Editorial: «Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte» – on its 30th volume. – The current Vice‐President and President of the «Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte – Société d'Histoire des Sciences – Society for History of Science» commemorate the publication of the 30th volume of its journal Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte with a brief overview of the journal's history and development, which is also presented as a contribution to the history of the Society itself.

A conspicuous feature of contemporary modelling practices is the use of the same mathematical forms and modelling methods across different scientific domains. This model transfer raises many philosophical questions concerning, for example, the exact object of transfer, the relationship between the model and the target domain, the specific challenges such transfer confronts, and the ways in which model transfer relates to scientific progress. While the interest in studying model transfer has increased among philosophers of science in recent years, the phenomenon (...) has not yet received its due attention. The literature is scattered and much of it has addressed questions around the factors that might explain model transfer, such as whether the different target phenomena to which a model is applied eventually prove to be structurally and dynamically similar, or whether they have to share more fundamental ontological features that explain the interdisciplinary success of distinct models. This chapter surveys the existing literature on model transfer with the main goal of highlighting the main findings of existing discussions and pointing out open issues whose discussion would improve our understanding of this highly relevant phenomenon in science. (shrink)

The pathogenic microbe came to be a widely acknowledged “scientific fact” by the end of the 19th century. Taking the transfer of bacteriological knowledge to Warsaw as an example, this article contributes to understanding the question of how knowledge of bacteria was stabilized outside of its original place of production. Conceiving bacteriological knowledge as a laboratory practice it describes the techniques of mobilizing the “laboratory network” this practice depended on. The case of the Polish medical student Odo Bujwid transporting Robert (...) Koch’s and Louis Pasteur’s laboratory networks to Warsaw will be analyzed. Bujwid used literary and visual inscriptions to make these laboratory networks immutably mobile in Bruno Latour’s sense. But he also had to transport three-dimensional objects central to the networks’ functioning back to Warsaw. Personal exchange was, furthermore, essential to their successful transportation to the Polish kingdom. Next to Bujwid’s efforts to transform the laboratory networks into immutable mobiles, the analysis will extend the focus to mutable mobiles as well and will thus show that the successful stabilization of bacteriological knowledge in Warsaw was due not only to the immutability of its laboratory network but to its flexibility and elasticity as well. (shrink)

How do scientific innovations spread within and across scientific communities? In this paper, we propose a general account of the diffusion of scientific innovations. This account acknowledges that novel ideas must be elaborated on and conceptually translated before they can be adopted and applied to field-specific problems. We motivate our account by examining an exemplary case of knowledge diffusion, namely, the early spread of theories of rational decision-making. These theories were grounded in a set of novel mathematical tools and concepts (...) that originated in John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and subsequently spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. Introducing a network-based diffusion measure, we trace the spread of those tools and concepts into distinct research areas. We furthermore present an analytically tractable typology for classifying publications according to their roles in the diffusion process. The proposed framework allows for a systematic examination of the conditions under which scientific innovations spread within and across preexisting and newly emerging scientific communities. (shrink)