This paper discusses the origin of technical terminology in everyday language by outlining stages in a long-term history of technical terminology marked by increasing degrees of reflexivity. It uses the examples of spatial terminology in an ancient Chinese theoretical text, in Newtonian mechanics, and in relativity theory, and attempts to explain the increasing distance of the meanings of technical terms from their everyday counterparts by relating it to historical processes of knowledge integration.

Four years prior to receiving the Nobel Prize, Albert Einstein pledged the prize money to his soon to be ex-wife Mileva to ensure her and their sons’ livelihood and to serve as an advance payment of the sons’ inheritance. With this money, Mileva Einstein bought three Zurich apartment houses in 1924 and in 1930. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, this investment plummeted in value. Thanks to Albert Einstein’s persistent financial efforts for over more than ten years, a small sum constituting the rest of the Nobel Prize capital was actually transferred to the sons, following Mileva’s death in 1948.

In this paper, the importance of the cosmographical activities of the Vienna astronomical “school” for the reception of the Tractatus de Sphaera is analyzed. First, the biographies of two main representatives of the Vienna mathematical/astronomical circle are presented: the Austrian astronomers, mathematicians, and instrument makers Georg von Peuerbach (1423–1461) and his student Johannes Müller von Königsberg (Regiomontanus, 1436–1476). Their studies influenced the cosmographical teaching at the University of Vienna enormously for the next century and are relevant to understanding what followed; therefore, the prosopographical introductions of these Vienna scholars have been included here, even if neither can be considered a real author of the Sphaera. Moreover, taking the examples of an impressive sixteenth-century miscellany (Austrian National Library, Cod. ser. nov. 4265, including the recently rediscovered cosmography by Sebastian Binderlius, compiled around 1518), the diversity of different cosmographical studies in the capital of the Habsburg Empire at the turning point between the Middle Ages and the early modern period is demonstrated.

Handwritten comments in the Vienna edition of De sphaera (1518) also show how big the influence of Sacrobosco’s work remained as a didactical tool at the universities in the first decades of the sixteenth century—and how cosmographical knowledge was transformed and structured in early modern Europe by the editors and readers of the Sphaera.

A symposium took place in honor of Jürgen Renn at SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) in Trieste, July 14–16, 2022 with sessions of the symposium were organized around the following topics: origins of evolution of knowledge; external representations of knowledge; science and society; organization of knowledge; the spread of knowledge; knowledge evolution and the Anthropocene. A selection of the talks given at the meeting are presented in this preprint. The inspiration to organize the symposium stemmed from Renn’s publication The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Since this book is presented by Renn himself as a culmination of the joint research undertaken in his department at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin since 1994, it seemed only fitting to celebrate this milestone achievement at an event that would include many of those who fundamentally shaped this joint research endeavor over the years.

The take-off of the First Industrial Revolution in England around the mid-eighteenth century, which shifted manufacturing to the factory system, was due to the emergence of the new entrepreneurial class with highly skilled and culturally informed technicians who fully assimilated the values of capitalism and transferred them to their fundamental innovations. One could apply the Gramscian concept of “hegemony” to describe the spread of new literary and philosophical societies in which entrepreneurs, technicians, and intellectuals met to discuss solutions to newly emerging problems. Inventions that increased labor productivity flourished, and in the field of energy production, where water wheels and steam engines already existed, decisive advances were to streamline their use in capitalist production, which prevented future developments because science was still tied to old approaches. The contributions of John Smeaton to the development of water wheels, and of James Watt to the steam engine are analyzed here in detail, emphasizing how both led to the completion of Newtonian mechanics and the birth of thermodynamic science. The concept of efficiency that inspired their research was destined to inform all of modernity. In those same years in France, the regime of absolutism prevented the nascent bourgeoise from establishing their hegemony. Through the Enlightenment movement, they sublimated their planning by studying and systematizing the achievements of British “practical mechanics” in a rational sense. In particular, Lazare Carnot, trained in the school of military genius, generalized the criteria that Smeaton had established for water wheels to all mechanical machines, introducing the first formalizations of energy concepts. Lazare’s son, Sadi Carnot, inspired by the same criteria, formulated the first theory of “fire machines” in 1824, opening up the modern field of thermodynamics, which introjected from its inception the criterion of efficiency.

In this previously unpublished text, Wolfgang Edelstein has presented systematic “Preliminary Considerations for a Structural Curriculum Theory,” guided by three concepts that organize the factual and temporal-social references as well as the mode of justification of the school as a place of subject-bound instruction. In 1973, when he presented these considerations, the great dream of a comprehensive educational reform based on the comprehensive school had been shattered, which had been nurtured by the German Education Council and also pushed by the MPI for Human Development, as Edelstein soberly and critically balances at the beginning. In addition, the great promises of the various curriculum theories had come to an end, including the theory of the MPI director Saul B. Robinsohn, which was oriented toward the analysis of social need. Edelstein’s new approach was oriented toward the goal of enabling every learner to achieve self-determination in a civilization determined by the sciences, and perceived the educational system primarily as a world of learning that shapes school learning processes in their factual-temporal logic in a subject-centered way. It is thus a decidedly content- and process-oriented rather than an outcome-oriented view of schooling that he makes the central reference for theoretical work and the criterion for the design of learning processes. Learning and social psychological theories are therefore particularly intensively received, above all Jean Piaget and considerations concerning the “structure of discipline,” with which Jerome Bruner had newly inspired the teaching-related debate.

The borrowing registers of university libraries represent ‒ especially for the history of science ‒ a new source genre and thus a new approach. They enable to reconstruct the decisive influences and stimuli on scientists working at the places in question. In this article, this is exemplified by the Göttingen mathematician Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), who, apart from a few stays abroad, lived and worked almost exclusively in Göttingen. In the first section, the Göttingen University Library borrowing registers are introduced and the most important previous book-historical publications related to them are presented. In the second section, I first describe how and why I came to examine these registers with reference to Riemann, and present in the following some new results regarding the genesis of Riemann’s groundbreaking philosophical as well as mathematical ideas. I conclude with an unaltered photomechanical reproduction of Riemann’s book and journal borrowings from the Göttingen University Library, as I extracted and compiled them quite some time ago without the use of digital tools. The definitive edition of this article will be published in an appropriate journal for the history of science after having been revised and then translated into English in post-Covid times, with further consultation of the originals in Göttingen. For the convenience of English-speaking readers, a work-in-progress English version of this preprint can be obtained from the author.