Bøger i Studies in the History of Modern Science serien

Why should the story of a woman's role in the development of a scientific theory be written? Biographically, it is about a woman who believed in the greatness of science and strove, with some measure of success, to participate in that noble, but wholly male-dominated, enterprise.

I wrote to Professor Cassina on 29 October, 1963, inquiring if he planned to write the biography, and I offered him my assistance, since I hoped to return to Italy for a year.

A number of years ago I began a project to derme and evaluate the impact of Buffon's Histoire naturelle on the science of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My attention, however, was soon diverted by the striking difference between the highly literary natural history of Buffon and the duller, but more rigor­ ous, zoology of his successors, and I began to try to understand this transformation of natural history into a set of separate scientific disciplines (geology, botany, ornithology, entomology, ichthyology, etc. ). Historical literature on the emergence of the biological sciences in the early nineteenth century is, unfortunately, scant. ! Indeed the entire issue of the emergence of scientific disciplines in general is poorly documented. A recent collection of articles on the subject states: One reason for this is, of course, that scientific development is a highly com­ plex process. Consequently, there has been a tendency for those engaged in its empirical study to select for close attention one strand or a small number of strands from the complicated web of social and intellectual factors at work. Many historians, for example, have dealt primarily with the internal development of scientific knowledge within given fields of inquiry. Sociologists, in contrast, have tended to concentrate on the social processes associated with the activities of scientists; but at the same time 2 they have largely ignored the intellectual content of science.

A comprehensive study of German materialism in the second half of the nineteenth century is long overdue. Among contemporary historians the mere passing references to Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Buchner as materialists and popularizers of science are hardly sufficient, for few individuals influenced public opinion in nineteenth-century Germany more than these men. Buchner, for example, revealed his awareness of the historical significance of his Kraft und Stoff in comments made in 1872, just seventeen years after its original appearance. A philosophical book which has undergone twelve big German editions in the short span of seventeen years, which further has been issued in non-German countries and languages about fifteen to sixteen times in the same period, and whose appearance (although its author was entirely unknown up to then) has called forth an almost unprecedented storm in the press, . . . such a book can be nothing ordinary; the world-calling it enjoys at present must be justified through its wholly special characteristics or by the merits of its form and content. ' Vogt, Moleschott and Buchner explicitly held that their materialism was founded on natural science. But other materialists of the nineteenth century also laid claim to the scientific character of their own thought. It is likely that Marx and Engels would have permitted their brand of materialism to have been called scientific, provided, of course, that 'scientific' was understood in their dialectical meaning of the term. Socialism, Engels maintained, had become a science with Marx.

Since the creation of quantum mechanics was inevitably a technical process conducted through the medium of technical language it has been impossible to avoid the introduction of a large amount of such language. The technical details are essential to the dialogue, but the plot proceeds and can, I hope, be understood on a non technical level.

Although the World War II efforts to develop nuclear weapons have inspired a very large literature, it struck us as noteworthy that virtually nothing existed in the form of firsthand accounts.

Following his loss of eyesight in his mid-twenties Bonnet entered a more reflective period, turning to philosophy and pondering the nature of human understanding - considerations he had formerly disdained, but that now seemed a natural outgrowth of his reflections on nature.

Radio techniques were the nrst to lead astronomy away from the quiescent and limited Universe revealed by traditional observations at optical wave lengths. In the earliest days of radio astronomy, a handful of radio physicists and engineers made one startling discovery after another as they opened up the radio sky.

I wrote to Professor Cassina on 29 October, 1963, inquiring if he planned to write the biography, and I offered him my assistance, since I hoped to return to Italy for a year.

them in his cheat-preface to Copernicus De Revolutionibus, but the main change in their import has been that whereas Osiander defended Copernicus, Mach and Duhem defended science. The modem conception of hypothetico­ deductive science is, again, geared to defend the respectability of science in much the same way: the physical interpretation, it says, is merely and always hypothetical, and so the scientist is never really committed to it. Hence, when science sheds the physical interpretation off its mathematical skeleton as time and refutation catch up with it, the scientist is not really caught in error, for he never was committed to this interpretation in the first place. This is the apologetic essence of present day, Popper-like, versions of the idea of science as a mathematical-core-cum-interpretational shell. This is also Cohen's view, for it aims to free Newton of any existential commitment to which his theory might allegedly commit him. It will be readily seen that Cohen regards this methodological distinction between mathematics and physics to be the backbone of the Newtonian revolution in science (which is, in its tum, the climax of the whole Scientific Revolution) for a very clear reason: it enables us to argue that Newton could use freely the new concept of centripetal force, even though he did not be­ lieve in physical action at a distance and could not conceive how such a force could act to produce its effects". ([3] pp.

Although the World War II efforts to develop nuclear weapons have inspired a very large literature, it struck us as noteworthy that virtually nothing existed in the form of firsthand accounts.