In France, as in other European countries, especially Britain and Germany, the nineteenth century was a period of great progress and achievement in science. This would still have been true if Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur had been the only outstanding French scientists of the nineteenth century, whereas there were, of course, many others apart from an impressive number of brilliant French mathematicians. Nevertheless, although it was a great century for French science there was perhaps something rather disappointing about it, (...) and something rather ingrowing about the attitude of French scientists towards scientific developments in other countries. For example, the French took it hard that the creator of the theory of evolution should have been an Englishman, remembering too late Darwin's predecessor Lamarck, and they certainly were very slow in accepting Darwin's theory of evolution.1 Again, the French may have felt that after the important contributions of French scientists such as Coulomb, Poisson, Biot and, above all, Ampère, the theory of electricity and magnetism which is today principally associated with the names of Faraday and Maxwell should have been created by a Frenchman. Once again this new theory was only accepted very slowly and hesitantly, and even unwillingly, in France—one thinks, for example, of the criticisms levelled at the theory by Pierre Duhem in his “The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory”.2 Of course it might be that if one knew how to weigh properly the various achievements of French scientists in different branches of science one would find that, allowing for her rather static population during the nineteenth century, thetotalcontribution of France compared well with those of Britain and Germany. Nevertheless, in one case at least, that of theoretical physics, there seems to have been an unmistakable failure to live up to the promise of the beginning of the century. The purpose of this paper is to advance possible reasons to explain this failure. (shrink)

The years immediately after the final downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte could easily have been years of anti-climax in French science. In 1815, after two decades of undoubted greatness, the time, I feel, was ripe for decline. And decline might well have occurred if the traditions and the style of science as practised in France in the period of Napoleon's rule had been carried on unchanged by the disciples of the two great men who had dominated work in the physical sciences (...) for so many years. These men, of course, were the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet and the mathematician and physicist Pierre Simon Laplace. (shrink)

Bacon's inductivist philosophy of science divides thinkers into the scientific and the prejudiced, using as a standard the up-to-date science textbook. Inductivists regard the history of science as progressing smoothly, from facts rather than from problems, to increasingly general theories, undisturbed by contending scientific schools. Conventionalists regard theories as pigeonholes for classifying facts; history of science is the development of increasingly simple theories, neither true nor false. Conventionalism is useless for reconstructing and weighing conflicts between schools, and overemphasizes science's internal (...) organic growth. For Popper, not for inductivists or conventionalists, the successful criticism of theories is the heart of science. Popper's view admits the existence of valuable errors and enables us to avoid being wise after the event, thereby improving our understanding of the history of science through reconstructions of the actual interplay of theories and facts. (shrink)