In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the leaders of the Genetics Society of America (GSA) struggled to find an appropriate group response to Trofim Lysenko's scientific claims and the Soviet treatment of geneticists. Although some of the leaders of the GSA favored a swift, critical response, procedural and ideological obstacles prevented them from following this path. Concerned about establishing scientific orthodoxy on one hand and politicizing the content of their science on the other, these American geneticists drew on democratic (...) language and concepts as they engaged in this political issue. The relatively weak statements that did emerge from the GSA attracted little attention in the scientific or popular press. The intensely politicized atmosphere of American science complicated the GSA's task, as domestic concerns about protecting democracy were beginning to constrain academic freedom. In the context of American Cold War culture, Lysenko became just one example of the dangers the Cold War world presented to scientific freedom. (shrink)

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the leaders of the Genetics Society of America struggled to find an appropriate group response to Trofim Lysenko’s scientific claims and the Soviet treatment of geneticists. Although some of the leaders of the GSA favored a swift, critical response, procedural and ideological obstacles prevented them from following this path. Concerned about establishing scientific orthodoxy on one hand and politicizing the content of their science on the other, these American geneticists drew on democratic language (...) and concepts as they engaged in this political issue. The relatively weak statements that did emerge from the GSA attracted little attention in the scientific or popular press. The intensely politicized atmosphere of American science complicated the GSA’s task, as domestic concerns about protecting democracy were beginning to constrain academic freedom. In the context of American Cold War culture, Lysenko became just one example of the dangers the Cold War world presented to scientific freedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the second decade of the twentieth century a new subject appeared in American high schools, aimed at providing citizens with an understanding of the essential nature of scientific thinking. “General science,” as it was called, was developed and promoted by an emerging class of professional educators who sought to offer a version of science that they believed would both excite public interest and prove useful in the everyday lives of the masses of students streaming into the rapidly expanding (...) institution of secondary education. It was to be a course with real utility that would transcend the boundaries of the specialized, abstract disciplinary subjects like chemistry and physics—subjects with identities tied to the practices and standards of the colleges and universities, which had long exerted control over the content of secondary schooling. This essay recounts the origins of general science and, in particular, examines how the intellectual and material environment of the city of Chicago at the turn of the century influenced the course that was produced and widely adopted in school programs across the United States. (shrink)

ArgumentIn the theory-dominated view of scientific experimentation, all relations of theory and experiment are taken on a par; namely, that experiments are performed solely to ascertain the conclusions of scientific theories. As a result, different aspects of experimentation and of the relations of theory to experiment remain undifferentiated. This in turn fosters a notion of theory-ladenness of experimentation (TLE) that is toocoarse-grainedto accurately describe the relations of theory and experiment in scientific practice. By contrast, in this article, I suggest that (...) TLE should be understood as anumbrella conceptthat has different senses. To this end, I introduce a three-fold distinction among the theories of high-energy particle physics (HEP) as background theories, model theories, and phenomenological models. Drawing on this categorization, I contrast two types of experimentation, namely, “theory-driven” and “exploratory” experiments, and I distinguish between the “weak” and “strong” senses of TLE in the context of scattering experiments from the history of HEP. This distinction enables identifying the exploratory character of the deep-inelastic electron-proton scattering experiments – performed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) between the years 1967 and 1973 – thereby shedding light on a crucial phase of the history of HEP, namely, the discovery of “scaling,” which was the decisive step towards the construction of quantum chromo-dynamics as a gauge theory of strong interactions. (shrink)

Once one of the main protagonists of history of science, the historiography on quantum theory has recently gone through a process of reconfiguration of methods, research questions and epistemological framework. In this paper, I review the recent developments and propose some reflections on its future evolution.