The ArgumentDevelopments in theoretical physics, even when they are revolutionary for physics, usually donotenter public awareness. The reaction to the special relativity theory is one of the few exceptions. The conceptual changes brought by special relativity to our notions of space and time, induced a lively debate not only within intellectual circles but in many strata of the educated middle class. In this article, I focus on a particular moment of public reaction to special and general relativity theory and to (...) its creator Albert Einstein. I try to paint a picture of the anti-Einstein campaign in Germany of 1920, with finer brush strokes than those applied previously by others. My aim is to embed the campaign into the cultural and political climate of the Weimar republic. Without leaving the realm of physics only a superficial understanding of what happened seems possible. My thesis is that the anti-Einstein-campaign was organized, and the physicists involved in it used, mainly in order to rally support for one of the German right-wing parties, the Deutschnationale Volkspartei. (shrink)

By 1918, four years of total war had produced a complete mobilization of scientists, scholars and their institutions throughout Europe, the British Empire, and the United States. Public men spoke freely of the implications of a ‘technological war’ run by engineers and chemists. And in the years following the Armistice, historians were eager to record the achievements of the professions, and the effects of the war on their self-image. Memories of the First World War, as Paul Fussell reminds us, remain (...) and shape the texture of our daily life. The parapet, wire and mud have become permanent features of human existence. In a similar way, the war of 1914–18 had enduring consequences for science and scientists, rarely appreciated until the end of the Second World War. Scholars and savants deserted their classrooms for the trenches, industries and war offices, while professional bodies turned themselves into useful extensions of military departments. By October 1914, the infamous Professors' Manifesto, with its Appeal to the Cultured Peoples of the World had identified German science with German war aims, and the natural sciences were fully at war. Scientific knowledge applied to the war was – at one and the same time – a fulfilment of the Enlightenment project of reason, and a violation of the Enlightenment ethos of humanism and internationalism. (shrink)

This essay analyses discussions of national versus international or transnational science, with an emphasis on the journal Osiris from 1986 to 2009, including the concepts of national science, national styles and characters in science, scientific internationalism, transfer of science and scientists from one nation to another, and comparison of different national examples. The author argues that perceiving science as a ‘national’ activity has not only been persistent, it is also perhaps inevitable. This special issue on transnational histories of science raises (...) the question of what is gained and lost by such an approach. First of all, what is the distinction between ‘transnational’ and ‘international’? The dictionary defines the latter as something existing, occurring, or carried on between two nations, while the former extends or operates across national boundaries. Thus ‘international’ implies some sort of commerce. In contrast, transnational is a loosely defined term. (shrink)

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and ‘the West’. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product.

In There Are No Such Things As Theories (French 2020), the reification of theories is critically analysed and rejected. My aim here is to tease out some of the implications of this approach first of all, for how we, philosophers of science, should view the history of science; secondly, for how we should understand the devices that we use in our own philosophical practices; and thirdly, for how we might think about the relationship between the history of science and the (...) philosophy of science. (shrink)

The year 1968 is universally considered a watershed in history, as the world was experiencing an accelerated growth of anti-establishment protests that would have long-lasting impacts on the cultural, social, and political spheres of human life. On September 26, amid social and political unrest across the globe, 62 physicists gathered in Geneva to found the European Physical Society. Among these were the official representatives of the national physical societies of 18 countries in both Eastern and Western Europe, who signed the (...) constitution in spite of the political divides of the Cold War. According to the main proponent of the society, Italian physicist Gilberto Bernardini, the success of the initiative was the realization of a dream: the institutional formation of a single community of European physicists, a representation of a culturally unified Europe that he described as a “single highly civilized nation.” The analysis of as yet unexplored archival materials of Bernardini and other protagonists in the establishment of the society has enabled an investigation of the historical development of science diplomacy in two interconnected ways: first, by elucidating how the actors involved, especially those in Western Europe, interpreted their role as diplomats amid particularly turbulent reconfigurations of international political relations; second, by interpreting the attempt to institutionalize transnational scientific networks with the establishment of a non-governmental organization as a tool to influence world political affairs. It will first be shown that the political ideal of a culturally unified Europe was deeply intertwined with the socio-professional interests of a specific community, mostly involved with CERN. I will argue that, in the process of establishing the society, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armed forces led many of the Western physicists involved in this process to reframe the role of the European Physical Society as a tool to diffuse liberal-democratic values and to support political dissidents in Eastern Europe. (shrink)

Kosmos, Koralle and Cultural Milieu. On the Role of Popular Science Communication in the late Kaiserreich and Weimar Germany. This paper discusses the role of popular science communication for the ‘cultural milieu’ or more generally the ‘environment’ of scientists and science in Germany between c. 1900 and 1933 in the sense of Paul Forman. On the rich basis of diverse journals aiming at a differentiated public the discourse on atomic physics is sketched. Since the thesis of a general hostility towards (...) atomic physics in particular and science in general cannot be accredited the question arises how widespread and in which sense a crisis of science was discussed in the Weimar years. (shrink)

The Constitution of a Network of Reactionary Physicists during the Republic of Weimar. The dominance of physicists from Berlin in the German Physical Society caused a controversial discussion on the statute initiated by those outside of Berlin in 1914. It could not be finished because of the outbreak of World War I. This antagonism got a political and ideological quality when only the ‘Non‐Berliners’ supported a chauvinistic appeal of German physicists in the so‐called “Krieg der Geister”. After the war this (...) development led to the constitution of a network of reactionary physicists just before the “Naturforscherversammlung” in Bad Nauheim in 1920. Its members shared a hostile attitude towards the new Republic of Weimar and were mostly chauvinistic and anti‐Semitic. Temporarily the network was able to mobilise a considerable part of German physicists for their aims. A decentralisation of the German Physical Society was put through. Considering this network we examine one of the theses of Paul Forman according to which there is a close correlation between political and scientific orientations during that time. We are able to confirm this as far as science policy is concerned. There a bias for a certain kind of research can be found. It becomes more difficult when we investigate the influence of a political attitude on the individual research. We succeed in those cases where the modern theories are involved. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article gives the background to a public lecture delivered in Hebrew by Edmund Landau at the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925. On the surface, the lecture appears to be a slightly awkward attempt by a distinguished German-Jewish mathematician to popularize a few number-theoretical tidbits. However, quite unexpectedly, what emerges here is Landau's personal blend of Zionism, German nationalism, and the proud ethos of pure, rigorous mathematics – against the backdrop of the situation of Germany (...) after World War I. Landau's Jerusalem lecture thus shows how the Zionist cause was inextricably linked to, and determined by political agendas that were taking place in Europe at that time. The lecture stands in various historical contexts - Landau's biography, the history of Jewish scientists in the German Zionist movement, the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the creation of a modern Hebrew mathematical language. This article provides a broad historical introduction to the English translation, with commentary, of the original Hebrew text. (shrink)

Over the first decades of the twentieth century, the fragmentary remains of a huge prehistoric ungulate were unearthed in scientific expeditions in India, Turkestan and Mongolia. Following channels of formal and informal empire, these were transported to collections in Britain, Russia and the United States. While striking and of immense size, the bones proved extremely difficult to interpret. Alternately naming the creature Paraceratherium, Baluchitherium and Indricotherium, paleontologists Clive Forster-Cooper, Alexei Borissiak and Henry Fairfield Osborn struggled over the reconstruction of this (...) gigantic fossil mammal. However, despite these problems, shared work on the creature served as a focus for collaboration and exchange rather than rivalry between these three scientific communities. Not only did the initial interpretation and analysis depend on pre-existing connections between British and American paleontological institutions, but the need for comparative material, recognition and contacts brought British and American scholars into communication and exchange with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This article examines these processes. It first uses these excavations as a comparative case-study of different manifestations of colonial science in this period, examining how scholars in the Britain, the Russian Empire and the United States used formal and informal colonial links to Asia to pursue new research. It then moves to examine how the common problem of reconstructing this giant animal drew metropolitan scientific communities together, at least for a time. The construction of the Baluchitherium and Indricotherium illustrates the drives to expand research both imperially and internationally in the early-twentieth century, but also the continual problems in resources, institutionalization, transport and communication that could run up against scientific work. (shrink)

Beyond Weimar Culture – The Significance of the Forman Thesis for a Cultural Approach to the History of Science. The famous ‘Forman thesis’, published in 1971, argued for a historical linkage among the intellectual atmosphere of Weimar Germany, popular revolts against determinism and materialism, and the creation of the revolutionary new theory of quantum mechanics. Paul Forman's long essay on “Weimar Culture” has shaped research agendas in numerous fields, from the history and philosophy of physics to German history to the (...) sociology of scientific knowledge. Despite its status as a classic and its transformative effect, Weimar Culture has always inspired as much critique as assent. In particular in the history of science, cohorts of students and two generations of scholars have debated the Forman thesis as a conceptual tool for linking scientific change with cultural processes. The Forman thesis raises critical questions for both the ongoing debates over cultural approaches to the history of science and the burgeoning newer scholarship on physics in and beyond Weimar Germany. Exploring these implications has been the aim of a transnational project of the three authors of this article which sheds some light on these debates and briefly introduces the following papers of this special issue devoted to Paul Forman and his seminal works in the history of science. (shrink)

Examining how, and to what effect, the phrase “truly international” became central to the rhetoric and organization of the American-hosted 1950 International Congress of Mathematicians, this essay traces the negotiation of a “truly international” discipline from mathematicians’ first international congresses around the turn of the century across two world wars and their divisive interlude. Two failed attempts to host international congresses of mathematicians in the United States, for 1924 and 1940, defined the stakes for those who became the principal organizers (...) for 1950. Combining American organizational records with contexts and sources that extend across and beyond traditional mathematical centers in Europe and North America, the essay shows how a small cohort of American mathematicians marshaled an emphatic but ambiguous “international” rhetoric to guide policies and command cooperation and support while responding to persistent challenges. Their adaptations and compromises left a lasting mark on the terms and achievements of international inclusion, cooperation, and hegemony in mathematics. (shrink)

The emergence of conferences in the late nineteenth century significantly changed the ways in which the international scientific community functioned and experienced itself. In the early modern Republic of Letters, savants mainly related through print and correspondence, and apart from at local and later national levels, scholars rarely met. International conferences, by contrast, brought scientists together regularly, in the flesh and in great numbers. Their previously imagined community now became tangible. This paper examines how conferencing reshaped the collective of international (...) scientists by zooming in on the massive meetings of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry, 1893–1914. Drawing on Emile Durkheim's studies of religious gatherings it analyses the ritualization of routine conference practices, such as plenary ceremonies, toasts, ladies’ programmes and committee meetings. It looks at how roles were distributed as participants performed as hosts and guests, and in masculine and feminine and national and international identities. Importantly, it shows both how the sacralization of chemistry as a higher aim served to instil senses of dedication in order to organize labour and mitigate conflict, and how the self-perception of the international chemical community was based on contemporary understandings of parliament, democracy and representation. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie Erforschung der Antarktis galt um 1900 als eine der letzten großen Herausforderungen im Zuge der Erschließung der Welt. Viele Nationen beteiligten sich daran, darunter das deutsche Kaiserreich. So fanden im Jahrzehnt vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg auch zwei deutsche Antarktisexpeditionen statt: von 1901 bis 1903 unter der Leitung von Erich von Drygalski und in den Jahren 1911/12 unter der Leitung Wilhelm Filchners. Die Forschung hat das Verhältnis zwischen den Unternehmen der verschiedenen Nationen bislang oftmals mit einem Fokus entweder auf Wettbewerb (...) oder Zusammenarbeit beschrieben. Dieser Aufsatz zeigt, dass internationale Kooperation und Konkurrenz die deutsche Antarktisexploration in spannungsreicher Gleichzeitigkeit prägten. Dabei nutzten die Akteure von Beginn an beide Interaktionsmodi als argumentative Ressourcen und verfolgten bewusst und situativ variabel Handlungsoptionen nach sowohl kompetitiven als auch kooperativen Logiken. Die Akteure bemühten sich darum, keinen der beiden Modi überwiegen zu lassen, sondern ein Gleichgewicht zu wahren, um die sowohl aus Wettbewerb als auch aus Zusammenarbeit entstehenden Vorteile für sich nutzen zu können. Gerade die genauen Kriterien der Konkurrenz wurden dabei zum Teil in der Schwebe gehalten, um sich hier alle Möglichkeiten offen zu halten. Bei der retrospektiven Bewertung ihrer Expeditionen durch die deutsche Öffentlichkeit gelang es ihnen jedoch nicht, die Deutungshoheit über Erfolg und Misserfolg der Unternehmen zu gewinnen: Weder der Verweis auf erfolgreiche Kooperationen, noch auf den Sieg im Wettbewerb um wissenschaftliche Leistungen konnte in der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung im deutschen Kaiserreich die Niederlage beim Erreichen möglichst südlicher Breiten ausgleichen. (shrink)

In 1946, the British biochemist Joseph Needham returned from a four-year stay in China. Needham scholars have considered this visit as a revelatory period that paved the way for his famous book seriesScience and Civilization in China. Surprisingly, however, Needham's actual time in China has remained largely unstudied over the last seventy years. As director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, Needham travelled throughout Free China to promote cooperation between British and Chinese scientists to contain the Japanese invasion during the (...) Second World War. By rediscovering Needham's peregrinations, this paper re-examines the origins of his fascination for China. First, it contests the widely held idea that this Chinese episode is quite separate and different from Needham's first half-life as a leftist scientist. Second, it demonstrates how the political and philosophical commitments he inherited from the social relations of science movement, and his biochemical research, shaped his interest in China's past. Finally, this paper recounts these forgotten years to reveal their implications for his later pursuits as historian of science and as director of the natural-science division of UNESCO. It highlights how, while in China, Needham co-constituted the philosophical tenets of his scientific programme at UNESCO and the conceptual foundations of hisSCC. (shrink)

Until recently, the links between Rockefeller philanthropies and Russianscience and medicine during the 1920s have been virtually ignored, both inofficial Foundation histories and in Soviet accounts of foreign scientificrelations. Materials from the newly-opened Russian archives and the Rockefeller Archive Center reveal dense and tangled connections between multiple Rockefeller givers and multiple Russian takers. Examining the `Russian matter' from the perspective of both `givers' and `takers', this article highlights the impact of domestic and international politics on giving and taking across borders, (...) and reveals the range of meanings of`internationalism' in philanthropy. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper is concerned with “holism” as a German cultural “style” of doing psychobiology in Central Europe between the two world wars. The paper takes its starting point from a critical analysis of Forman's writings on nationalism versus internationalism in interwar German science, and the alleged “accommodation” of interwar German physics to an antiscientific, irrationalist culture. The paper argues that psychobiological holism was not just a reaction against nineteenth-century atomistic or mechanistic approaches to modeling life and mind; it also (...) represented a domestically directed answer from within the German biomedical scientific community to broad religious and cultural “disenchantment.” As such, holistic psychobiology emerges as a phenomenon that challenges us with at least four levels of discourse: experimental/clinical, epistemological/philosophical, existential/religious, and ideological/political. The paper defends the methodological appropriateness of a collective case-study approach to the problem of holism as a multilevel discourse. It concludes by offering a preliminary contextualized analysis of the thought of three representative holistic leaders of the time: behavioral biologist and ethologist Jakob von Uexküll; clinical neurologist Constantin von Monakow; and neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this article we throw more light on Einstein's position as a pacifist and democrat during World War I than was possible up to now. This results from a systematical search for and evaluation of published and unpublished documents. Among others, it was possible to give evidence of Einstein's radicalization and to clear up the circumstances of his public appearance during the troublesome days of the Revolution in November 1918. Einstein's role in the Bund Neues Vaterland and other pacifist (...) organizations and his interaction with other pacifists in Germany and abroad is exposed in detail and interpreted. In contrast to the generally accepted view, we give a reappraisal of Einstein's activity and show that his pacifism was always of a humanitarian nature. He only rarely applied social and political categories to the happenings during the war. Due to his main focus on physics Einstein's pacifism remained one more of creed than of deed. (shrink)

For historians of medicine, the professor Theodor Billroth of the University of Vienna was the leading European surgeon of the late nineteenth century and the personification of intervention by organ or body part removal. For social and political historians, he was a German nationalist whose book on medical education heralded the rise of anti-Semitism in the Austrian public sphere. This article brings together and critically reassesses these two hitherto separate accounts to show how, in a period of dramatic social and (...) political change, Viennese surgery split into two camps. One, headed by Billroth, was characterized by an alliance with the German educational model, German nationalism leading to racial anti-Semitism and an experimental approach to the construction of surgical procedure, which heavily relied on the methods of pathological physiology. The other, which followed a long Austrian tradition, stood for a clinically oriented and strictly organized medical education that catered to an ethnically and socially diverse population and, simultaneously, for an anatomically oriented surgery, largely of the locomotor apparatus. This study shows how, in a major centre of medical education and capital of a multiethnic empire, surgical and national identities were forged together. (shrink)