together with A. Arndt).
Ohad Parnes
Participation in the Rathenau Summer Academy "Communicating Nature - Die Semiotisierung der Natur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert," Berlin, July 17-30, 1994.
Participation in the workshop "Gene Concepts and Evolution," Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, January 6-7, 1995.
Jürgen Renn
Lecture "The Third Way to General Relativity. Einstein and Mach in Context," Boston University, October 3, 1994.
Presentation "Electronic Working Environments in the History of Science" (jointly with I. Trucci and M. Warnke), Workshop on Digital Libraries in the History of Science, New Orleans, October 11, 1994.
Member of the Organizing Committee of the International Conference "History of science and technology for a better understanding of our time," and lecture "Epistemologie historique et interdisciplinarité," Paris, November 17-19, 1994.
Director of the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (together with P. Damerow).
Editor of "Science in Context" (together with G. Freudenthal).
Member of the Editorial Board of "Archimedes, New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technologies."
Member of the Network "Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte," Berlin.
Member of the Organizing Committee of the International Conference "Scienza e Potere. La politica della scienza in Europa e le sue radici storiche," Convegno promossa dalla Commissione Ricerca della Comunità Europea, Florence, December 8-10, 1994.
Urs Schoepflin
Lecture "Informetrie für die dokumentarische Praxis: Anforderungen und Perspektiven der Datenbanknutzung zur Gewinnung von scientometrischen Informationen" and organization of a session for the Committee on Informetrics at the Deutscher Dokumentartag, Trier, September 27-30, 1994.
Lecture "Mehrwert von bibliographischen Datenbanken" (jointly with W. Glänzel) at the Fourth International Symposium for Information Science (ISI '94), Graz, November 2-4, 1994.
Chairperson of the Committee on Scientometrics of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation.
Vice-chair of the Research Association for Science Communication and Information (RASCI).
Volkmar Schüller
Lecture "Das Problem der Trägheit von Galilei bis Newton," Congresso Internazionale Galileo Galilei, organized by the Istituto Italiana di Cultura Berlin, Berlin, November 10-13, 1994.
Annette Vogt
Lecture "Die Widerspiegelung der Weimarer Republik in Briefen von und an Emil Julius Gumbel," 1st Interdisciplinary Colloquium of History of Science, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, October 20, 1994.
Lecture "Die Anfänge der Mathematik," colloquium of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, December 7, 1994.
Leo Corry (Tel-Aviv University)
is staying from August 15, 1994 - May 18, 1995, as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the transition from classical to modern physics around 1900, in particular with investigations on "Hilbert and Relativity." Until today, Hilbert's work on the gravitational field equations of general relativity, communicated in 1915, has primarily been analyzed from the point of view of Einstein's contributions. The meaning of this particular research within the framework of Hilbert's own general conception of mathematics and of science, its roots and its scope have remained largely unexamined. Leo Corry's research is intended as a contribution to bridging this notable gap in the historiography of contemporary mathematics and physics. Besides the analytical level, this research comprises a parallel, documentary one.
Yehuda Elkana (Tel-Aviv University, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and ETH Zürich)
stayed from June 1, 1994 - October 31, 1994, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. He has developed a theory of culture which is problem oriented and does not distinguish between history, philosophy, and sociology of science, or rather of knowledge, as separate disciplines. The central concepts of this growing theory are the socially determined images of knowledge and the idea of a two-tier thinking which points to a creative dialectical tension between realism in the limited - and, by necessity, partial - theoretical frameworks, whether in trying to understand the physical world or the individual or the social history of man, and relativism in selecting and delimiting those partial theoretical frameworks. In other terms this is a comparative epistemology which is dialectical and hermeneutic, and which combines relativism and realism. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the role of reflective thinking and second-order concepts in science, in particular with respect to explanatory ideals (causal versus functional or contextualist explanations) by preparing a theoretical introductory volume to a broad study of Intellectual History of Europe: the Culture of Science: 1500 - 1900. Recently a new major project has emerged out of his work on Cassirer and on intellectual history: a critical, comparative, interdisciplinary rethinking of the Enlightenment.
Jöran Friberg (University of Göteborg)
is staying from January 15, 1995 - July 15, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His foci of research are related to his overall ambition to demonstrate the amazing continuity of the mathematical tradition, from its first development in the Mesopotamian region in the fourth millennium BC., through the Sumerian and Old and Late Babylonian periods, all the way to the advent of Greek mathematics. These foci are: numbers and methods of accounting before the invention of writing; numbers and methods of accounting immediately after the invention of writing; the beginning of mathematics in the Mesopotamian region in the third Millennium BC.; new interpretations of known Old Babylonian mathematical texts; publications of many new Old and Late Babylonian mathematical texts; new ideas about the first development of Greek mathematics and about the Babylonian influence on this development. He contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of formal sciences in particular by analyzing proto-literate metro-mathematical field texts from Uruk, Jemdet Nasr and Susa.
Catherine Goldstein (CNRS and Université de Paris Sud)
is staying from February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute; she is funded jointly by the Max Planck Society and the CNRS. Her general research topic is the construction and transmission of mathematical objects or methods in a cultural and sociological perspective, mainly illustrated by cases coming from the history of number theory. She contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of formal sciences by comparative studies (both institutional, personal, and intellectual) of the number theorists in France and in Berlin during the period 1870-1914; she is especially interested in the various uses of abelian functions and ideal numbers (and their developments) in number theoretical problems, and how these seemingly internal aspects could be connected to extra-mathematical considerations. This part of her research includes the constitution of a database of publications in number theory which have appeared in French journals or by French authors during this period. The other part of the project is to derive from these examples (and others already studied) some methodological tools for understanding mathematical practices and their representations as cultural practices. A particular focus of her work is to define and describe heterogeneous, but coherent configurations (including, for instance, a special approach to proofs, methods, types of problems, groups of reference, views on the history of the domain) and to study the transformations of their constitutive elements.
Mario Helbing (ALTES-project at the ETH Zürich)
is staying from January 16, 1995 - January 15, 1996, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. In cooperation with Ottavio Besomi he is presently finishing a new critical edition of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of the empirical sciences by analyzing the technical language of preclassical mechanics in Europe in order to provide a glossary for a group of works edited in the sixteenth century: translations of ancient treatises on mechanics (Pseudo-Aristotle, Archimedes, Vitruvius, Pappus), of related texts of the Middle Ages (Nemorarius), of mechanics in sixteenth century Italy (Tartaglia, Cardano, Commandino, Guidobaldo, Benedetti), and of texts of engineers (Ramelli and others).
Jens Høyrup (Roskilde University)
stayed from August 20, 1994 - January 31, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. One of his major research areas is the Old Babylonian so-called "algebra" (dating from the earlier second millennium BC). His detailed analysis of the language used to represent mathematical operations has allowed him to anatomize the conceptual structure of Babylonian algebra. He has shown in particular that the mathematical techniques of Babylonian algebra are based on a kind of area-geometry which is not of the Euclidean axiomatic type but which nevertheless involves deductive structures. In addition, he is working on the role of geometrical concepts for the heuristics of ancient mathematics. He has investigated a geometrical conceptual structure that is present in the mensurational geometry of several pre-modern cultures - Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, Italy of the late Middle Ages. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of formal sciences by investigating the possible impact of scientific knowledge on practical knowledge in mathematics before the modern area. In particular, he has performed a comparative analysis of ancient and Islamic (Hebrew and Latin) medieval treatises on mensuration (Hero, pseudo-Hero, al-Khwarizmi, Abu Bakr, ibn Thabit, al-Karaji, Savasorda, Fibonacci), with the purpose of checking the influence of Greek scientific geometry on medieval practical-geometrical techniques. Finally, during his stay at the Institute he completed a book manuscript with the title: As Regards the Humanities: An approach to their theory through history and philosophy which also appears in the preprint series of the Institute.
Michel Janssen (University of Pittsburgh)
stayed from May 20,1994 - July 20, 1994, as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the transition from classical to modern physics around 1900 by taking part in the detailed reconstruction of Einstein's path to the general theory of relativity, in particular by participating in the interpretation of the Zürich notebook. Furthermore, in connection with his dissertation project, he studied the transition from classical to relativistic physics using the example of the different ways in which ether theorist H. A. Lorentz and early relativist Max Laue accounted for the so-called Trouton-Noble experiment. Whereas for Lorentz the effects of this experiment were peculiar deviations from the Newtonian mechanics that was part of his theory, for Laue they were manifestations of the normal behavior of systems in a new relativistic mechanics. This suggests a comparison of Lorentz's theory with special relativity along somewhat different lines than is typically pursued in the secondary literature. The analysis of these accounts of the Trouton-Noble experiment is also relevant for the study of how the special theory of relativity acquired its canonical form.
Shaul Katzir (Tel-Aviv University)
stayed from July 26, 1994 - October 20, 1994, as a predoctoral research fellow at the Institute. He assisted John Stachel in his research on the history of the theories of relativity by examining Fresnel's work. Furthermore, he contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the transition from classical to modern physics around 1900, in connection with his Master's thesis project, by investigating Poincaré's understanding and use of the principle of relativity in the context of both his philosophical and physical writings.
Peter McLaughlin (Universität Konstanz)
stayed from August 1, 1994 - January 31, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His current research is concentrated in two general areas of the history and philosophy of science: (1) the interrelations of science and philosophy in the early modern age, focusing, in particular on the emergence of the modern empirical sciences during the Scientific Revolution and (2) the (metaphysical) presuppositions that are implicit in the conceptualizations of the objects to be explained by science. Within these broad areas he is working on three specific projects: (1) on the concepts of generation and development of organisms in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and the cognitive role of the theory of the organism in the constitution of biology as a distinct discipline towards the end of the eighteenth century; (2) on the role of experimental manipulations in the rise of modern science and its philosophy as well as on the systematic role of experimental practice in a philosophical analysis of what scientific knowledge is or ought to be; (3) on the nature, role, and legitimacy of functional explanations and teleological descriptions in science. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the role of reflective thinking and second-order concepts in science in particular by his third project on functional explanation. During his stay at the Institute he completed a substantial part of the draft of a book with the provisional title What Functions Explain. This work deals with philosophical questions on the nature of scientific explanation, in particular questions of what is already assumed about the object to be explained by the form or kind of explanation proposed. The continuing uncertainty surrounding the status and legitimacy of functional explanations and their relation to more straightforward causal explanations is shown to be connected to unresolved problems concerning reduction, holism, and so-called "downwards" (whole-part) causal relations. This epistemological project is closely related to Peter McLaughlin's research in the history of science.
Jim Ritter (Université de Paris 8)
is staying from February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute; he is funded jointly by the Université de Paris 8 and the Max Planck Institute. His research interests center around two poles: the evolution of the domain of 'rational practices' in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (which include mathematics, medicine, divination), and the aims and development of unified field theories in the physical and mathematical communities between 1920 and 1950 in the wake of the success of general relativity. He contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of formal sciences by creating a corrected corpus of the Susa cuneiform mathematical texts and by comparing this with both Babylonian mathematical practices on the one hand and Elamite administrative texts on the other. The aim is to examine the way in which mathematical practices adopted from outside of a cultural center are modified both in their structure and their application. In the case of unified field theories, Jim Ritter is especially interested in looking at German work in this area during the inter-war period as a way of determining the way in which Einstein turned increasingly from a physical towards a mathematical dimension (journals, collaborators, approaches to his subject), as well as the motivations or constraints for this change, the effect on his work, and what it means in terms of the relationships between both communities during this period.
John Stachel (Boston University)
is staying from June 1, 1994, - August 31, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. He is working on a multi-volume history of relativity theory which will concern itself not only with the origins of the theory, but also with the process of its assimilation by the physics community and the later vicissitudes of the theory, comprising not only its conceptual history as well as the experimental developments relevant to it, but also the applications of the theory in various branches of physics and technology, as well as the theory's philosophical and popular impact. John Stachel received in 1994 a grant from the American National Science Foundation that enabled him to spend one semester working on this project. He contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the transition from classical to modern physics around 1900 by working on the first main theme of his project (corresponding to the first volume of the planned book series) which centers on the history of the special theory of relativity. In the past year, investigations on the optics of moving bodies in the nineteenth century have been at the center of his interest. John Stachel has written a first draft on the subject which will be revised and extended in the near future. The next main theme (corresponding to the second and third volume of the planned book series) will cover the history of the general theory of relativity. Finally, a future theme of the project (to be covered by the fourth volume of the planned book series) will focus on unified field theories.
Postdoctoral research fellows of the Rathenau program
Continuing the final phase of the former Walther Rathenau program of the Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin in its traditional form in the period 1994/95, the Institute is presently funding five postdoctoral stipends, awarded to Richard H. Beyler, Frank Dittmann, Anke te Heesen, Agnes Miklós Illés, and Edward Jurkowitz.
headed by Urs Schoepflin
Introduction. The Library is the central information unit of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Its task is to assist research by providing literature, reference, and modern information services in all forms. This includes the acquisition or delivery of traditional printed sources like books or journals, microfiche and -films, bibliographic reference files, and extends to electronic documentations and electronic archives. With the electronic documentation the Library will not only supply reference information and sources in the history of science, but also the appropriate tools to search and handle the wealth of electronic information available worldwide. While these services will be developed subsequently along with the computerized infrastructure at the Institute, immediate decisions for building up an efficient framework for basic services had to be made. When the Library came into operation in September 1994, the following priorities were set:
-- developing a collection of reference works and major standard editions
-- identifying a set of core journals which should be available in the Library
-- developing an efficient inter-library loan service
-- linking the Library to major national and international networks
Library developments. In the founding phase, the development of the collection concentrated on reference works, major source works, and critical standard editions. Catalogues and offers of antiquarian book-shops are scanned systematically for acquisitions. The collection has greatly benefitted from the donation of the personal library of the late Lorenz Krüger. His books will be reunited and presented as a special section in the new Institute Library.
As a second information resource, a set of some 60 current journals, which belong to the core literature in the research areas of the Institute, were selected and ordered. More journal titles will be added subsequently. A choice of national and international newspapers is also available.
With the Landmarks of Science it was possible to purchase an important set of some 9000 historical works, giving immediate access to the eminent sources of the history of science on microprint and microfilm. Other newly acquired microfilm collections include Newton's Manuscripts and Papers and Einstein's Collected Works. Documents of all these collections will be made available through microfilm reader-scanners for direct reading in the Library as well as for printing or editing on the individual workstations via the internal network. In fact, the Library's microform collection is built up to be a strategic resource for the research at the Institute.
In addition, the Library offers a variety of electronic resources, mostly on CD-ROM, including bibliographic reference databases, encyclopedias, and electronic library catalogues. Some of them are networked via the inhouse LAN and can be accessed from the individual workstations. Through a modem-line the Library is connected to the Internet and has access to the databases of the German Library Service Centre (DBI, Berlin), various hosts, and the catalogues of major libraries world-wide. This service will be enhanced to include image and full-text databases and opened to end-users as soon as the Internet connections will be upgraded. Internet is seen as a major resource on the way for the Library to become a provider of "virtual information."
The Inter-Library Loan (ILL), as another of the Library's service-priorities, provides bibliographic reference and document delivery from the major research-libraries in Berlin, Germany and abroad. Thanks to agreements with lending libraries having special holdings in our field, it is possible to obtain historic material which otherwise would not be circulated. ILL provides also copies of journal articles as well as microfilms of books and other documents. Catalogues from the lending libraries can be consulted on microfiche, electronic files and trough the Internet.
The Library has not yet decided on the implementation of a comprehensive library system. At present, the holdings are catalogued in a bibliographic information file which is shared through the internal network. Care is taken that the data can be directly imported into EndNote, a bibliographic program used as a standard in the Institute. Thus, the library catalogue is not an isolated data-file, but is integrated into the working environment of the researchers. For all it's computing activities and system developments the Library closely cooperates with the Computing Service Unit of the Institute.
The collections and most of the resources of the Library are permanently accessible for members of the Institute, so that they can use the Library also during evening hours and weekends.
After the appointment of the director of the Library in 1994, a first librarian could be employed. She was joined by another librarian in February 1995. The team is supported by two student assistants.
For the next months the Library is still in provisional quarters, since the ground floor of the building is going to be reconstructed to host all the Library collections, the staff, and the special services - including reading places and other facilities. At present, the plans for equipping and designing the Library are being discussed with the architects and vendors. It is hoped to open the new Institute Library in the second half of 1995.
Scholarly activities at the Library. In addition to building up the Library of the Institute, Urs Schoepflin has also carried out scientometric research in the areas of scientific communication structures, reception processes of scientific literature, and historiography of science.
Results of an ongoing study (in cooperation with Dr. Wolfgang Glänzel, Information Science and Informetrics Research Unit at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest) investigating the differences in reception between fields of science were prepared for publication: it was found that in the current literature of medicine and physics the reception speed is much higher and the cited literature more recent than in fields like mathematics, the social sciences, or history of science. This goes along with a rapid decay (obsolescence) of the journal literature in medicine and physics, while in the other fields a longer "maturing phase" and a slower decay could be observed. In analyzing the reference structure, quantitative differences in the significance of monographs vs. journal literature could also be shown. History of science relays much more on monographic literature for communicating research results than e.g. medicine. On a methodical level, these differences have consequences for developing standard bibliometric indicators, for evaluating bibliographic reference services, and for observing reception processes by means of bibliographic databases in general. In addition to such global issues, the findings can give detailed insight in the functioning of scientific communication and in the preferences and habits of certain scientific communities. Thus one can determine the importance of an individual journal or depict the interaction between institutions or groups of authors.
In a second research area, the publication output in the field of sociology for the last 100 years was analyzed to study the quantitative development of this discipline both in terms of substance and total publications output over the time. Quantitative studies of scientific disciplines can be used e.g. to show the emergence (and decay) of fields or subfields in terms of publications or of institutions and persons, but also to describe its conceptual state at a certain historical moment. Here the classification schemes of bibliographies or library catalogues are helpful. The present study aimed also at the methodical problem of reliable empirical data: international comparisons were used to evaluate the different sources. On the bibliographic level, differences and shifts in the importance of monographic and journal literature could be shown within the discipline. These findings are backed by observations made in the other research area, where the communication structures are analyzed in terms of literature references.
headed by Jörg Kantel
The computing service unit started work in May 1994. The first tasks of the unit were
-- planning and acquisition of the entire computing equipment for the basic needs of the research projects and of the other service units of the Institute (Administration and Library)
-- planning and establishing a Local Area Network
-- training new users
-- supporting the users
-- supporting the computing facilities of the administration unit (VAX PDP 11)
-- participation in the design of the computing facilities of the Library and Documentation Unit of the Institute
-- design of the future computing facilities at the Institute
-- providing support directly to the research projects of the Institute.
Hardware of the Institute. The current state of development of the computer system of the Institute can best be described as 'maturing' from a Peer-to-Peer-Network to a decentralized Client-Server-Concept. The concept is based on a central backup server with a 10 GByte Hard-disk-Array, a server for the generally used Database-System of the Institute (FileMaker) and a server for external communications (at this time only via a modem-connection). A Mail-Server, intended as a server for the communications (internal and external) of the Institute, is currently being tested. Together with the four printers and the above mentioned servers the Local Area Network covers more than 50 participants at the Institute.
Internal and external communication. The internal communication of the Institute makes use of all the facilities of a Local Area Network, i.e. mailing and file-transfer. The unit is still busy with managing some problems concerning the establishment of external communication (WAN - Wide Area Network, Internet). The envisaged solution to this problem is the installation of a 2 MBit permanent connection to the Internet through the Fritz Haber Institute, planned for the end of March 1995. The administration unit is separately connected through a permanent link to a VAX PDP 11 system located at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology.
Support of research activities. Although the capacity of the Computing Service Unit is small, it has tried to support some of the research activities of the Institute such as
-- the development and programming of a toolbox for a scientific working environment for working with large texts and images
-- support for the scanning and OCR-activities of several projects
-- supply of electronically managed audio-visual presentations of several workshops
-- support of research projects by planning and development of a central bibliographical system.
Contact with other institutions. Close cooperation contacts were established to the
-- Computer Service Unit of the Universität Lüneburg, in particular concerning the programming of working environments for research projects which use large amounts of data
-- Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza and Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze, in particular concerning the electronic equipment for the cooperative research on the emergence of early modern mechanics (Galileo's manuscripts on mechanics)
-- the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung in Göttingen (GWDG)
In October 1994, Jörg Kantel visited Boston, New Orleans, and Champaign-Urbana in order
-- to contact the Perseus-Project at Tuft's University in Boston
-- to visit computer facilities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge
-- to participate in a workshop on digital libraries in New Orleans
-- to visit and contact the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Champaign-Urbana.
Organized by Jürgen Renn, Werner Heinrich, and Tilman Sauer
At this workshop recent progress in the reconstruction of Einstein's development of general relativity was discussed by a group of scholars working on the history of relativity which has been meeting regularly in Berlin since 1991, on the initiative of the Einstein Arbeitsstelle, as well as by a number of guests. The workshop was attended by Peter Damerow (Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education), Yehuda Elkana (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Tel-Aviv University/ETH Zürich), Hubert Goenner (Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen), Werner Heinrich (Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein), Michel Janssen (University of Pittsburgh), Wolfgang Lefèvre (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Karl von Meyenn (Max Planck Institute for Physics), John Norton (University of Pittsburgh), Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Tilman Sauer (Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein), and John Stachel (Boston University). Einstein's Zürich Notebook, containing research notes from the critical period of his work on general relativity in 1912-13, was the focus of the discussions. The identification of Einstein's major heuristic strategies by the scholars of the Arbeitsstelle was used in order to reinterpret previous work on the notebook done by the group as well as to attempt reconstructions of passages that had so far remained obscure. A first account of the results which have been jointly achieved is given in the working report of the Arbeitsstelle (Renn et al. 1994); a comprehensive reconstruction of the development of general relativity, based on the work of the group, will appear as a book.
Organized by Peter Damerow and Jörg Kantel
Recent research has brought about considerable progress in the understanding of deductive processes inherent in Babylonian mathematics. The work of Jens Høyrup has provided evidence that a careful analysis of the terminology of the mathematical cuneiform texts would result in a better understanding of the reasoning behind mathematical operation because the heuristics of Babylonian problem solving has been disguised by anachronistic translations. In order to make the sources electronically accessible for a computer-assisted reconstruction of their terminology, experts in Babylonian mathematics and Near Eastern philology have been brought together for defining conventions for the electronic coding of the texts: Peter Damerow (Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education), Robert Englund (Freie Universität Berlin), Jöran Friberg (University of Göteborg), Jens Høyrup (Roskilde University), Stephan Maul (Freie Universität Berlin), Karin Reiter (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg), Gebhard Selz (Albrecht-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), and Marcel Sigrist (Ecole Biblique, Jerusalem). The conventions the working group has agreed upon are now being applied in the data acquisition.
The symposium was one of a series of colloquia in the context of the European week for scientific culture, organized by the European Commission. The local responsibility for this conference was shared by the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, the CNRS, and the Fondation Villette-Entreprises. The Max Planck Institute, represented by Jürgen Renn, collaborated with other European partner institutions in shaping the scientific program of the symposium (Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence; Centre d'Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Liège; Deutsches Museum, München; and the Modern History Faculty, Oxford).
After an opening discussion on the relevance of history of science and technology to general history, Roger Chartier (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), John Christie (University of Leeds), Bruno Jacomy (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris), Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Helmuth Trischler (Deutsches Museum, München), and Ulrich Wengenroth (Technische Universität, München) debated on different approaches to this discipline. Other sections of the colloquium dealt with the interaction between the science and technology, with the possible contribution of the history of science and technology to science teaching, and with the role of science museums.
The conference has been initiated by the European Science and Technology Forum, which was created in 1993 by the European Community as a complement to the implementation of European Union research and technological development programs. The conference was preceded by several seminars in which a small number of scholars prepared its scientific program and coordinated several short-time research projects connected with the conference. For the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Jürgen Renn participated in these activities. Under the auspices of the European Science and Technology Forum, the conference was jointly organized by the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence (responsible for the local organization); the Centre d'Histoire des Sciences et Techniques, Paris; the C.I.S., Bologna; the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge; the Instituto Documentales e Historicos sobre la Ciencia, Valenza; the Istituto Universitario Europeo, Florence, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; and the Office for History of Science, Uppsala.
The conference dealt with the main issues and trends that have characterized the centuries-long process of institutionalization of scientific research in Europe, up to the recent implementation of coordinated research policies at Community level. It was divided into several sessions, dealing with central developmental steps in a roughly chronological order, but addressing also theoretical questions raised by the historical study of these steps: "From Patronage to the Management of Science," "The Organization and Management of Science 1800-1990," "Cognitive and Political Organization of Science," and "Science Policy, Industry and Technology." The session "Cognitive and Political Organization of Science" was organized by the Max Planck Institute, with lectures by Paul Forman (Smithonian Institution, Washington, DC), Jonathan Harwood (University of Manchester), Wolfgang Lefèvre (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Herbert Mehrtens (Technische Universität Braunschweig), Andrew Pickering (University of Illinois, Urbana), and Rudolph Stichweh (Universität Bielefeld). In the concluding session of the conference, Lorraine Daston (University of Chicago/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Yehuda Elkana (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Tel-Aviv University/ETH Zürich), Robert Fox (University of Oxford), and Arie Rip (University of Twente) discussed, at a round-table coordinated by Antonio Ruberti, on "History and its Value for Science Policy."
Organized by Peter Beurton, Wolfgang Lefèvre and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg)
Since the rediscovery of Mendel's laws at the turn of the century, genes were regarded as fairly unproblematic "last particles" of the organic world and its evolution. The molecular-biological findings of the last 20 years, however, have made the gene concept increasingly less tractable. It has turned out that any single gene may be scattered across the whole genome and may be reassembled by enzymes according to the needs of the developmental stage in question. While in the population genetic perspective of the neo-Darwinian paradigm genes continue to be treated as "last particles," this is definitely not the case from a molecular-biological and developmental perspective. At the same time, the present situation has opened up a new question about the past history of the gene concept and its old paradoxes. Possibly, the disintegration of "the gene" can thus be turned into a virtue for gaining new insights into unsolved controversies of the past. A first explanative attack on these issues was taken at the workshop on "Gene Concepts and Evolution."
The following presentations were given at this workshop which was held at the Institute in January 1995: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg): "Genes: A disunified view from the perspective of molecular biology." Peter J. Beurton (Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science): "Genes: A unified view from the perspective of population genetics." Raphael Falk (Hebrew University): "The gene: From an abstract to a material entity and back." Frederic L. Holmes (Yale University): "The DNA replication problem, 1953-1957." Richard M. Burian (Virginia State University): "Too many kinds of genes? Some problems posed by discontinuities in gene concepts and the continuity of the genetic material." Jean Gayon (Université de Bourgogne): "From measure to order: a philosophical scheme for the history of the concept of 'heredity'."
A preprint including some workshop material and the papers held at the workshop is available at the Institute.
Organized by Wolfgang Lefèvre and Ursula Klein (Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin)
The history of chemistry is a promising field for studies in historical epistemology since it displays features of the interrelationship of forms of experiences, ways of representation, and layers of knowledge which are different from those familiar from the history of physics or the history of life sciences. Hence the history of chemistry not only confronts the history of science with yet another object discipline but can significantly complement our understanding of the processes of scientific thinking. Despite the efforts of many scholars in this field, one cannot claim that the history of chemistry is a well-explored area in this respect. The Institute has therefore taken the initiative of encouraging further research in this direction. A first step is the organization of a symposium on early modern chemistry.
The so-called "Baconian" sciences deserve special attention if one wants to study the relationship between the experience of practitioners and scientific concept formation within the emergence of the early modern sciences. Post-Paracelsian and pre-Lavoisierian chemistry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has, until now, not been studied systematically from this perspective. If this chemistry was at all seen as the birth stage of modern chemistry, it was almost exclusively regarded as the result of the victorious struggle of the ideas of atomism against Peripatetic natural philosophy. Early modern chemistry before Lavoisier is, on the other hand, especially promising for gaining insights into the role reflections of processes given with certain chemical operations played for concept formation, as well as insights into the relationship between those operations and scientific experiments. Both aspects will be in the center of interest of the planned workshop.
Until now, the following scholars have agreed to give a presentation at the symposium: Marco Beretta (Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence) on the concepts underlying the terminology of the sixteenth and seventeenth century metallurgical writings; Maurice Crosland (Kent University at Canterbury) on the problems of early chemical terminology; Owen Hannaway (Johns Hopkins University) on chemistry and language from the time of Agricola to the time of Lavoisier; Frederic L. Holmes (Yale University) on the workshop topic in general; Ursula Klein (Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin) on the relationship between the concepts of chemical compound and chemical affinity and reversible operations of seventeenth century metallurgy and pharmacy; Christoph Meinel (Universität Regensburg) über die Praxis der Syndiakritischen Methode bei Jungius; and Robert P. Multhauf on the importance of the chemical technology of the sixteenth and seventeenth century for the emergence of early modern chemical concepts. It is planned to publish a book based on the results of the symposium as well as on additional research performed at the Institute in this area.
Organized by Jürgen Renn, Tilman Sauer, and John Stachel (local organizing committee)
The conference will be the fourth one in a series of international symposia devoted to the history of general relativity; earlier conferences were held in Boston (1986), Luminy (1988), and Pittsburgh (1991). These conferences provide a forum for historians, philosophers, and scientists to meet, exchange and review recent work in the history of general relativity. Approximately 40 lectures are scheduled for the Berlin conference.
Three main topics will be at the focus of this year's conference. First, investigations on the origins and development of the theory of general relativity until 1916 and on alternative historical lines of development will be discussed and reviewed. In this field important progress has been made in the past few years, in particular due to the analysis and reconstruction of Einstein's research notes but also due to the exploration of his scientific context which has shed light on the alternative paths towards a relativistic theory of gravitation.
Second, the further development and vicissitudes of the general theory of relativity after its formulation in 1915 will be discussed with emphasis on various aspects. Recent historical work will be presented on the immediate theoretical development of the theory, on the application of the new concepts of relativity theory in special fields of physics such as cosmology, on its experimental verifications and on the exploration of further consequences of the theory such as gravitational radiation. These problems very often transcend the purely historical dimension and raise questions of philosophical and methodological relevance, to which special sessions of the conference are dedicated.
Third, the public debates about the philosophical and ideological relevance and implications of the theory of general relativity, in particular during the years of the Weimar Republic, show that the history of general relativity cannot adequately be understood as a purely scientific development. After the verification of the gravitational light deflection in 1919 Einstein became a public and political figure, and cultural and philosophical disputes as well as ideological and political conflicts very often were set afire by differing assessments of his work. Consequently, investigations of the reception of the theory of general relativity will be another focus of the conference.
Organized by Lorraine Daston
As mentioned above, this symposium is the first of a series of three such symposia on the history of the fundamental categories that structure scientific thought and practice: the other two workshops will be devoted to the topics of "Proof, Test, Demonstration" and to "Varieties of Scientific Experience." The proceedings of each workshop will be published as a separate volume; the University of Chicago Press has expressed interest in publishing the series. Each symposium will include contributions from the social and human, as well as the natural sciences, exploiting the full compass of the German word Wissenschaft. The plan is to create a small, international core group of scholars, who would participate in all three symposia in order to strengthen the intellectual continuity of the series, and of course to benefit from the presence of leading scholars in the field.
The central question addressed by the first symposium in the series is, what kind of thing or event can count as an object of scientific inquiry and why? Luminescence, monsters, air currents, dreams, comets - these are all phenomena which have faded in and out of scientific inquiry. Their brute existence was never denied, but their status as scientific objects waxed and waned. How does a phenomenon come to qualify and be disqualified as a scientific object? This is a question not only about the theoretical and methodological assumptions that single out a class of things or events as worthy of study, but also about the ways in which such things and events are homogenized and solidified into public objects of inquiry - and then dissolved once more into the blooming, buzzing confusion of phenomena which are real but no longer objective. This symposium focuses on episodes in which scientific objects either come into being or pass away, in order to understand the conditions for scientific objecthood.
Scientific objects are selected, and once selected they are re-made. For every science and for every age, some highly restricted domain of phenomena seems to promise insights into the essence of things - pendula for seventeenth-century mechanics, zoophytes for eighteenth-century naturalists, the corn trade for nineteenth-century political economists, drosophila for mid-twentieth-century geneticists. But the identification of these key classes of phenomena is only half the labor of fixing a new object of scientific inquiry. The phenomena must be defined and stabilized by new techniques: manipulations, instruments, observations, and presentations must be standardized in order to make the privileged phenomena not only palpable but uniform. Instruments like the Leyden jar helped stabilize electricity as an object of scientific study in the eighteenth century, just as herbals and floras stabilized various plant species through woodcuts and copper engravings from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. The remaking of scientific objects through instruments and representations will also be a principal theme of the symposium.
Among the invited speakers are Jed Buchwald (Dibner Institute, Cambridge), Jan Goldstein (University of Chicago), Doris Kaufmann (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena), Bruno Latour (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines, Paris), Glenn Most (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg), Theodore Porter (University of California, Los Angeles), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg), Marshall Sahlins (University of Chicago), and Norton Wise (Princeton University).
Scholars who have been invited to join the core group include Rivka Feldhay (University of Tel-Aviv), Peter Galison (Harvard University, Cambridge), Ian Hacking (University of Toronto), Stephen Levinson (Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen), Krzysztof Pomian (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), and Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science).
November 9, 1994 - John Stachel: "Marx's Critical Concept of Science"
December 14, 1994 - Leo Corry: "Nicolas Bourbaki and the Myth of Mathematical Structure"
January 11, 1995 - Jens Høyrup: "Die praktische Geometrie auf die Füße stellen - oder wie man Heron in drei Stücke zerteilt, die am selben Nagel hängen"
February 8, 1995 - Yehuda Elkana: "Rethinking - not Unthinking - the Enlightenment"
March 1, 1995 - Elmar Holenstein: "Sprachliche Universalien"
(1) Publications of research scholars
Beurton, Peter John. "'Neo-Darwinism' or 'Synthesis'?" In Second Meeting of the Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science: The Philosophy of Biology in Pittsburgh, 1993.
Beurton, Peter John. "Historische und systematische Probleme der Entwicklung des Darwinismus." Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie 1 (1994): 93-211.
Beurton, Peter John. "Ernst Mayr und der Reduktionismus." Biologisches Zentralblatt (forthcoming):
Beurton, Peter John. "How is a Species Kept Together?" Biology and Philosophy (forthcoming):
Damerow, Peter. "Albert Einstein e Max Wertheimer." In L'eredità di Einstein, eds. Gualtiero Pisent and Jürgen Renn. 43-60. Percorsi della scienza storia testi problemi 4. Padova: il poligrafo, 1994.
Damerow, Peter. "The oldest written documents of mankind." In Old World Civilizations. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humankind, ed. Göran Burenhult. 26-27. Vol. 3. Sydney: Weldon Owen/Bra Böcker, 1994.
Damerow, Peter. "Vorüberlegungen zu einer historischen Epistemologie der zahlbegriffsentwicklung." In Der Prozeß der Geistesgeschichte: Studien zur ontogenetischen und historischen Entwicklungslogik des Geistes, eds. Günter Dux and Ulrich Wenzel. 248-322. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994.
Damerow, Peter and Hans-Peter Meinzer. "Computertomografische Untersuchung ungeöffneter archaischer Tonkugeln aus Uruk: W 20987,9, W 20987,11 und W20987,12." Baghdader Mitteilungen 26 (1995): 7-37 and TF 1-4.
Damerow, Peter and Martin Schreiber. "Of Clay and Computers: Deciphering and Editing Archaic Texts with Hypertext and Database Systems." In Yesterday: Proceedings from the 6th International Conference. Association of History and Computing in Odense, edited by Hans Jørgen Marker and Kirsten Pagh, Odense University Press, 363-375, 1994.
Daston, Lorraine. "Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe." Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93-124.
Daston, Lorraine. "How Probabilities Came to Be Objective and Subjective." Historia Mathematica 21 (1994): 330-344.
Daston, Lorraine. "Neugierde als Empfindung und Epistemologie in der frühmodernen Wissenschaft." In Macrocosmos im Microcosmos: Die Welt in der Stube. Zur Geschichte des Sammelns 1450-1800, ed. Andreas Grote. 35-59. Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 1994.
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. "The Image of Objectivity." Representations 40 (1992): 81-128.
Daston, Lorraine. "Fortuna and the Passions." Chance, Culture and the Literary Text. Michigan Romance Studies 14 (1994): 25-47.
Daston, Lorraine. "The Several Contexts of the Scientific Revolution. Review Essay of R. Porter and M. Teich, eds., The Scientific Revolution in National Context." Minerva 32 (1994): 108-114.
Daston, Lorraine. "Enlightenment Calculations." Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 182-202.
Daston, Lorraine (with Katharine Park). "Hermaphrodites and the Orders of Nature." Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, special issue on "Premodern Sexualities" 1 (1995): 419-438.
Daston, Lorraine. "The Cold Light of Facts and the Facts of Cold Light: Luminescence and the Transformation of the Scientific Fact, 1600-1750." Early Modern France (forthcoming):
Daston, Lorraine. "Curiosity and the Study of Nature in Early Modern Europe." In Word Image, ed. Peter Parshall. forthcoming.
Daston, Lorraine. "How Nature Became the Other: Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism in Early modern Science." Yearbook for the Sociology of Science (forthcoming):
Daston, Lorraine. "The Language of Strange Facts." In Writing/Science, ed. Timothy Lenoir. Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming.
Daston, Lorraine. "The Moral Economy of Science." Osiris issue on Critical Problems in the History of Science (forthcoming):
Daston, Lorraine. "Objectivity with and without Words." In The Prose of Objectivity, eds. Hans-Peter Becker and William Clark. forthcoming.
Daston, Lorraine. "Probability in the Seventeenth Century." In Cambridge History of Philosophy, eds. M. Ayers and D. Garber. 17th-century volume. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
Daston, Lorraine. "Scientific Objectivity and the Ineffable." In Between Physics and Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Erhard Scheibe, ed. Brigitte Falkenburg. forthcoming.
Lefèvre, Wolfgang. "Feuerbach und die Grenzen der Ethik." In Solidarität oder Egoismus - Studien zu einer Ethik bei und nach Ludwig Feuerbach, ed. Hans J. Braun. 125-140. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994.
Lefèvre, Wolfgang. "La raccomandazione di Max Talmey - L'esperienza formativa del giovane Einstein." In L'eredità di Einstein, eds. Gualtiero Pisent and Jürgen Renn. 21-30. Percorsi della scienza storia testi problemi 4. Padova: il poligrafo, 1994.
Lefèvre, Wolfgang and Peter Damerow. "Wissenssysteme im geschichtlichen Wandel." In Wissenspsychologie, eds. Friedhart Klix and Hans Spada. Themenbereich C: Theorie und Forschung - Serie II: Kognition, Band G. forthcoming.
Renn, Jürgen, Peter Damerow, Werner Heinrich, Giuseppe Castagnetti, and Tilman Sauer. Einstein in Berlin: Wissenschaft zwischen Grundlagenkrise und Politik. Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein, Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, 1994.
Renn, Jürgen and Gualtiero Pisent, eds. L'eredità di Einstein. Percorsi della scienza storia testi problemi 4. Padova: il poligrafo, 1994.
Renn, Jürgen. "Sull'utilità della filosofia per la fisica: Einstein e la nascita della relatività generale." In L'eredità di Einstein, eds. Gualtiero Pisent and Jürgen Renn. 113-133. Percorsi della scienza storia testi problemi 4. Padova: il poligrafo, 1994.
Renn, Jürgen and Robert Schulmann, eds. Albert Einstein/Mileva Mari[[paragraph]]. Am Sonntag küss' ich Dich mündlich. Die Liebesbriefe 1897 - 1903. München/Zürich: Piper, 1994.
Renn, Jürgen. "Historical Epistomology and Interdisciplinarity." In Physics, Philosophy and the Scientific Community, ed. Kostas Gavroglu et al. 241-251. Dordrecht: Kluwer academic publishers, 1995.
Glänzel, Wolfgang and Urs Schoepflin. "Little Scientometrics, Big Scientometrics - and beyond?" Scientometrics 30 (2-3 1994): 375-384.
Glänzel, Wolfgang and Urs Schoepflin. "A stochastic model for citation processes with applications to ageing and reception speed analyses." Scientometrics 30 (1 1994): 49-64.
Glänzel, Wolfgang and Urs Schoepflin. "A bibliometric study on ageing and reception processes of scientific literature in the sciences." Journal of Information Science 21 (1 1995): 37-53.
Schoepflin, Urs. "Informetrie für die dokumentarische Praxis: Anforderungen und Perspektiven der Datenbanknutzung zur Gewinnung von scientometrischen Informationen." In Dokumentartag 1994: Blick Europa! Informations- und Dokumentationsmanagement, Hg. Wolfram Neubauer. 103-105. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation, 1994.
Schoepflin, Urs. "Qualität von Datenbanken aus scientometrischer Sicht." In Information und Medienvielfalt, Hg. Wolfram Neubauer und Ralph Schmidt. 469-471. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation, 1994.
Schoepflin, Urs. "Scientometrie im Schnittpunkt zwischen Fachinformation und Wissenschaftspolitik." In Qualität und Information, Hg. Wolfram Neubauer. 69-81. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation, 1994.
Schoepflin, Urs und Wolfgang Glänzel. "Mehrwert von bibliographischen Datenbanken." In Mehrwert von Information - Professionalisierung der Informationsarbeit, Hg. Wolf Rauch, Franz Strohmeier, Harald Hiller und Christian Schlögl. 209-216. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1994.
Schoepflin, Urs und Gundula Härtel. "Zur Geschichte der Soziologie: bibliometrische Analysen zur Entwicklung einer Disziplin." In Informations- und Wissensverarbeitung in den Sozialwissenschaften. Beiträge zur Umsetzung neuer Informationstechnologien, Hg. Heinrich Best, Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer, Matthias Herfurth und Hans P. Ohly. 553-573. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994.
Schüller, Volkmar. "Das Helmholtz-Liesche Raumproblem und seine ersten Lösungen." In Universalgenie Helmholtz, Rückblick nach 100 Jahren, ed. Lorenz Krüger. 260-275. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994.
Vogt, Annette. "Bericht: Symposium "History of Mathematics and Mathematics Teaching" zum 60. Geburtstag von Jaroslav Folta, 2.-4.4.1993 in BRDO/Manetin." Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Ethik der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (NTM-Neue Serie) 2 (1994): 53-55.
Vogt, Annette. Emil Julius Gumbel (1891-1966) - Der erste Herausgeber der mathematischen Manuskripte von Karl Marx (nebst Anhang). FSP Wissenschaftsgeschichte und -theorie der Förderungsgesellschaft Wissenschaftliche Neuvorhaben mbH, 1994. Preprint Nr. 7.
Vogt, Annette and S.S. Demidov. "Zum Gedenken an Adol'f Pavlovich Jushkevich." Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Ethik der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (NTM-Neue Serie) 2 (1994): 250-252.
Vogt, Annette. "Hermann von Helmholtz' Beziehungen zu russischen Gelehrten." In Universalgenie Helmholtz. Rückblick nach 100 Jahren, ed. Lorenz Krüger. 66-86. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994.
Vogt, Annette. "Hilda Pollaczek-Geiringer (1893-1973) - erste Privatdozentin für Mathematik an der Berliner Universität." Dialektik (3 1994): 157-162.
Vogt, Annette. Nicht nur Lise Meitner... - Frauen an Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten zwischen 1910 und 1945. FSP Wissenschaftsgeschichte und -theorie der Förderungsgesellschaft Wissenschaftliche Neuvorhaben mbH, 1994. Preprint Nr. 19.
Vogt, Annette. "Rezension von Theodor Bergmann/Mario Keßler (Hrsg.), Aufstieg und Zerfall der Komintern. Studien zur Geschichte ihrer Transformation (1919-1943), Mainz: Podium Progessiv 11, 1992." Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 36 (1994): 112-113.
(2) Publications of visiting scholars
(Here only those publications are listed which were written in relation to the projects pursued by the visiting scholars at the Institute.)
McLaughlin, Peter. "Review of: Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, translated and edited by J. Michael Young, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992." Erkenntnis (forthcoming):
McLaughlin, Peter. "Review of: Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, edited by Eckart Förster, translated by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993." Erkenntnis (forthcoming):
McLaughlin, Peter. "Review of: Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, edited and translated by David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992." Erkenntnis (forthcoming):
Preprint Nr. 1 Lorraine Daston, Wordless Objectivity, 1994
Preprint Nr. 2 Jürgen Renn, Historical Epistemology and Interdisciplinarity, 1994
Preprint Nr. 3 Jens Høyrup, Old Babylonian Mathematical Procedure Texts. A Selection of "Algebraic" and related Problems with Concise Analysis, 1994
Preprint Nr. 4 John Stachel, Einstein and Bose, 1994
Preprint Nr. 5 Peter Damerow/Wolfgang Lefèvre, Wissenssysteme im geschichtlichen Wandel, 1994
Preprint Nr. 6 Yehuda Elkana, Essays on the Cognitive and Political Organization of Science, 1994
Preprint Nr. 7 Lorraine Daston, Ravening Curiosity, Gawking Wonder, and the Study of Nature, 1994
Preprint Nr. 8 Peter McLaughlin, Spontaneous vs. Equivocal Generation in Early Modern Science, 1994
Preprint Nr. 9 Jürgen Renn, The Third Way to General Relativity Einstein and Mach in Context, 1994
Preprint Nr. 10 John Stachel, Marx's Critical Concept of Science, 1994
Preprint Nr. 11 Peter Beurton, Essays in the Honour of Ernst Mayr's 90th Birthday, 1994
Preprint Nr. 12 Jens Høyrup, Linee larghe. Un' ambiguità geometrica dimenticata, 1995
Preprint Nr. 13 Jens Høyrup, On the mensuration of the "Liber mensurationum", 1995
Preprint Nr. 14 Wolfgang Lefèvre, Material and Social Conditions in an Historical Epistemology of Scientific Thinking, 1995
Preprint Nr. 15 Jens Høyrup, As Regards the Humanities... An approach to their theory through history and philosophy, 1995
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
English Homepage / German Homepage
The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science started its work in March 1994. The original board of directors, as envisaged by the Max Planck Society, consisted of Lorraine Daston, Lorenz Krüger, and Jürgen Renn. Jürgen Renn assumed his duties in March 1994, Lorraine Daston in September 1994. Presently, she is an External Member of the Institute, before assuming her directorship at the Institute in mid-1995. Due to health problems, Lorenz Krüger was unable to accept his call, but nevertheless took part intensively in the initial phase of planning the Institute. His death in September 1994 was a great loss to the Institute. The Institute will preserve his memory by offering in 1996 the Lorenz-Krüger-Award for Historical Epistemology to an outstanding philosopher of science working in the history of science.
The Institute will consist of three research groups. A first group, directed by Jürgen Renn, began its work in March 1994, a second group, directed by Lorraine Daston, has also started work already in 1994, but will not be in full operation before July 1995. A third group will be built up in the near future.
At the end of its first year of existence, the regular, permanent staff of the Institute consists of 23 persons, including support staff. In addition to the permanent and regular staff, there has been a varying number of pre- and postdoctoral research fellows, researchers working on externally funded projects, and visiting scholars, altogether 11 scholars in the period from April 1, 1994 to March 31, 1995. Furthermore the two Service Units of the Institute, the Library and Documentation Unit and the Computing Services Unit, as well as the Institute's Administration have been set up during the year.
The Institute for the History of Science is devoted to the development of a theoretically oriented history of science which studies scientific thinking and knowledge acquisition in their historical development and their interaction with the cultural, technical, and social contexts of science. While mathematics and the natural sciences form the principal objects of research at the Institute, the methodologies applied are rooted in the humanities, and in particular in studies of human culture and cognition. The development of an "historical epistemology" is a central research goal. It should comprise an historical understanding of the development of fundamental categories of scientific thinking, such as "number," "force," "causality," "experiment," "deductivity," "objectivity," "determinism," and "probabilism." The study of such overarching notions, based on detailed studies in disciplinary histories, grounds generalizations and comparative analyses beyond the conclusions which can be achieved by disciplinary histories alone. In order to further this interdisciplinary approach by broadening its empirical basis, the Institute will also explore new ways of making the sources of the history of science accessible, in particular by using the new media of information storage and retrieval.
The following report is aimed at giving an overview of the research projects which have already started or are in preparation in order to show how some of the goals described above are going to be realized in the near future.
Beurton, Peter J. ( Dr. rer.nat., 1973 [biology], Humboldt-Universität Berlin; habil. phil. 1987, Universität Potsdam): Research strategies in biological evolutionary theory; modern Darwinism and the philosophy of science (E. Mayr, K. Popper, T.S. Kuhn); population genetics, the biological species, and reductionism.
Damerow, Peter (associated), Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (Dr. math. 1977, Universität Bielefeld; habil., 1994, [philosophy], Universität Konstanz): History of Science and Education, genesis of writing and arithmetic, individual and historical development of cognition, mathematical modelling in the sciences.
Daston, Lorraine, (A.B. Harvard University 1973, Dipl. University of Cambridge 1974, Ph.D. 1979 [History of Science], Harvard University; Assistant Professor Harvard University (1980-83) and Princeton University (1983-1986); Dibner Associate Professor Brandeis University (1986-1989); Professor at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (1990-1992); Professor University of Chicago (1992-1995): history of probability and statistics (16th-19th cs.); history of forms of scientific evidence and objectivity (16th-20th cs.).
Lefèvre, Wolfgang (Dr. phil., 1971 [philosophy], Freie Universität Berlin; habil., 1977 [philosophy in connection with history of science], Freie Universität Berlin; APL-Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin [philosophy]): History of science in connection with history of philosophy on the basis of social history; sciences in Greek antiquity; early modern physics and chemistry; history of biology, 1600 to 1900.
Parnes, Ohad (M.A. 1993, [history and philosophy of science], Tel-Aviv University); history of bacteriology and immunology, German epistemology and philosophy of science at the beginning of the 20th century.
Renn, Jürgen (Dipl. Phys. 1983, Freie Universität Berlin; Dr. rer.nat. 1987 [mathematics], Technische Universität Berlin). Collaborator resp. co-editor of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (1986-92); Assistant, since 1993 Associate Professor at Boston University (1989-93) [philosophy and history of science, physics]; Simon Silverman-Guest Professor at Tel-Aviv University (1993) [history of science]; Guest Professor at the ETH Zürich (1993-1994) [philosophy]: history of early modern mechanics, history of relativity theory; interaction between cognitive and contextual factors in the history of science.
Schoepflin, Urs (Dipl.-Soz., 1975, Freie Universität Berlin; director of library): Scientific information systems; scientific communication; sociology and history of science; scientometrics.
Schüller, Volkmar (Dr. rer.nat., 1972 [physics], Universität Greifswald): history of 17th and 18th century mathematics and physics.
Vogt, Annette (Dipl.-Math., Dr. rer.nat., 1986, Universität Leipzig): History of mathematics; history of mathematics in Germany in the 19th and 20th century; history of female scientists.
Dr. Leo Corry, Tel-Aviv University, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (August 15, 1994 - February 28, 1995)
Prof. Dr. Yehuda Elkana, Tel-Aviv University, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and ETH Zürich, Visiting Scholar (June 1, 1994 - October 31, 1994)
Prof. Dr. Jöran Friberg, University of Göteborg, Visiting Scholar (January 15, 1995 - July 15, 1995)
Dr. Catherine Goldstein, CNRS and Université de Paris Sud, Visiting Scholar (February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995)
Dr. Mario Helbing, ALTES-project at the ETH Zürich, Visiting Scholar (January 16, 1995 - January 15, 1996)
Prof. Dr. Jens Høyrup, Roskilde University, Visiting Scholar (August 20, 1994 - January 31, 1995)
Michel Janssen, University of Pittsburgh, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (May 20, 1994 - July 20, 1994)
Shaul Katzir, Tel-Aviv University, Predoctoral Research Fellow (July 26, 1994 - October 20, 1994)
Dr. Peter McLaughlin, Universität Konstanz, Visiting Scholar (August 1, 1994 - January 31, 1995)
Prof. Dr. Jim Ritter, Université de Paris 8, Visiting Scholar (February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995)
Prof. Dr. John Stachel, Boston University, Visiting Scholar (June 1, 1994 - August 31, 1995)
The work of the research group of Jürgen Renn is mainly dedicated to the understanding of the historical processes of structural changes in systems of knowledge. This goal comprises the reconstruction of central cognitive structures of scientific thinking (both primary and second-order structures), the study of the dependence of these structures on their experiential basis and on their cultural conditions (in particular on instruments and external representations), and the study of the interaction between individual thinking and institutionalized systems of knowledge. Thus the interaction of three major factors in the development of scientific thinking has to be reconstructed: (1) the experiential basis of scientific thinking in a given period (including technical practice as well as scientific experiments), (2) the scientific means and external representations employed (including language, graphical representations, and formalisms), and (3) the cognitive organization and social conditions of the structures of scientific knowledge and thinking. This theoretical program of a historical epistemology is the common core of the different investigations and research projects pursued and planned by the research group.
Historical epistemology in this sense requires an integration of cultural and cognitive studies of science. While methods and results of the cognitive sciences, of the structuralist tradition of psychology, as well as of philosophical theories of concept development can help to compensate theoretical deficits in the history of science in a narrow sense, in particular when it comes to explaining thinking processes, the history of science can, inversely, contribute to overcoming the limitations of theoretical approaches whose claims have so far not been systematically confronted with the results of historical research. However, an historical epistemology would not only have to add the models and scientific arms of the social and cognitive sciences to the traditional methodological arsenal of the history of science, but also to seek a theoretical coherency that goes beyond exploiting historical case studies in order to flesh out preconceived philosophical opinions.
In order to achieve a broad historical basis for dealing with these theoretical problems and to cover at least some of the major developmental steps in the history of science, research has been inaugurated or is planned in four different areas: (1) the emergence of formal sciences such as mathematics, (2) the emergence of empirical sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology, (3) structural changes in sciences with developed disciplinary structures and integrated theoretical foundation, and (4) the role of reflective thinking and second-order concepts in science.
(1) The emergence of formal sciences. In order to reconstruct the emergence of sciences such as mathematics and logic it is necessary to investigate the development of mathematical thinking in ancient civilizations. No projects have been established until now in this research area, but several steps of preparation have been made in order to clarify the theoretical and technical preconditions.
-- In September 1994, the Institute in collaboration with Peter Damerow from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education organized a workshop on Babylonian mathematics. This workshop was dedicated to exploring the possibilities of standardizing transcription conventions of mathematical cuneiform texts in such a way that all extant documents which are dispersed in numerous collections and publications can be stored in a unified electronic database.
-- Distinguished scientists in this field have been invited as visiting scholars, Jens Høyrup (Roskilde University), Jöran Friberg (University of Göteborg), and Jim Ritter (Université de Paris 8).
(2) The emergence of empirical sciences. This area of research, in particular the investigation of preclassical mechanics, is one of the major topics already present in the earlier work of Jürgen Renn. In the new Institute he has extended the scope of his research in this area. Three projects have been launched concerning
-- the emergence of classical mechanics (Wolfgang Lefèvre and Jürgen Renn in cooperation with Peter Damerow),
-- the sources of Newton's Principia (Volkmar Schüller)
-- the emergence of microbiology and immunology (Ohad Parnes).
In addition, activities have been undertaken in order to explore other aspects of research in this area which may become a focus of future work at the Institute.
-- A workshop on the emergence of classical chemistry to be held in June 1995 has been prepared by the Institute in cooperation with Ursula Klein (Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftstheorie).
-- Mario Helbing (ALTES-project at the ETH Zürich), an expert in Latin and Italian sources of early modern science, is working as a visiting scholar for one year at the Institute. In close connection with his ongoing research activities, he is examining the feasibility of a lexicon of technical and scientific terminology in early modern science.
(3) Structural changes in sciences with developed disciplinary structures and integrated theoretical foundations. This area of research is also closely connected to earlier and ongoing research of Jürgen Renn on the transition from classical to modern physics. Although no dedicated new projects on this topic have been established at the Institute, it was a major topic already from the beginning of its research activities.
-- Jürgen Renn is heading, together with Peter Damerow, the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein at the Center for Development and Socialization of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education.
-- In April 1994, the Institute organized a workshop on Einstein's "Zürich Notebook" and the development of general relativity.
-- Distinguished scientists as well as pre- and postdoctoral research fellows working on the history of relativity theory have been invited as visiting scholars: John Stachel (Boston University), Michel Janssen (University of Pittsburgh), Shaul Katzir (Tel-Aviv University), and Leo Corry (Tel-Aviv University).
-- The Institute is organizing the Fourth International Conference on the History of General Relativity, to be held in Berlin July 31- August 3, 1995.
-- A systematic collection of sources related to the history of relativity theory has been started.
-- Furthermore, related research has also been started with regard to structural changes of knowledge in a quite different developed discipline. A project has been launched (Peter Beurton) aiming at the investigation of concept formation in evolutionary biology.
-- In January 1995, the Institute organized a workshop on "Gene concepts and evolution."
(4) The role of reflective thinking. Research in this area is presently concentrated on the historical role of overall theories of nature and of explanatory ideals (causal versus functional or contextualist explanations).
-- A project has been started (Wolfgang Lefèvre) focusing on the investigation of philosophical integrations of classical science using the example of Kant's natural philosophy.
-- Distinguished scholars working on explanatory ideals have been invited as visiting scholars, Yehuda Elkana (Tel-Aviv University, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and ETH Zürich) and Peter McLaughlin (Universität Konstanz).
In the following, short descriptions of the projects will be presented. Additionally various research activities in cooperation with the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein centered on the development of relativity theory deserve special attention. These activities will be described in some detail first.
Jürgen Renn and Tilman Sauer (Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein) in cooperation with John Stachel (Boston University), Michel Janssen (University of Pittsburgh), Shaul Katzir (Tel-Aviv University), and Leo Corry (Tel-Aviv University)
The conceptual framework of classical nineteenth-century physics had to be restructured and reinterpreted in its very fundamentals in order to arrive at a consistent relativistic theory of gravitation. It is this process which characterizes the conceptual breakthrough to Einstein's general theory of relativity in 1915 as a genuine scientific revolution. Einstein's path towards establishing a general theory of relativity has been an important topic in the history of 20th century physics over the past few years, but it is only now, after his unpublished research notes have been reconstructed in detail, that a comprehensive reassessment from the point of view of an historical epistemology becomes possible.
Einstein's path to General Relativity begins in the year 1907 with the formulation of the equivalence principle and ends in the Fall of 1915 with the discovery of generally covariant field equations for gravitation. The theory of a static gravitational field, which he had developed on the basis of the equivalence principle, was completed in the Spring of 1912. This static theory was based on a scalar field equation modelled after Newtonian physics. It was still formulated without making use of any mathematics more sophisticated than standard differential calculus. Only in 1912 Einstein did realize the relevance of Gaussian surface theory and somewhat later that of the absolute differential calculus of Ricci and Levi-Civita for his problem, identifying the metric tensor as representing the gravitational field.
The impact of this considerably more sophisticated mathematics on Einstein's thinking was crucial for the development of the theory. Fortunately, the reconstruction of this period can be founded on a rich empirical basis. Apart from a number of rather explicit publications and a well-documented scientific correspondence, it is in particular one unpublished research notebook dating from the years 1912-1913, the so-called Zürich Notebook, which allows a direct and undisguised view into Einstein's thinking at that time.
Following groundbreaking papers by John Stachel, John Norton, and a few other scholars, the investigation and reconstruction of this notebook has been the object of various research activities at the Institute in cooperation with the scholars of the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein. The identification of two distinct heuristic strategies in the notebook turned out to be an important interpretative tool for the understanding of Einstein's search for gravitational field equations. One strategy was to take physical considerations derived from classical physics, such as energy-momentum conservation and the recovery of Newton's gravitational theory in a suitable limit, as the starting point; the other strategy was to begin from mathematical considerations concerning the covariance group of candidate field equations and then to attempt to find a consistent physical meaning for the mathematical objects under consideration. The reconstruction of the calculations in the notebook has shown in particular that, following this latter strategy, Einstein had considered already in 1912 the correct field equations of 1915 (albeit in linearized approximation) and had thus come within a hair's breadth of the final general theory of relativity. But he failed to recognize the physical meaning of these equations, and turned to the alternative strategy.
The research on the notebook hence throws new light on the complex process of interaction between mathematical representation and the construction of physical meaning. In particular, the establishment and stabilization of the new physical concepts that emerged with general relativity required a minimal state of elaboration of the mathematical formalism going considerably beyond the finding of the correct field equation. Paradoxically, this state of elaboration itself had to be reached under the guidance of concepts and heuristic strategies which were themselves still rooted in classical physics. It is therefore not surprising that Einstein first published in 1913 an erroneous field equation which seemed, however, satisfactory from the point of view of his heuristic strategies rooted in classical physics, and that it took him more than two years before he returned to the correct equation which he had found in 1912. In these more than two years he elaborated the consequences both of his erroneous field equation of 1913 as well as of the other candidate field equations he had already considered in his research notebook of 1912. It was only after this exhaustive elaboration of the possibilities which were opened up by the available formalisms that the network of physical and mathematical relationships thus established had become sufficiently dense to shape and stabilize the new concepts which finally allowed him to identify the correct field equation of general relativity.
The detailed reconstruction of how Einstein discovered in 1915 that he had to give up the field equations of 1913 was one of the research topics on which Michel Janssen (postdoctoral research fellow) worked during his stay at the Institute in collaboration with the members of the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein.
The research on Einstein's development of general relativity has been complemented by various studies of both the narrower and wider context of Einstein's research:
John Stachel (visiting scholar) is working on a project supported by the American National Science Foundation aiming at documentation and interpretation of the development of relativity theory in general. While in no way slighting the magnificent contributions of Einstein, his project will analyze the more general scientific, technological, and social conditions which made the development of the theory of relativity possible. In an attempt to get away from any sense of inevitability, the historical account will be supplemented at a number of crucial points in the development by "alternate scenarios," that is, indications of alternate paths that the historical development might have taken resulting in rather different developments of the theory. During his stay at the Institute John Stachel is focusing in particular on the history of the special theory of relativity, which started from the problem of reconciling the relativity principle of mechanics with the results of the optics and electrodynamics of moving bodies in the nineteenth century, and concluded with the acceptance of the special theory by the physics community as an indispensable working tool in many fields by the middle of the twentieth century.
Shaul Katzir (predoctoral research fellow) has worked on a comparison between Poincaré's and Einstein's treatment of the electrodynamics of moving bodies and of the principle of relativity, with the aim of exploring alternative developments in the area of special relativity.
Jürgen Renn has finished a study of alternative strategies for approaching the conceptual problems solved by the theory of general relativity. He showed, in particular, that around the time of Einstein's research on general relativity, essentially two other alternative strategies were pursued in order to address the problem of gravitation, one rooted in the tradition of mechanics, the other in the tradition of field theory. On this background, Einstein's formulation of general relativity can be identified as a "third way," a peculiar mixture of field theoretical and mechanical elements. The consequences of this mixed constitution of the heuristic roots of general relativity for its conceptual development are analyzed, concentrating on the role of Mach's Principle for the physical interpretation of the theory, both in its intermediate and its final versions. Having established that the development of general relativity was not uniquely determined by the intrinsic nature of the problems to be solved, the study also includes an analysis of contextual factors that shaped Einstein's perspective on these problems, in particular his philosophical views on the foundations of physics.
Finally, Leo Corry (postdoctoral research fellow) has studied David Hilbert's work on relativity, and, in particular, his formulation of a generally relativistic field equation for gravitation, in the context of Hilbert's attempts to develop a unified axiomatic approach to the whole of physical science. One of the goals of Corry's research is to enlarge the view of the field of possible pathways which could lead to a theory such as general relativity, in close association with the research pursued by Jürgen Renn and John Stachel.
Wolfgang Lefèvre and Jürgen Renn (responsible) in cooperation with Peter Damerow
According to a distinction made by Thomas S. Kuhn experiences during the scientific revolutions of early modern times should be less important for the emergence of modern "classical" sciences (mathematics, astronomy, mechanics etc.) than for the "Baconian" sciences (chemistry, magnetism, studies of thermal phenomena etc.). The close connection between practical and scientific mechanics in early modern times is, on the other hand, well known since the work of Olschki and Zilsel. The way in which the knowledge of the early modern engineering tradition interacted with the concepts and theories acquired from the tradition of theoretical mechanics during the emergence of classical modern mechanics is, however, not yet sufficiently understood.
The exploration of the respective roles and mutual relationships of practical and theoretical knowledge in the emergence of classical mechanics is a central research goal of the project dedicated to the history of mechanics. The project comprises (1) an analysis of the technical terminologies both in scientific texts and treatises of engineers at the time of Galileo in order to reconstruct the mental models involved and their historical roots and (2) the reconstruction of the emergence of the deductive structure of classical mechanics out of new experiences assimilated to these cognitive preconditions.
This project is pursued in close collaboration with the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, and the "ALTES-Project" at the ETH Zürich.
Many of the sources documenting the emergence of classical mechanics are kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence under the responsibility of Isabella Trucci. Great efforts are presently under way to make these documents electronically accessible. In particular, a project has begun which is headed by Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, and which aims at producing electronic editions of such documents on CD-ROM which will also include the results of the work of historians of science on these texts.
At the ETH Zürich the "ALTES-Project" (Archivio del lessico tecnico e scientifico tra il Cinquecento e il Seicento), which has been launched recently and is headed by Ottavio Besomi, is dedicated to the creation of archives for the European technical and scientific terminology of the early modern period in several languages. In the framework of this project, a glossary for Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems has already been completed which is based on a new critical edition of Galileo's Dialogue by Ottavio Besomi and Mario Helbing.
The project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science uses results of these two projects and has, in particular, received copies and electronic reproductions of relevant sources. Mario Helbing from the ETH Zürich has been working since the beginning of 1995 for one year as a visiting scholar at the Institute.
The reconstruction of the emergence of classical mechanics as it is presently pursued at the Institute comprises the following aspects:
(1) Technical and scientific terminology. The investigations in this area focus on the relationships between the terminologies used in various literary traditions: early modern translations (into Latin, Italian, French, and German) of treatises on mechanics from Antiquity (e.g. those by Pseudo-Aristotle, Archimedes, Heron, and Pappus) and from the Middle Ages (in particular by Jordanus), early modern engineering treatises such as those by Ramelli, Fontana, Specklin, etc., and early modern treatises on mechanics which had a significant impact in the period from 1550 to 1650, such as those by Tartaglia, Cardano, Benedetti, Guidobaldo del Monte, Stevin, and Galileo. It is the primary goal of this research to analyze the initial basis and the further development of technical terminology in several European languages (scholar's as well as layman's languages), conceived as representations of mechanical knowledge. The work has started with an analysis of the "Quaestiones mechanicae" of Pseudo-Aristotle. This treatise, almost unknown in the Middle Ages, was translated into several modern languages in the sixteenth century, was circulated widely and quoted and discussed by many authors. The works related to the "Quaestiones mechanicae" are hence a well-defined corpus and the analysis of its technical vocabulary will form a basic nucleus for the reconstruction of mechanical terminology with which other texts can be compared.
(2) Emergence of deductive classical mechanics. The investigation of the emergence of classical mechanics aims at a comprehensive reconstruction of the conceptual and deductive structures of preclassical mechanics and their relations to the later classical concepts. The current research concentrates on a reconstruction of the deductive structures elaborated by Galileo in his manuscripts on mechanics, Mss. 72, of the Galilean collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. The collection documents Galileo's work on mechanical problems during a period of more than 40 years in which his thinking developed from its scholastic beginnings to the publication of the Discorsi, an essential contribution to classical mechanics. The manuscript collection Mss. 72 comprises some 300 pages and consists of short texts in Italian and Latin, representing sketches of proofs, but also extended drafts intended for publication, calculations, tables of calculated numbers, diagrams, and even some documents pertaining to experiments performed by Galileo. A first rough transcription and translation of Mss. 72 into English as well as a systematic study of Galileo's use of abbreviations has been almost completed. The deciphering, chronological ordering, and interpretation of this collection constitutes a necessary step in the reconstruction of the structural change of mental models initiated by the work of Galileo. In fact, a comprehensive reconstruction of the development of the conceptual and deductive structures shaping this development has not yet been accomplished, in spite of many important contributions by scholars such as Caverni, Drake, Galluzzi, Naylor, and Wisan. The results of the systematic analysis of the material will be compared with arguments in ancient and medieval texts on the same subject, with experiences documented in the contemporary technical literature, and with the outcome of modern experiments and the structures of modern proofs.
(3) Tools for the computer-assisted analysis of sources. The work on the text material is supported by systematic text acquisition using optical character recognition techniques and by the development of electronic working environments supporting the transcription, translation as well as the linguistic analysis of manuscript collections. A toolbox has been developed which allows the creation of working environments linking images, text corpora, lists of words, and technical terms.
Volkmar Schüller (responsible)
There is still a wide-spread misunderstanding concerning Newton's work on physics, according to which it can be identified with the classical physics of modern textbooks. In fact, however, so-called Newtonian mechanics was created by later scientists, such as Jakob Herrmann, Leonhard Euler, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and many others who further developed Newton's physical and mathematical principles. Only at that point was the terminology of classical mechanics created and Newtonian mechanics received its canonical form. If one wants to understand the historical conditions of the genesis of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, this work should hence not only be considered as the beginning of an entirely new classical physics but also as representing a culminating achievement of early modern physics. The investigation of the sources of Newton's physics, especially of his knowledge of the ancient authors and of his knowledge of early modern physics is, in spite of the considerable research efforts by scholars such as Rosenberg, Koyré, I. B. Cohen, Westfall, and others, a task still far from being completed.
In the context of the general goal of the research group to reconstruct the emergence of classical mechanics, Volkmar Schüller is working on Isaac Newton's Principia. He has prepared a new German translation which will be finished by February 1996. Based on his familiarity with Newton's work, he is now preparing a glossary of Newton's technical and scientific terminology. This glossary will be integrated with work done in the work group on the development of scientific terminology in early modern mechanics.
In a commentary, Volkmar Schüller describes the complex genesis of Newtons Principia and analyzes the sources used by Newton. Furthermore, in order to document the reception of the Principia by Newton's contemporaries, the reviews published in contemporary scientific journals, such as Acta Eruditorum, Journal des Savans, and others are investigated.
Ohad Parnes (responsible)
The research project of Ohad Parnes deals with the origins of immunology, comprising the development of early microbiology as a basis for its establishment. The most basic concepts underlying immunology - like microscopical agents and infection - as well as the theoretical presuppositions - mainly the demonstration of the causal role of germs in disease - were in fact developed between 1830-1875, the period of the establishment of bacteriology. These years are currently in the focus of his research while, in a later stage, he will also address the various theoretical schemes envisaged to explain the process of immunological reaction in the years 1880-1910.
Today, the demonstration of medical causality is usually associated with "Koch's postulates." These postulates (although never formulated as such by Koch himself), appear in different forms in Koch's own writings. They essentially claim that, in order to demonstrate the causal role of a parasitic agent, it has (1) to be isolated, (2) to be re-introduced by way of inoculation, and (3) to reproduce the disease under examination, typically in a laboratory animal. Koch's postulates were introduced, at least in a de facto fashion around 1876.
The postulates, as self-evident as they might appear today, embody, however, a considerable corpus of theoretical and experimental knowledge which was assembled if not generated in the few decades preceding Koch. The postulates are, in particular, based on numerous conceptual presuppositions which were established in this period, such as "parasitism," "pure-culture," "bacterial species," and "life-history" (Entwicklungsgeschichte) of micro-organisms.
These conceptual innovations in turn have been developed on the background of a process of integration of various long-range traditions of knowledge, both scientific and practical. The invention of the microscope, as well as observations of microscopical organisms date back to the seventeenth century. Practical knowledge about the process of fermentation was even older. Medicine was, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, well aware of the phenomena of epidemic and endemic diseases. The integration of these different traditions of knowledge and the ensuing consequences for conceptual innovations took place in the framework of a research program which established a structured relationship between these layers.
In fact, from about 1835 on, several scientists, most of them young, German, and in loose institutional association with each other, attempted to establish a new science of life, based on microscopic explanations. These scientists shared a program to establish a new, rigorous but also distinct science of life: rigorous - in the sense of being based on causal explanations comparable to the established science of physics; distinct - in the sense of offering a life-specific mode of explanation, independent of the prevailing physical and chemical ones (such as those of the Liebig-Wöhler school). In this context, microbiology offered a way to establish a genuine science of life, based on strict laws of causality.
Several areas of technical as well as of conceptual development are currently being examined in order to identify the conditions which made the creation of the new science possible: e.g. the development of microscopy (in particular the introduction of the achromatic microscope), the observation and classification of micro-organisms (in particular the transition from the pre-microbiological classification schemes to the gradual differentiation of the group "bacteria"), and the study of fermentation (in particular the discovery of the role of yeast in fermentation by Theodor Schwann in the years 1835-1838).
Peter Beurton (responsible)
The debate on the foundations of evolutionary biology over the last twenty-five years provides an important opportunity for the investigation of structural changes in a discipline with an integrated theoretical foundation and a developed disciplinary structure. In the history of evolutionary biology the year 1970 was a turning point, when the neo-Darwinian paradigm, which aimed at providing such a framework and which was founded in the 1930's by scientists like R.A. Fisher, S. Wright, T. Dobzhansky, or E. Mayr, gave way to a plurality of approaches to evolution. Since then, and in contrast to what may be called retrospectively the "complacent past," even the most fundamental concepts of evolution which had been developed or re-affirmed by neo-Darwinism have been called into question. No longer are there unequivocal answers to such questions as: what is meant by "adaptation," by "gene," by "species," or, in fact, by "Darwinism"? Although biology has not lost the integrative character as a discipline which it achieved in the nineteenth century, evolutionary biology can no longer be considered a conceptually unified science. Neo-Darwinian thinking remains, on the other hand, indisputably this century's major contribution to evolutionary theory. It provided the population genetic underpinning of Darwinian evolution: populations are, genetically speaking, gene pools which comprise a neverceasing resource of genetic variation for selection to act upon. However, modern alternative views of evolution pay, for example, rather greater attention to holistic properties of organisms which become manifest during individual development. Principles of self-organization which come into play via genomic structure and organismic Baupläne are seen as more important features for guiding the evolution of species than brute adaptation of populations to environmental circumstances.
These developments in evolutionary biology provide the framework of the research project. Presently, this project concentrates on the analysis of the history of the concepts of "species" and "gene."
Species. The "biological species definition" was coined in the early 1940's within the newly developed neo-Darwinian (population genetic) paradigm by Ernst Mayr who was - and still is - probably the major figure in this field. The merits of his species definition have been called into question with the crumbling of this paradigm since 1970. At present, there are some half-dozen competing species concepts, one of which has been proposed by Peter Beurton. He developed his views on the foundations of evolutionary biology in close relationship with his historical studies; he has, for instance, undertaken an analytical investigation of Ernst Mayr's publications in order to reconstruct how the latter's views of the species concept have evolved over half a century, while his species definition has remained unchanged. Although it is common to refer in matters of the species concept (positively or negatively) to Ernst Mayr, this evolution of his views has largely remained unnoticed. Peter Beurton has shown in particular that Mayr's understanding of his own species definition can be interpreted in the context of his responses to the changing intellectual climates in which he variously found himself. This interpretation has set the stage for a parallel investigation of Mayr's growing awareness of the pitfalls of reductionism in evolutionary biology across the last half century.
Gene. While in the population genetic perspective of the neo-Darwinian paradigm genes continue to be treated as "last particles," this is definitely not the case from a molecular-biological and developmental perspective. The present situation is somewhat reminiscent of that of the atom at the turn of the century: the more molecular biologists learn about the gene, the less they seem to be able to integrate their increased knowledge into one coherent concept. At the same time, the present situation has opened up the perspective of new questions about the past history of the gene concept and its old paradoxes. In order to explore the challenges posed by this development of the concept of gene, the Institute, in collaboration with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg), organized in January 1995 a workshop on "Gene Concepts and Evolution." In view of the outcome of the workshop, it has been decided to create an international working group focusing on the history of the gene concept and to plan a volume with interrelated contributions from members of this working group. The next intermediate step will be a second workshop which will be based on precirculated draft contributions to this volume.
Wolfgang Lefèvre (responsible) in cooperation with Falk Wunderlich
The classical modern sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth century consisted not only of single theories - for instance of motion in free fall, of percussion, of gravity etc. - which reached, on the basis of experiments and methodically controlled observations, a hitherto unknown level of intersubjective acceptance. The classical sciences also comprised attempts to construct overall theories of nature based on such single theories, which should be able to overcome the universal natural philosophy in the tradition of Aristotle. Examples are Kepler's "Weltharmonik," Descartes' mechanistic cosmology, Newton's speculations on "active principles," Leibniz' philosophy of "monads," Boscovic' and Kant's dynamism, and Le Sage's atomistic theory. But these overall theories failed to achieve a status of being intersubjectively shared. In retrospect it seems to be clear that the contemporary level of modern sciences provided too small a basis for these ambitious enterprises. Except among historians of philosophy these overall theories are forgotten today or mentioned only as metaphysical egg-shells of this early stage of the modern sciences.
These overall theories do deserve attention, however, if one wants to reconstruct a full picture of the emergence of the modern sciences. In particular, these theories represent, despite their entirely obsolete scientific basis, outstanding examples of the role of reflective thinking in integrating disparate chunks of scientific knowledge. From the perspective of an historical epistemology, it is especially interesting to study how first-order concepts of the scientific theories which were to be integrated interacted with second-order concepts in the construction of these global theories. Reflections based on first-order concepts from the whole range of science played in fact a role both for integration as well as for concept formation in single fields of scientific knowledge.
These processes are being investigated using the example of Kant's natural philosophy. Currently, a detailed documentation of the scientific concepts in Kant's precritical writings is being prepared based on an electronic access to the entire body of writing involved. This documentation comprises in particular a list of Kantian notions used in his writings until 1780. Most of the notions will be supplemented by glossary entries, clarifying their meaning and showing parallels to contemporary usage. References to Kant's writings will be given which contain definitions or give particular insights into the Kantian use of a notion. Furthermore the notions will be provided with cross-references, thus obtaining a net of interrelations among them. In order to show the diachronic dimension, each notion will be associated with brief information about the work (represented by year of appearance) in which it occurs.
The work of the research group of Lorraine Daston is directed towards an historical epistemology understood as the history of the categories that structure scientific thought, pattern arguments and proofs, and certify standards of explanation. Historical epistemology thus conceived can be (indeed, must be) instantiated by the history of specific scientific ideas and practices, but it poses a different kind of question: not the history of this or that particular use of infinitesimals in mathematical demonstrations of the seventeenth century, but rather the history of the changing forms and standards of mathematical demonstration during this period; not the history of how this or that particular fact was established in, say, nineteenth-century physiology, but rather the history of the competing forms of facticity - statistical, experimental, and observational - forged in the laboratory; not the historical judgement that this or that discipline has attained objectivity, but rather the historical investigation into the multiple meanings and concrete scientific manifestations, from photographs to standardized observation protocols, of objectivity.
Because Lorraine Daston will not officially assume her duties as director until July, 1995, her research group has not yet fully begun as a research unit: to date, only one scholar, Annette Vogt, is engaged in fulltime research in this group. The following report therefore describes planned as well as ongoing research. The group plans two investigations into historical epistemology for 1995-1997: an exploration of the varieties of scientific experience, and a study of the history of the ideals and practices of scientific objectivity, including a special project conducted by Dr. Annette Vogt on the status of women in mathematics and the natural sciences. In addition, three conferences are planned on related themes: "The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Scientific Objects" (September 1995); "The Varieties of Scientific Experience" (summer 1996); and "Proof and Demonstration" (summer 1997).
Lorraine Daston (responsible)
Empiricism is a house with many mansions. The field observation and the laboratory manipulation, for example, both constitute scientific experience, but each grounds a different form of investigation and inference. The history of science is strewn with confrontations between rival forms of experience: Aristotelian universals about what happens always or most of the time when nature is unconstrained clashed with experiments performed under deliberately artificial conditions in early modern studies of pneumatics and electricity; the clinical tact of the seasoned physician vied with self-registering instruments like the sphygmograph in nineteenth-century physiology; the legitimacy of introspection and other modes of self-experimentation still exercise psychologists and biologists. Each of these forms of scientific experience has its distinctive techniques and evidentiary standards. Historians of science have only recently begun to explore experiment as an entity with a logic and culture semi-independent of theory; the full variety, history, and interrelationships of other forms of scientific experience still await thorough study. In 1995-96 an international group of historians, with research specialties ranging from Renaissance anatomy to eighteenth-century scientific voyages to nineteenth-century experimental design, will gather at the Institute to construct in common a more refined taxonomy of scientific experience in historical context.
In the framework of this project, Lorraine Daston's research focuses on a history of the scientific fact, as it emerged as a primary category of experience in seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Although natural philosophy had been empirical at least since Aristotle, it became factual only in the seventeenth century. This claim does not conflate the factual with the experimental, although many seventeenth-century experiments were sterling examples of the new facts. Rather, what distinguished the new empiricism of facts from the old empiricism of experience was chiefly its relationship to explanation, illustration, and conjecture. Observations on everything from spawning fish to meteors abound in Aristotelian natural philosophy, but they almost always make their entrance in a demonstrative or pedagogical context. They are mustered in support or illustration of a given claim or conjecture. In contrast, the empiricism of the seventeenth century is grainy with facts, full of observations and experimental results conspicuously detached from explanatory or theoretical moorings. Indeed, the prototypical fact of this period is the singular or even bizarre event - a monstrous birth, an aurora borealis, or the luminescent Bologna stone - that steadfastly defied all attempts at explanation and theorizing. The first scientific facts were stubborn not because they would not go away - indeed, they were so ephemeral, rare, and capricious that the problem was rather to make them stay - but rather because they could not be subsumed under extant theory. Although the category of the factual remained central to scientific empiricism ever after, the prototypical fact continued to mutate: the singularities reported in the annals of seventeenth-century academies became the commonplaces of a Humean induction ("fire always burns") and later the homogeneous, countable facts of the statistical tabulation.
Lorraine Daston (responsible)
Modern usage of the word "objectivity" is hopelessly but revealingly confused. It refers at once to metaphysics, to methods, and to morals. We slide effortlessly from statements about the "objective truth" of a scientific claim, to those about the "objective procedures" that guarantee a finding, to those about the "objective manner" that qualifies a researcher. What process of historical fusion soldered the metaphysical, the methodological, and the moral into the amalgamate concept of scientific objectivity? The project centers on the mid-nineteenth century, when two distinct forms of objectivity, the mechanical and the communitarian, emerged as epistemological ideals or averages, methodological practices, and moral imperatives.
Mechanical objectivity countered the subjectivity of projection onto nature, including judgment and aesthetic idealization. It was nominalist in its metaphysics, mechanical in its methods, and self-restrained in its morals. Scientific images were no longer of types or ideals for averages, but rather of concrete individuals; wherever possible, image-making and observational procedures were mechanized, through photographs, statistical data reduction, and self-registering instruments; scientists exhorted themselves and their colleagues to refrain from premature intervention and interpretation of data. In contrast, communitarian objectivity countered the subjectivity of idiosyncrasy and parochialism, not only of individuals but also of local research groups. Proponents of mechanical objectivity worried that human intervention might distort natural phenomena; proponents of communitarian objectivity fretted about how anthropocentric scales of time and space might fail to register certain phenomena altogether - the path of a storm system, the shape of an isotherm, the distribution of a species. Communitarian objectivity preferred composites of many observations to individuals, standardized to mechanical techniques, and an ethos of solidarity to one of authenticity. The project traces these two forms of scientific objectivity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a broad span of disciplines, from astronomy to meteorology to palaeontology, paying especially close attention to the characteristic images produced by each tradition. If the emblem of mechanical objectivity was the unretouched photograph, the emblem of communitarian objectivity was the global map pieced together by a community of farflung observers.
Annette Vogt (responsible)
One core sense of scientific objectivity is epistemological: as philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it, one "view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world, or on the particular type of creature he is." What difference does the "specific" of gender make to the bare possibility of a scientific career, to selection of research topic, and/or to style of scientific reasoning? In the project a comprehensive survey of women scientists who worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft and at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität Berlin 1899-1945 will be prepared. The survey seeks preliminary answers to these and other questions concerning the involvement of women in German science in the early decades of the twentieth century. These women have all but disappeared from the histories of their disciplines, and intensive archival work is required to reconstruct their professional and private lives. Ultimately, this data base will be supplemented with comparison samples from several foreign universities and polytechnics, in the hope of highlighting cultural differences. In addition to establishing the identities and biographies of this surprisingly large group of women researchers, the study aims to discover: (1) whether women gravitated to certain institutions and specialties within science and mathematics, and if so, the reasons for such patterns; (2) what ideals and practices of early twentieth-century scientific research (including those of objectivity) helped or hindered the recruitment and participation of women; and (3) what role changing cultural views of femininity during this period in Germany played in the careers of these women scientists.
Peter Beurton
Participation in the annual meeting of the "Gesprächskreis Phylogenetische Systematik," Zoologisches Institut der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, December 11, 1994.
Address "Ernst Mayr und der Reduktionismus", conferral of an honorary doctorate in philosophy to Ernst Mayr by the Universität Konstanz and on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Konstanz, September 5, 1994.
Peter Damerow
Lecture "Number as a Second-Order Concept," international workshop on "Images of Knowledge, Two-Tier Thinking and Higher Education," The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University, April 4-7, 1994.
Participation and Lecture on "Symbol und Zahlbegriff" at the interdisciplinary colloquium on "Mediale Grundlagen der Kognition," Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Philosophy, summer semester 1994.
Lecture (Antrittsvorlesung) "Kannten die Babylonier den Satz des Pythagoras?," Universität Konstanz, October 24, 1994.
Director of the Arbeitsstelle "Albert Einstein" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (together with J. Renn).
Editor of the series "Materialien zu den frühen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients (MSVO)" (together with R.M. Boehmer, R.K. Englund und H.J. Nissen).
Teaching activities:
- Probleme der Begriffsentwicklung in der Geschichte der Nataurwissenschaften. Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Philosophy - Research Colloquium. (3 hours per week, together with W. Lefèvre).
- Epistemologie der Zahlbegriffsentwicklung. Universität Konstanz. (Kompaktseminar, 30 hours per semester).
Lorraine Daston
Lecture "Anthropomorphism and Anthrocentrism in Early Modern Science," conference on "Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Philosophy," University of Chicago, April 1994.
Lecture "A History of Scientific Objectives," University of Pittsburgh, April 1994.
Lecture "Hermaphrodites and the Order of Nature," Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, May 1994.
Lecture "Scientific Objectivity with and without Words," conference on "Die Prosa der Objektivität," Wolfenbüttel, August 1994.
Lecture "The Vertigo of Scientific Progress," conference on "Looking Back to the Future," Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., November 1994.
Member of the Advisory Editorial Boards for the international journals "Critical Inquiry" and "Science in Context" and of the series"Ideas in Context," Cambridge University Press.
Member of "American Historical Association."
Member of the "Committee on the Status of History and Philosophy of Science," University of Chicago (1994-95).
Member of the International Advisory Board of the "Einstein Forum," Potsdam.
Member of the Beirat "Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften."
Member of "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte."
Member of "History of Science Society."
Member of the Network "Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte," Berlin.
Referee for "National Science Foundation," "Volkswagen Stiftung," and the "National Endowment for the Humanities."
Referee for the international journals "Isis," "Philosophia Naturalis," "Journal of the History of Ideas," "Studies in History and Philosophy of Science," "Configurations," and "Perspectives on Science."
Referee for Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Chicago, and California University Presses.
Wolfgang Lefèvre
Lecture "Galilei und die Ingenieurwissenschaft", Congresso Internazionale Galileo Galilei, organized by the Istituto Italiana di Cultura Berlin, Berlin, November 10-15, 1994.
Lecture "Material and Social Conditions in an Historical Epistemology of Scientific Thinking", "Scienza e Potere. La politica della scienza in Europa e le sue radici storiche," Convegno promossa dalla Commissione Ricerca della Comunità Europea, Firenze, December 8-10, 1994. (Available as Preprint of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science).
Member of the Board of the "Internationale Hegel-Gesellschaft."
Teaching activities:
-- Probleme der Begriffsentwicklung in der Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften. Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Philosophy - Research Colloquium (3 hours per week, together with P. Damerow).
-- Philosophie - Wissenschaft - Gesellschaft. Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for Philosophy - Research Colloquium (3 hours per week, together with A. Arndt).
Ohad Parnes
Participation in the Rathenau Summer Academy "Communicating Nature - Die Semiotisierung der Natur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert," Berlin, July 17-30, 1994.
Participation in the workshop "Gene Concepts and Evolution," Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, January 6-7, 1995.
Jürgen Renn
Lecture "The Third Way to General Relativity. Einstein and Mach in Context," Boston University, October 3, 1994.
Presentation "Electronic Working Environments in the History of Science" (jointly with I. Trucci and M. Warnke), Workshop on Digital Libraries in the History of Science, New Orleans, October 11, 1994.
Member of the Organizing Committee of the International Conference "History of science and technology for a better understanding of our time," and lecture "Epistemologie historique et interdisciplinarité," Paris, November 17-19, 1994.
Director of the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (together with P. Damerow).
Editor of "Science in Context" (together with G. Freudenthal).
Member of the Editorial Board of "Archimedes, New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technologies."
Member of the Network "Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte," Berlin.
Member of the Organizing Committee of the International Conference "Scienza e Potere. La politica della scienza in Europa e le sue radici storiche," Convegno promossa dalla Commissione Ricerca della Comunità Europea, Florence, December 8-10, 1994.
Urs Schoepflin
Lecture "Informetrie für die dokumentarische Praxis: Anforderungen und Perspektiven der Datenbanknutzung zur Gewinnung von scientometrischen Informationen" and organization of a session for the Committee on Informetrics at the Deutscher Dokumentartag, Trier, September 27-30, 1994.
Lecture "Mehrwert von bibliographischen Datenbanken" (jointly with W. Glänzel) at the Fourth International Symposium for Information Science (ISI '94), Graz, November 2-4, 1994.
Chairperson of the Committee on Scientometrics of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation.
Vice-chair of the Research Association for Science Communication and Information (RASCI).
Volkmar Schüller
Lecture "Das Problem der Trägheit von Galilei bis Newton," Congresso Internazionale Galileo Galilei, organized by the Istituto Italiana di Cultura Berlin, Berlin, November 10-13, 1994.
Annette Vogt
Lecture "Die Widerspiegelung der Weimarer Republik in Briefen von und an Emil Julius Gumbel," 1st Interdisciplinary Colloquium of History of Science, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, October 20, 1994.
Lecture "Die Anfänge der Mathematik," colloquium of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, December 7, 1994.
Leo Corry (Tel-Aviv University)
is staying from August 15, 1994 - May 18, 1995, as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the transition from classical to modern physics around 1900, in particular with investigations on "Hilbert and Relativity." Until today, Hilbert's work on the gravitational field equations of general relativity, communicated in 1915, has primarily been analyzed from the point of view of Einstein's contributions. The meaning of this particular research within the framework of Hilbert's own general conception of mathematics and of science, its roots and its scope have remained largely unexamined. Leo Corry's research is intended as a contribution to bridging this notable gap in the historiography of contemporary mathematics and physics. Besides the analytical level, this research comprises a parallel, documentary one.
Yehuda Elkana (Tel-Aviv University, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and ETH Zürich)
stayed from June 1, 1994 - October 31, 1994, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. He has developed a theory of culture which is problem oriented and does not distinguish between history, philosophy, and sociology of science, or rather of knowledge, as separate disciplines. The central concepts of this growing theory are the socially determined images of knowledge and the idea of a two-tier thinking which points to a creative dialectical tension between realism in the limited - and, by necessity, partial - theoretical frameworks, whether in trying to understand the physical world or the individual or the social history of man, and relativism in selecting and delimiting those partial theoretical frameworks. In other terms this is a comparative epistemology which is dialectical and hermeneutic, and which combines relativism and realism. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the role of reflective thinking and second-order concepts in science, in particular with respect to explanatory ideals (causal versus functional or contextualist explanations) by preparing a theoretical introductory volume to a broad study of Intellectual History of Europe: the Culture of Science: 1500 - 1900. Recently a new major project has emerged out of his work on Cassirer and on intellectual history: a critical, comparative, interdisciplinary rethinking of the Enlightenment.
Jöran Friberg (University of Göteborg)
is staying from January 15, 1995 - July 15, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His foci of research are related to his overall ambition to demonstrate the amazing continuity of the mathematical tradition, from its first development in the Mesopotamian region in the fourth millennium BC., through the Sumerian and Old and Late Babylonian periods, all the way to the advent of Greek mathematics. These foci are: numbers and methods of accounting before the invention of writing; numbers and methods of accounting immediately after the invention of writing; the beginning of mathematics in the Mesopotamian region in the third Millennium BC.; new interpretations of known Old Babylonian mathematical texts; publications of many new Old and Late Babylonian mathematical texts; new ideas about the first development of Greek mathematics and about the Babylonian influence on this development. He contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of formal sciences in particular by analyzing proto-literate metro-mathematical field texts from Uruk, Jemdet Nasr and Susa.
Catherine Goldstein (CNRS and Université de Paris Sud)
is staying from February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute; she is funded jointly by the Max Planck Society and the CNRS. Her general research topic is the construction and transmission of mathematical objects or methods in a cultural and sociological perspective, mainly illustrated by cases coming from the history of number theory. She contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of formal sciences by comparative studies (both institutional, personal, and intellectual) of the number theorists in France and in Berlin during the period 1870-1914; she is especially interested in the various uses of abelian functions and ideal numbers (and their developments) in number theoretical problems, and how these seemingly internal aspects could be connected to extra-mathematical considerations. This part of her research includes the constitution of a database of publications in number theory which have appeared in French journals or by French authors during this period. The other part of the project is to derive from these examples (and others already studied) some methodological tools for understanding mathematical practices and their representations as cultural practices. A particular focus of her work is to define and describe heterogeneous, but coherent configurations (including, for instance, a special approach to proofs, methods, types of problems, groups of reference, views on the history of the domain) and to study the transformations of their constitutive elements.
Mario Helbing (ALTES-project at the ETH Zürich)
is staying from January 16, 1995 - January 15, 1996, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. In cooperation with Ottavio Besomi he is presently finishing a new critical edition of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of the empirical sciences by analyzing the technical language of preclassical mechanics in Europe in order to provide a glossary for a group of works edited in the sixteenth century: translations of ancient treatises on mechanics (Pseudo-Aristotle, Archimedes, Vitruvius, Pappus), of related texts of the Middle Ages (Nemorarius), of mechanics in sixteenth century Italy (Tartaglia, Cardano, Commandino, Guidobaldo, Benedetti), and of texts of engineers (Ramelli and others).
Jens Høyrup (Roskilde University)
stayed from August 20, 1994 - January 31, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. One of his major research areas is the Old Babylonian so-called "algebra" (dating from the earlier second millennium BC). His detailed analysis of the language used to represent mathematical operations has allowed him to anatomize the conceptual structure of Babylonian algebra. He has shown in particular that the mathematical techniques of Babylonian algebra are based on a kind of area-geometry which is not of the Euclidean axiomatic type but which nevertheless involves deductive structures. In addition, he is working on the role of geometrical concepts for the heuristics of ancient mathematics. He has investigated a geometrical conceptual structure that is present in the mensurational geometry of several pre-modern cultures - Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, Italy of the late Middle Ages. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of formal sciences by investigating the possible impact of scientific knowledge on practical knowledge in mathematics before the modern area. In particular, he has performed a comparative analysis of ancient and Islamic (Hebrew and Latin) medieval treatises on mensuration (Hero, pseudo-Hero, al-Khwarizmi, Abu Bakr, ibn Thabit, al-Karaji, Savasorda, Fibonacci), with the purpose of checking the influence of Greek scientific geometry on medieval practical-geometrical techniques. Finally, during his stay at the Institute he completed a book manuscript with the title: As Regards the Humanities: An approach to their theory through history and philosophy which also appears in the preprint series of the Institute.
Michel Janssen (University of Pittsburgh)
stayed from May 20,1994 - July 20, 1994, as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the transition from classical to modern physics around 1900 by taking part in the detailed reconstruction of Einstein's path to the general theory of relativity, in particular by participating in the interpretation of the Zürich notebook. Furthermore, in connection with his dissertation project, he studied the transition from classical to relativistic physics using the example of the different ways in which ether theorist H. A. Lorentz and early relativist Max Laue accounted for the so-called Trouton-Noble experiment. Whereas for Lorentz the effects of this experiment were peculiar deviations from the Newtonian mechanics that was part of his theory, for Laue they were manifestations of the normal behavior of systems in a new relativistic mechanics. This suggests a comparison of Lorentz's theory with special relativity along somewhat different lines than is typically pursued in the secondary literature. The analysis of these accounts of the Trouton-Noble experiment is also relevant for the study of how the special theory of relativity acquired its canonical form.
Shaul Katzir (Tel-Aviv University)
stayed from July 26, 1994 - October 20, 1994, as a predoctoral research fellow at the Institute. He assisted John Stachel in his research on the history of the theories of relativity by examining Fresnel's work. Furthermore, he contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the transition from classical to modern physics around 1900, in connection with his Master's thesis project, by investigating Poincaré's understanding and use of the principle of relativity in the context of both his philosophical and physical writings.
Peter McLaughlin (Universität Konstanz)
stayed from August 1, 1994 - January 31, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. His current research is concentrated in two general areas of the history and philosophy of science: (1) the interrelations of science and philosophy in the early modern age, focusing, in particular on the emergence of the modern empirical sciences during the Scientific Revolution and (2) the (metaphysical) presuppositions that are implicit in the conceptualizations of the objects to be explained by science. Within these broad areas he is working on three specific projects: (1) on the concepts of generation and development of organisms in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and the cognitive role of the theory of the organism in the constitution of biology as a distinct discipline towards the end of the eighteenth century; (2) on the role of experimental manipulations in the rise of modern science and its philosophy as well as on the systematic role of experimental practice in a philosophical analysis of what scientific knowledge is or ought to be; (3) on the nature, role, and legitimacy of functional explanations and teleological descriptions in science. He contributed to the research activities of the Institute on the role of reflective thinking and second-order concepts in science in particular by his third project on functional explanation. During his stay at the Institute he completed a substantial part of the draft of a book with the provisional title What Functions Explain. This work deals with philosophical questions on the nature of scientific explanation, in particular questions of what is already assumed about the object to be explained by the form or kind of explanation proposed. The continuing uncertainty surrounding the status and legitimacy of functional explanations and their relation to more straightforward causal explanations is shown to be connected to unresolved problems concerning reduction, holism, and so-called "downwards" (whole-part) causal relations. This epistemological project is closely related to Peter McLaughlin's research in the history of science.
Jim Ritter (Université de Paris 8)
is staying from February 12, 1995 - August 12, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute; he is funded jointly by the Université de Paris 8 and the Max Planck Institute. His research interests center around two poles: the evolution of the domain of 'rational practices' in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (which include mathematics, medicine, divination), and the aims and development of unified field theories in the physical and mathematical communities between 1920 and 1950 in the wake of the success of general relativity. He contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the emergence of formal sciences by creating a corrected corpus of the Susa cuneiform mathematical texts and by comparing this with both Babylonian mathematical practices on the one hand and Elamite administrative texts on the other. The aim is to examine the way in which mathematical practices adopted from outside of a cultural center are modified both in their structure and their application. In the case of unified field theories, Jim Ritter is especially interested in looking at German work in this area during the inter-war period as a way of determining the way in which Einstein turned increasingly from a physical towards a mathematical dimension (journals, collaborators, approaches to his subject), as well as the motivations or constraints for this change, the effect on his work, and what it means in terms of the relationships between both communities during this period.
John Stachel (Boston University)
is staying from June 1, 1994, - August 31, 1995, as a visiting scholar at the Institute. He is working on a multi-volume history of relativity theory which will concern itself not only with the origins of the theory, but also with the process of its assimilation by the physics community and the later vicissitudes of the theory, comprising not only its conceptual history as well as the experimental developments relevant to it, but also the applications of the theory in various branches of physics and technology, as well as the theory's philosophical and popular impact. John Stachel received in 1994 a grant from the American National Science Foundation that enabled him to spend one semester working on this project. He contributes to the research activities of the Institute on the transition from classical to modern physics around 1900 by working on the first main theme of his project (corresponding to the first volume of the planned book series) which centers on the history of the special theory of relativity. In the past year, investigations on the optics of moving bodies in the nineteenth century have been at the center of his interest. John Stachel has written a first draft on the subject which will be revised and extended in the near future. The next main theme (corresponding to the second and third volume of the planned book series) will cover the history of the general theory of relativity. Finally, a future theme of the project (to be covered by the fourth volume of the planned book series) will focus on unified field theories.
Postdoctoral research fellows of the Rathenau program
Continuing the final phase of the former Walther Rathenau program of the Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin in its traditional form in the period 1994/95, the Institute is presently funding five postdoctoral stipends, awarded to Richard H. Beyler, Frank Dittmann, Anke te Heesen, Agnes Miklós Illés, and Edward Jurkowitz.
headed by Urs Schoepflin
Introduction. The Library is the central information unit of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Its task is to assist research by providing literature, reference, and modern information services in all forms. This includes the acquisition or delivery of traditional printed sources like books or journals, microfiche and -films, bibliographic reference files, and extends to electronic documentations and electronic archives. With the electronic documentation the Library will not only supply reference information and sources in the history of science, but also the appropriate tools to search and handle the wealth of electronic information available worldwide. While these services will be developed subsequently along with the computerized infrastructure at the Institute, immediate decisions for building up an efficient framework for basic services had to be made. When the Library came into operation in September 1994, the following priorities were set:
-- developing a collection of reference works and major standard editions
-- identifying a set of core journals which should be available in the Library
-- developing an efficient inter-library loan service
-- linking the Library to major national and international networks
Library developments. In the founding phase, the development of the collection concentrated on reference works, major source works, and critical standard editions. Catalogues and offers of antiquarian book-shops are scanned systematically for acquisitions. The collection has greatly benefitted from the donation of the personal library of the late Lorenz Krüger. His books will be reunited and presented as a special section in the new Institute Library.
As a second information resource, a set of some 60 current journals, which belong to the core literature in the research areas of the Institute, were selected and ordered. More journal titles will be added subsequently. A choice of national and international newspapers is also available.
With the Landmarks of Science it was possible to purchase an important set of some 9000 historical works, giving immediate access to the eminent sources of the history of science on microprint and microfilm. Other newly acquired microfilm collections include Newton's Manuscripts and Papers and Einstein's Collected Works. Documents of all these collections will be made available through microfilm reader-scanners for direct reading in the Library as well as for printing or editing on the individual workstations via the internal network. In fact, the Library's microform collection is built up to be a strategic resource for the research at the Institute.
In addition, the Library offers a variety of electronic resources, mostly on CD-ROM, including bibliographic reference databases, encyclopedias, and electronic library catalogues. Some of them are networked via the inhouse LAN and can be accessed from the individual workstations. Through a modem-line the Library is connected to the Internet and has access to the databases of the German Library Service Centre (DBI, Berlin), various hosts, and the catalogues of major libraries world-wide. This service will be enhanced to include image and full-text databases and opened to end-users as soon as the Internet connections will be upgraded. Internet is seen as a major resource on the way for the Library to become a provider of "virtual information."
The Inter-Library Loan (ILL), as another of the Library's service-priorities, provides bibliographic reference and document delivery from the major research-libraries in Berlin, Germany and abroad. Thanks to agreements with lending libraries having special holdings in our field, it is possible to obtain historic material which otherwise would not be circulated. ILL provides also copies of journal articles as well as microfilms of books and other documents. Catalogues from the lending libraries can be consulted on microfiche, electronic files and trough the Internet.
The Library has not yet decided on the implementation of a comprehensive library system. At present, the holdings are catalogued in a bibliographic information file which is shared through the internal network. Care is taken that the data can be directly imported into EndNote, a bibliographic program used as a standard in the Institute. Thus, the library catalogue is not an isolated data-file, but is integrated into the working environment of the researchers. For all it's computing activities and system developments the Library closely cooperates with the Computing Service Unit of the Institute.
The collections and most of the resources of the Library are permanently accessible for members of the Institute, so that they can use the Library also during evening hours and weekends.
After the appointment of the director of the Library in 1994, a first librarian could be employed. She was joined by another librarian in February 1995. The team is supported by two student assistants.
For the next months the Library is still in provisional quarters, since the ground floor of the building is going to be reconstructed to host all the Library collections, the staff, and the special services - including reading places and other facilities. At present, the plans for equipping and designing the Library are being discussed with the architects and vendors. It is hoped to open the new Institute Library in the second half of 1995.
Scholarly activities at the Library. In addition to building up the Library of the Institute, Urs Schoepflin has also carried out scientometric research in the areas of scientific communication structures, reception processes of scientific literature, and historiography of science.
Results of an ongoing study (in cooperation with Dr. Wolfgang Glänzel, Information Science and Informetrics Research Unit at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest) investigating the differences in reception between fields of science were prepared for publication: it was found that in the current literature of medicine and physics the reception speed is much higher and the cited literature more recent than in fields like mathematics, the social sciences, or history of science. This goes along with a rapid decay (obsolescence) of the journal literature in medicine and physics, while in the other fields a longer "maturing phase" and a slower decay could be observed. In analyzing the reference structure, quantitative differences in the significance of monographs vs. journal literature could also be shown. History of science relays much more on monographic literature for communicating research results than e.g. medicine. On a methodical level, these differences have consequences for developing standard bibliometric indicators, for evaluating bibliographic reference services, and for observing reception processes by means of bibliographic databases in general. In addition to such global issues, the findings can give detailed insight in the functioning of scientific communication and in the preferences and habits of certain scientific communities. Thus one can determine the importance of an individual journal or depict the interaction between institutions or groups of authors.
In a second research area, the publication output in the field of sociology for the last 100 years was analyzed to study the quantitative development of this discipline both in terms of substance and total publications output over the time. Quantitative studies of scientific disciplines can be used e.g. to show the emergence (and decay) of fields or subfields in terms of publications or of institutions and persons, but also to describe its conceptual state at a certain historical moment. Here the classification schemes of bibliographies or library catalogues are helpful. The present study aimed also at the methodical problem of reliable empirical data: international comparisons were used to evaluate the different sources. On the bibliographic level, differences and shifts in the importance of monographic and journal literature could be shown within the discipline. These findings are backed by observations made in the other research area, where the communication structures are analyzed in terms of literature references.
headed by Jörg Kantel
The computing service unit started work in May 1994. The first tasks of the unit were
-- planning and acquisition of the entire computing equipment for the basic needs of the research projects and of the other service units of the Institute (Administration and Library)
-- planning and establishing a Local Area Network
-- training new users
-- supporting the users
-- supporting the computing facilities of the administration unit (VAX PDP 11)
-- participation in the design of the computing facilities of the Library and Documentation Unit of the Institute
-- design of the future computing facilities at the Institute
-- providing support directly to the research projects of the Institute.
Hardware of the Institute. The current state of development of the computer system of the Institute can best be described as 'maturing' from a Peer-to-Peer-Network to a decentralized Client-Server-Concept. The concept is based on a central backup server with a 10 GByte Hard-disk-Array, a server for the generally used Database-System of the Institute (FileMaker) and a server for external communications (at this time only via a modem-connection). A Mail-Server, intended as a server for the communications (internal and external) of the Institute, is currently being tested. Together with the four printers and the above mentioned servers the Local Area Network covers more than 50 participants at the Institute.
Internal and external communication. The internal communication of the Institute makes use of all the facilities of a Local Area Network, i.e. mailing and file-transfer. The unit is still busy with managing some problems concerning the establishment of external communication (WAN - Wide Area Network, Internet). The envisaged solution to this problem is the installation of a 2 MBit permanent connection to the Internet through the Fritz Haber Institute, planned for the end of March 1995. The administration unit is separately connected through a permanent link to a VAX PDP 11 system located at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology.
Support of research activities. Although the capacity of the Computing Service Unit is small, it has tried to support some of the research activities of the Institute such as
-- the development and programming of a toolbox for a scientific working environment for working with large texts and images
-- support for the scanning and OCR-activities of several projects
-- supply of electronically managed audio-visual presentations of several workshops
-- support of research projects by planning and development of a central bibliographical system.
Contact with other institutions. Close cooperation contacts were established to the
-- Computer Service Unit of the Universität Lüneburg, in particular concerning the programming of working environments for research projects which use large amounts of data
-- Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza and Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze, in particular concerning the electronic equipment for the cooperative research on the emergence of early modern mechanics (Galileo's manuscripts on mechanics)
-- the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung in Göttingen (GWDG)
In October 1994, Jörg Kantel visited Boston, New Orleans, and Champaign-Urbana in order
-- to contact the Perseus-Project at Tuft's University in Boston
-- to visit computer facilities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge
-- to participate in a workshop on digital libraries in New Orleans
-- to visit and contact the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Champaign-Urbana.
Organized by Jürgen Renn, Werner Heinrich, and Tilman Sauer
At this workshop recent progress in the reconstruction of Einstein's development of general relativity was discussed by a group of scholars working on the history of relativity which has been meeting regularly in Berlin since 1991, on the initiative of the Einstein Arbeitsstelle, as well as by a number of guests. The workshop was attended by Peter Damerow (Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education), Yehuda Elkana (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Tel-Aviv University/ETH Zürich), Hubert Goenner (Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen), Werner Heinrich (Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein), Michel Janssen (University of Pittsburgh), Wolfgang Lefèvre (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Karl von Meyenn (Max Planck Institute for Physics), John Norton (University of Pittsburgh), Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Tilman Sauer (Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein), and John Stachel (Boston University). Einstein's Zürich Notebook, containing research notes from the critical period of his work on general relativity in 1912-13, was the focus of the discussions. The identification of Einstein's major heuristic strategies by the scholars of the Arbeitsstelle was used in order to reinterpret previous work on the notebook done by the group as well as to attempt reconstructions of passages that had so far remained obscure. A first account of the results which have been jointly achieved is given in the working report of the Arbeitsstelle (Renn et al. 1994); a comprehensive reconstruction of the development of general relativity, based on the work of the group, will appear as a book.
Organized by Peter Damerow and Jörg Kantel
Recent research has brought about considerable progress in the understanding of deductive processes inherent in Babylonian mathematics. The work of Jens Høyrup has provided evidence that a careful analysis of the terminology of the mathematical cuneiform texts would result in a better understanding of the reasoning behind mathematical operation because the heuristics of Babylonian problem solving has been disguised by anachronistic translations. In order to make the sources electronically accessible for a computer-assisted reconstruction of their terminology, experts in Babylonian mathematics and Near Eastern philology have been brought together for defining conventions for the electronic coding of the texts: Peter Damerow (Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education), Robert Englund (Freie Universität Berlin), Jöran Friberg (University of Göteborg), Jens Høyrup (Roskilde University), Stephan Maul (Freie Universität Berlin), Karin Reiter (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg), Gebhard Selz (Albrecht-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), and Marcel Sigrist (Ecole Biblique, Jerusalem). The conventions the working group has agreed upon are now being applied in the data acquisition.
The symposium was one of a series of colloquia in the context of the European week for scientific culture, organized by the European Commission. The local responsibility for this conference was shared by the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, the CNRS, and the Fondation Villette-Entreprises. The Max Planck Institute, represented by Jürgen Renn, collaborated with other European partner institutions in shaping the scientific program of the symposium (Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence; Centre d'Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Liège; Deutsches Museum, München; and the Modern History Faculty, Oxford).
After an opening discussion on the relevance of history of science and technology to general history, Roger Chartier (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), John Christie (University of Leeds), Bruno Jacomy (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris), Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Helmuth Trischler (Deutsches Museum, München), and Ulrich Wengenroth (Technische Universität, München) debated on different approaches to this discipline. Other sections of the colloquium dealt with the interaction between the science and technology, with the possible contribution of the history of science and technology to science teaching, and with the role of science museums.
The conference has been initiated by the European Science and Technology Forum, which was created in 1993 by the European Community as a complement to the implementation of European Union research and technological development programs. The conference was preceded by several seminars in which a small number of scholars prepared its scientific program and coordinated several short-time research projects connected with the conference. For the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Jürgen Renn participated in these activities. Under the auspices of the European Science and Technology Forum, the conference was jointly organized by the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence (responsible for the local organization); the Centre d'Histoire des Sciences et Techniques, Paris; the C.I.S., Bologna; the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge; the Instituto Documentales e Historicos sobre la Ciencia, Valenza; the Istituto Universitario Europeo, Florence, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; and the Office for History of Science, Uppsala.
The conference dealt with the main issues and trends that have characterized the centuries-long process of institutionalization of scientific research in Europe, up to the recent implementation of coordinated research policies at Community level. It was divided into several sessions, dealing with central developmental steps in a roughly chronological order, but addressing also theoretical questions raised by the historical study of these steps: "From Patronage to the Management of Science," "The Organization and Management of Science 1800-1990," "Cognitive and Political Organization of Science," and "Science Policy, Industry and Technology." The session "Cognitive and Political Organization of Science" was organized by the Max Planck Institute, with lectures by Paul Forman (Smithonian Institution, Washington, DC), Jonathan Harwood (University of Manchester), Wolfgang Lefèvre (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Herbert Mehrtens (Technische Universität Braunschweig), Andrew Pickering (University of Illinois, Urbana), and Rudolph Stichweh (Universität Bielefeld). In the concluding session of the conference, Lorraine Daston (University of Chicago/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Yehuda Elkana (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Tel-Aviv University/ETH Zürich), Robert Fox (University of Oxford), and Arie Rip (University of Twente) discussed, at a round-table coordinated by Antonio Ruberti, on "History and its Value for Science Policy."
Organized by Peter Beurton, Wolfgang Lefèvre and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg)
Since the rediscovery of Mendel's laws at the turn of the century, genes were regarded as fairly unproblematic "last particles" of the organic world and its evolution. The molecular-biological findings of the last 20 years, however, have made the gene concept increasingly less tractable. It has turned out that any single gene may be scattered across the whole genome and may be reassembled by enzymes according to the needs of the developmental stage in question. While in the population genetic perspective of the neo-Darwinian paradigm genes continue to be treated as "last particles," this is definitely not the case from a molecular-biological and developmental perspective. At the same time, the present situation has opened up a new question about the past history of the gene concept and its old paradoxes. Possibly, the disintegration of "the gene" can thus be turned into a virtue for gaining new insights into unsolved controversies of the past. A first explanative attack on these issues was taken at the workshop on "Gene Concepts and Evolution."
The following presentations were given at this workshop which was held at the Institute in January 1995: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg): "Genes: A disunified view from the perspective of molecular biology." Peter J. Beurton (Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science): "Genes: A unified view from the perspective of population genetics." Raphael Falk (Hebrew University): "The gene: From an abstract to a material entity and back." Frederic L. Holmes (Yale University): "The DNA replication problem, 1953-1957." Richard M. Burian (Virginia State University): "Too many kinds of genes? Some problems posed by discontinuities in gene concepts and the continuity of the genetic material." Jean Gayon (Université de Bourgogne): "From measure to order: a philosophical scheme for the history of the concept of 'heredity'."
A preprint including some workshop material and the papers held at the workshop is available at the Institute.
Organized by Wolfgang Lefèvre and Ursula Klein (Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin)
The history of chemistry is a promising field for studies in historical epistemology since it displays features of the interrelationship of forms of experiences, ways of representation, and layers of knowledge which are different from those familiar from the history of physics or the history of life sciences. Hence the history of chemistry not only confronts the history of science with yet another object discipline but can significantly complement our understanding of the processes of scientific thinking. Despite the efforts of many scholars in this field, one cannot claim that the history of chemistry is a well-explored area in this respect. The Institute has therefore taken the initiative of encouraging further research in this direction. A first step is the organization of a symposium on early modern chemistry.
The so-called "Baconian" sciences deserve special attention if one wants to study the relationship between the experience of practitioners and scientific concept formation within the emergence of the early modern sciences. Post-Paracelsian and pre-Lavoisierian chemistry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has, until now, not been studied systematically from this perspective. If this chemistry was at all seen as the birth stage of modern chemistry, it was almost exclusively regarded as the result of the victorious struggle of the ideas of atomism against Peripatetic natural philosophy. Early modern chemistry before Lavoisier is, on the other hand, especially promising for gaining insights into the role reflections of processes given with certain chemical operations played for concept formation, as well as insights into the relationship between those operations and scientific experiments. Both aspects will be in the center of interest of the planned workshop.
Until now, the following scholars have agreed to give a presentation at the symposium: Marco Beretta (Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence) on the concepts underlying the terminology of the sixteenth and seventeenth century metallurgical writings; Maurice Crosland (Kent University at Canterbury) on the problems of early chemical terminology; Owen Hannaway (Johns Hopkins University) on chemistry and language from the time of Agricola to the time of Lavoisier; Frederic L. Holmes (Yale University) on the workshop topic in general; Ursula Klein (Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin) on the relationship between the concepts of chemical compound and chemical affinity and reversible operations of seventeenth century metallurgy and pharmacy; Christoph Meinel (Universität Regensburg) über die Praxis der Syndiakritischen Methode bei Jungius; and Robert P. Multhauf on the importance of the chemical technology of the sixteenth and seventeenth century for the emergence of early modern chemical concepts. It is planned to publish a book based on the results of the symposium as well as on additional research performed at the Institute in this area.
Organized by Jürgen Renn, Tilman Sauer, and John Stachel (local organizing committee)
The conference will be the fourth one in a series of international symposia devoted to the history of general relativity; earlier conferences were held in Boston (1986), Luminy (1988), and Pittsburgh (1991). These conferences provide a forum for historians, philosophers, and scientists to meet, exchange and review recent work in the history of general relativity. Approximately 40 lectures are scheduled for the Berlin conference.
Three main topics will be at the focus of this year's conference. First, investigations on the origins and development of the theory of general relativity until 1916 and on alternative historical lines of development will be discussed and reviewed. In this field important progress has been made in the past few years, in particular due to the analysis and reconstruction of Einstein's research notes but also due to the exploration of his scientific context which has shed light on the alternative paths towards a relativistic theory of gravitation.
Second, the further development and vicissitudes of the general theory of relativity after its formulation in 1915 will be discussed with emphasis on various aspects. Recent historical work will be presented on the immediate theoretical development of the theory, on the application of the new concepts of relativity theory in special fields of physics such as cosmology, on its experimental verifications and on the exploration of further consequences of the theory such as gravitational radiation. These problems very often transcend the purely historical dimension and raise questions of philosophical and methodological relevance, to which special sessions of the conference are dedicated.
Third, the public debates about the philosophical and ideological relevance and implications of the theory of general relativity, in particular during the years of the Weimar Republic, show that the history of general relativity cannot adequately be understood as a purely scientific development. After the verification of the gravitational light deflection in 1919 Einstein became a public and political figure, and cultural and philosophical disputes as well as ideological and political conflicts very often were set afire by differing assessments of his work. Consequently, investigations of the reception of the theory of general relativity will be another focus of the conference.
Organized by Lorraine Daston
As mentioned above, this symposium is the first of a series of three such symposia on the history of the fundamental categories that structure scientific thought and practice: the other two workshops will be devoted to the topics of "Proof, Test, Demonstration" and to "Varieties of Scientific Experience." The proceedings of each workshop will be published as a separate volume; the University of Chicago Press has expressed interest in publishing the series. Each symposium will include contributions from the social and human, as well as the natural sciences, exploiting the full compass of the German word Wissenschaft. The plan is to create a small, international core group of scholars, who would participate in all three symposia in order to strengthen the intellectual continuity of the series, and of course to benefit from the presence of leading scholars in the field.
The central question addressed by the first symposium in the series is, what kind of thing or event can count as an object of scientific inquiry and why? Luminescence, monsters, air currents, dreams, comets - these are all phenomena which have faded in and out of scientific inquiry. Their brute existence was never denied, but their status as scientific objects waxed and waned. How does a phenomenon come to qualify and be disqualified as a scientific object? This is a question not only about the theoretical and methodological assumptions that single out a class of things or events as worthy of study, but also about the ways in which such things and events are homogenized and solidified into public objects of inquiry - and then dissolved once more into the blooming, buzzing confusion of phenomena which are real but no longer objective. This symposium focuses on episodes in which scientific objects either come into being or pass away, in order to understand the conditions for scientific objecthood.
Scientific objects are selected, and once selected they are re-made. For every science and for every age, some highly restricted domain of phenomena seems to promise insights into the essence of things - pendula for seventeenth-century mechanics, zoophytes for eighteenth-century naturalists, the corn trade for nineteenth-century political economists, drosophila for mid-twentieth-century geneticists. But the identification of these key classes of phenomena is only half the labor of fixing a new object of scientific inquiry. The phenomena must be defined and stabilized by new techniques: manipulations, instruments, observations, and presentations must be standardized in order to make the privileged phenomena not only palpable but uniform. Instruments like the Leyden jar helped stabilize electricity as an object of scientific study in the eighteenth century, just as herbals and floras stabilized various plant species through woodcuts and copper engravings from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. The remaking of scientific objects through instruments and representations will also be a principal theme of the symposium.
Among the invited speakers are Jed Buchwald (Dibner Institute, Cambridge), Jan Goldstein (University of Chicago), Doris Kaufmann (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena), Bruno Latour (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines, Paris), Glenn Most (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg), Theodore Porter (University of California, Los Angeles), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg), Marshall Sahlins (University of Chicago), and Norton Wise (Princeton University).
Scholars who have been invited to join the core group include Rivka Feldhay (University of Tel-Aviv), Peter Galison (Harvard University, Cambridge), Ian Hacking (University of Toronto), Stephen Levinson (Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen), Krzysztof Pomian (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), and Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science).
November 9, 1994 - John Stachel: "Marx's Critical Concept of Science"
December 14, 1994 - Leo Corry: "Nicolas Bourbaki and the Myth of Mathematical Structure"
January 11, 1995 - Jens Høyrup: "Die praktische Geometrie auf die Füße stellen - oder wie man Heron in drei Stücke zerteilt, die am selben Nagel hängen"
February 8, 1995 - Yehuda Elkana: "Rethinking - not Unthinking - the Enlightenment"
March 1, 1995 - Elmar Holenstein: "Sprachliche Universalien"
(1) Publications of research scholars
Beurton, Peter John. "'Neo-Darwinism' or 'Synthesis'?" In Second Meeting of the Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science: The Philosophy of Biology in Pittsburgh, 1993.
Beurton, Peter John. "Historische und systematische Probleme der Entwicklung des Darwinismus." Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie 1 (1994): 93-211.
Beurton, Peter John. "Ernst Mayr und der Reduktionismus." Biologisches Zentralblatt (forthcoming):
Beurton, Peter John. "How is a Species Kept Together?" Biology and Philosophy (forthcoming):
Damerow, Peter. "Albert Einstein e Max Wertheimer." In L'eredità di Einstein, eds. Gualtiero Pisent and Jürgen Renn. 43-60. Percorsi della scienza storia testi problemi 4. Padova: il poligrafo, 1994.
Damerow, Peter. "The oldest written documents of mankind." In Old World Civilizations. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humankind, ed. Göran Burenhult. 26-27. Vol. 3. Sydney: Weldon Owen/Bra Böcker, 1994.
Damerow, Peter. "Vorüberlegungen zu einer historischen Epistemologie der zahlbegriffsentwicklung." In Der Prozeß der Geistesgeschichte: Studien zur ontogenetischen und historischen Entwicklungslogik des Geistes, eds. Günter Dux and Ulrich Wenzel. 248-322. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994.
Damerow, Peter and Hans-Peter Meinzer. "Computertomografische Untersuchung ungeöffneter archaischer Tonkugeln aus Uruk: W 20987,9, W 20987,11 und W20987,12." Baghdader Mitteilungen 26 (1995): 7-37 and TF 1-4.
Damerow, Peter and Martin Schreiber. "Of Clay and Computers: Deciphering and Editing Archaic Texts with Hypertext and Database Systems." In Yesterday: Proceedings from the 6th International Conference. Association of History and Computing in Odense, edited by Hans Jørgen Marker and Kirsten Pagh, Odense University Press, 363-375, 1994.
Daston, Lorraine. "Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe." Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93-124.
Daston, Lorraine. "How Probabilities Came to Be Objective and Subjective." Historia Mathematica 21 (1994): 330-344.
Daston, Lorraine. "Neugierde als Empfindung und Epistemologie in der frühmodernen Wissenschaft." In Macrocosmos im Microcosmos: Die Welt in der Stube. Zur Geschichte des Sammelns 1450-1800, ed. Andreas Grote. 35-59. Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 1994.
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. "The Image of Objectivity." Representations 40 (1992): 81-128.
Daston, Lorraine. "Fortuna and the Passions." Chance, Culture and the Literary Text. Michigan Romance Studies 14 (1994): 25-47.
Daston, Lorraine. "The Several Contexts of the Scientific Revolution. Review Essay of R. Porter and M. Teich, eds., The Scientific Revolution in National Context." Minerva 32 (1994): 108-114.
Daston, Lorraine. "Enlightenment Calculations." Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 182-202.
Daston, Lorraine (with Katharine Park). "Hermaphrodites and the Orders of Nature." Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, special issue on "Premodern Sexualities" 1 (1995): 419-438.
Daston, Lorraine. "The Cold Light of Facts and the Facts of Cold Light: Luminescence and the Transformation of the Scientific Fact, 1600-1750." Early Modern France (forthcoming):
Daston, Lorraine. "Curiosity and the Study of Nature in Early Modern Europe." In Word Image, ed. Peter Parshall. forthcoming.
Daston, Lorraine. "How Nature Became the Other: Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism in Early modern Science." Yearbook for the Sociology of Science (forthcoming):
Daston, Lorraine. "The Language of Strange Facts." In Writing/Science, ed. Timothy Lenoir. Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming.
Daston, Lorraine. "The Moral Economy of Science." Osiris issue on Critical Problems in the History of Science (forthcoming):
Daston, Lorraine. "Objectivity with and without Words." In The Prose of Objectivity, eds. Hans-Peter Becker and William Clark. forthcoming.
Daston, Lorraine. "Probability in the Seventeenth Century." In Cambridge History of Philosophy, eds. M. Ayers and D. Garber. 17th-century volume. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
Daston, Lorraine. "Scientific Objectivity and the Ineffable." In Between Physics and Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Erhard Scheibe, ed. Brigitte Falkenburg. forthcoming.
Lefèvre, Wolfgang. "Feuerbach und die Grenzen der Ethik." In Solidarität oder Egoismus - Studien zu einer Ethik bei und nach Ludwig Feuerbach, ed. Hans J. Braun. 125-140. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994.
Lefèvre, Wolfgang. "La raccomandazione di Max Talmey - L'esperienza formativa del giovane Einstein." In L'eredità di Einstein, eds. Gualtiero Pisent and Jürgen Renn. 21-30. Percorsi della scienza storia testi problemi 4. Padova: il poligrafo, 1994.
Lefèvre, Wolfgang and Peter Damerow. "Wissenssysteme im geschichtlichen Wandel." In Wissenspsychologie, eds. Friedhart Klix and Hans Spada. Themenbereich C: Theorie und Forschung - Serie II: Kognition, Band G. forthcoming.
Renn, Jürgen, Peter Damerow, Werner Heinrich, Giuseppe Castagnetti, and Tilman Sauer. Einstein in Berlin: Wissenschaft zwischen Grundlagenkrise und Politik. Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein, Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, 1994.
Renn, Jürgen and Gualtiero Pisent, eds. L'eredità di Einstein. Percorsi della scienza storia testi problemi 4. Padova: il poligrafo, 1994.
Renn, Jürgen. "Sull'utilità della filosofia per la fisica: Einstein e la nascita della relatività generale." In L'eredità di Einstein, eds. Gualtiero Pisent and Jürgen Renn. 113-133. Percorsi della scienza storia testi problemi 4. Padova: il poligrafo, 1994.
Renn, Jürgen and Robert Schulmann, eds. Albert Einstein/Mileva Mari[[paragraph]]. Am Sonntag küss' ich Dich mündlich. Die Liebesbriefe 1897 - 1903. München/Zürich: Piper, 1994.
Renn, Jürgen. "Historical Epistomology and Interdisciplinarity." In Physics, Philosophy and the Scientific Community, ed. Kostas Gavroglu et al. 241-251. Dordrecht: Kluwer academic publishers, 1995.
Glänzel, Wolfgang and Urs Schoepflin. "Little Scientometrics, Big Scientometrics - and beyond?" Scientometrics 30 (2-3 1994): 375-384.
Glänzel, Wolfgang and Urs Schoepflin. "A stochastic model for citation processes with applications to ageing and reception speed analyses." Scientometrics 30 (1 1994): 49-64.
Glänzel, Wolfgang and Urs Schoepflin. "A bibliometric study on ageing and reception processes of scientific literature in the sciences." Journal of Information Science 21 (1 1995): 37-53.
Schoepflin, Urs. "Informetrie für die dokumentarische Praxis: Anforderungen und Perspektiven der Datenbanknutzung zur Gewinnung von scientometrischen Informationen." In Dokumentartag 1994: Blick Europa! Informations- und Dokumentationsmanagement, Hg. Wolfram Neubauer. 103-105. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation, 1994.
Schoepflin, Urs. "Qualität von Datenbanken aus scientometrischer Sicht." In Information und Medienvielfalt, Hg. Wolfram Neubauer und Ralph Schmidt. 469-471. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation, 1994.
Schoepflin, Urs. "Scientometrie im Schnittpunkt zwischen Fachinformation und Wissenschaftspolitik." In Qualität und Information, Hg. Wolfram Neubauer. 69-81. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Dokumentation, 1994.
Schoepflin, Urs und Wolfgang Glänzel. "Mehrwert von bibliographischen Datenbanken." In Mehrwert von Information - Professionalisierung der Informationsarbeit, Hg. Wolf Rauch, Franz Strohmeier, Harald Hiller und Christian Schlögl. 209-216. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1994.
Schoepflin, Urs und Gundula Härtel. "Zur Geschichte der Soziologie: bibliometrische Analysen zur Entwicklung einer Disziplin." In Informations- und Wissensverarbeitung in den Sozialwissenschaften. Beiträge zur Umsetzung neuer Informationstechnologien, Hg. Heinrich Best, Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer, Matthias Herfurth und Hans P. Ohly. 553-573. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994.
Schüller, Volkmar. "Das Helmholtz-Liesche Raumproblem und seine ersten Lösungen." In Universalgenie Helmholtz, Rückblick nach 100 Jahren, ed. Lorenz Krüger. 260-275. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994.
Vogt, Annette. "Bericht: Symposium "History of Mathematics and Mathematics Teaching" zum 60. Geburtstag von Jaroslav Folta, 2.-4.4.1993 in BRDO/Manetin." Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Ethik der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (NTM-Neue Serie) 2 (1994): 53-55.
Vogt, Annette. Emil Julius Gumbel (1891-1966) - Der erste Herausgeber der mathematischen Manuskripte von Karl Marx (nebst Anhang). FSP Wissenschaftsgeschichte und -theorie der Förderungsgesellschaft Wissenschaftliche Neuvorhaben mbH, 1994. Preprint Nr. 7.
Vogt, Annette and S.S. Demidov. "Zum Gedenken an Adol'f Pavlovich Jushkevich." Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Ethik der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (NTM-Neue Serie) 2 (1994): 250-252.
Vogt, Annette. "Hermann von Helmholtz' Beziehungen zu russischen Gelehrten." In Universalgenie Helmholtz. Rückblick nach 100 Jahren, ed. Lorenz Krüger. 66-86. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994.
Vogt, Annette. "Hilda Pollaczek-Geiringer (1893-1973) - erste Privatdozentin für Mathematik an der Berliner Universität." Dialektik (3 1994): 157-162.
Vogt, Annette. Nicht nur Lise Meitner... - Frauen an Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten zwischen 1910 und 1945. FSP Wissenschaftsgeschichte und -theorie der Förderungsgesellschaft Wissenschaftliche Neuvorhaben mbH, 1994. Preprint Nr. 19.
Vogt, Annette. "Rezension von Theodor Bergmann/Mario Keßler (Hrsg.), Aufstieg und Zerfall der Komintern. Studien zur Geschichte ihrer Transformation (1919-1943), Mainz: Podium Progessiv 11, 1992." Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 36 (1994): 112-113.
(2) Publications of visiting scholars
(Here only those publications are listed which were written in relation to the projects pursued by the visiting scholars at the Institute.)
McLaughlin, Peter. "Review of: Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, translated and edited by J. Michael Young, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992." Erkenntnis (forthcoming):
McLaughlin, Peter. "Review of: Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, edited by Eckart Förster, translated by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993." Erkenntnis (forthcoming):
McLaughlin, Peter. "Review of: Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, edited and translated by David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992." Erkenntnis (forthcoming):
Preprint Nr. 1 Lorraine Daston, Wordless Objectivity, 1994
Preprint Nr. 2 Jürgen Renn, Historical Epistemology and Interdisciplinarity, 1994
Preprint Nr. 3 Jens Høyrup, Old Babylonian Mathematical Procedure Texts. A Selection of "Algebraic" and related Problems with Concise Analysis, 1994
Preprint Nr. 4 John Stachel, Einstein and Bose, 1994
Preprint Nr. 5 Peter Damerow/Wolfgang Lefèvre, Wissenssysteme im geschichtlichen Wandel, 1994
Preprint Nr. 6 Yehuda Elkana, Essays on the Cognitive and Political Organization of Science, 1994
Preprint Nr. 7 Lorraine Daston, Ravening Curiosity, Gawking Wonder, and the Study of Nature, 1994
Preprint Nr. 8 Peter McLaughlin, Spontaneous vs. Equivocal Generation in Early Modern Science, 1994
Preprint Nr. 9 Jürgen Renn, The Third Way to General Relativity Einstein and Mach in Context, 1994
Preprint Nr. 10 John Stachel, Marx's Critical Concept of Science, 1994
Preprint Nr. 11 Peter Beurton, Essays in the Honour of Ernst Mayr's 90th Birthday, 1994
Preprint Nr. 12 Jens Høyrup, Linee larghe. Un' ambiguità geometrica dimenticata, 1995
Preprint Nr. 13 Jens Høyrup, On the mensuration of the "Liber mensurationum", 1995
Preprint Nr. 14 Wolfgang Lefèvre, Material and Social Conditions in an Historical Epistemology of Scientific Thinking, 1995
Preprint Nr. 15 Jens Høyrup, As Regards the Humanities... An approach to their theory through history and philosophy, 1995
Preprint Nr. 16 Jens Høyrup, As Regards the Humanities... An approach to their theory through history and philosophy, 1995
Preprint Nr. 17 Jens Høyrup, As Regards the Humanities... An approach to their theory through history and philosophy, 1995
Preprint Nr. 18 Workshop Gene Concepts and Evolution, 6-7 January 1995, Berlin, 1995
Preprint Nr. 19 Leo Corry, The Kuhnian Agenda and the History of Mathematics, 1995
ImpressumPreprint Nr. 16 Jens Høyrup, As Regards the Humanities... An approach to their theory through history and philosophy, 1995
Preprint Nr. 17 Jens Høyrup, As Regards the Humanities... An approach to their theory through history and philosophy, 1995
Preprint Nr. 18 Workshop Gene Concepts and Evolution, 6-7 January 1995, Berlin, 1995
Preprint Nr. 19 Leo Corry, The Kuhnian Agenda and the History of Mathematics, 1995