Positioning the History of Science ppt

Positioning the History of Science
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editors
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
JÜRGEN RENN, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
KOSTAS GAVROGLU, University of Athens
Editorial Advisory Board
THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University
ADOLF GRÜNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKY†, (Editor 1960–1997)
VOLUME 248
POSITIONING THE
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Edited by
Kostas Gavroglu,
University of Athens,
Greece
and
Jürgen Renn
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,
Germany
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-10 1-4020-5419-X (HB)
ISBN-10 1-4020-5420-3 (e-book)
ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5419-8 (HB)
ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5420-4 (e-book)
Published by Springer,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

www.springer.com
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2007 Springer
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Positioning the History of Science
Kostas Gavroglu and Jürgen Renn 1
Big History?
Babak Ashrafi 7
Suggestions for the Study of Science
Stephen G. Brush 13
Will Einstein Still be the Super-Hero of Physics History in 2050?
Tian Yu Cao 27
For a History of Knowledge
Olivier Darrigol 33
Working in Parallel, Working Together
Lorraine Daston 35
Challenges in Writing About Twentieth Century East Asian Physicists
Dong-Won Kim (Jhu) 39
Why Should Scientists Become Historians?
Raphael Falk and Ruma Falk 43
From the Social to the Moral to the Spiritual: The Postmodern Exaltation
of the History of Science
Paul Forman 49
Between Science and History

Evelyn Fox Keller 57
The Search for Autonomy in History of Science
Yves Gingras 61
Without Parallels?: Averting a Schweberian Dystopia
Michael D. Gordin 65
The Intellectual Strengths of Pluralism and Diversity
Loren Graham 69
On Connoisseurship
John L. Heilbron 73
v
vi Table of Contents
Concerning Energy
Steve Joshua Heims 77
Reflections on a Discipline
Erwin N. Hiebert 87
The Woman in Einstein’s Shadow
Gerald Holton 95
The Mutual Embrace: Institutions and Epistemology
David Kaiser 99
History, Science, and History of Science
Helge Kragh 105
Parallel Lives and The History of Science
Mary Jo Nye 109
Discarding Dichotomies, Creating Community:
Sam Schweber and Darwin Studies
Diane B. Paul and John Beatty 113
Public Participation and Industrial Technoscience Today:
The difficult question of accountability
Dominique Pestre 119
The Character of Truth

Joan Richards 135
Schweber, Physicist, Historian and Moral Example
José M. Sánchez-Ron 139
What’s New in Science?
Terry Shinn 143
On the Road
Skúli Sigurdsson 149
Plutarchian Versus Socratic Scientific Biography
Thomas Söderqvist 159
Problems Not Disciplines
John Stachel 163
Physicist-Historians
Roger H. Stuewer 169
Letting the Scientists Back In
Stephen J. Weininger 173
Table of Contents vii
Science As History
M. Norton Wise 177
Postscript
Sam Schweber 185
KOSTAS GAVROGLU AND JÜRGEN RENN
POSITIONING THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
The present volume, compiled in honor of an outstanding historian of science,
physicist and exceptional human being, Sam Schweber, is unique in assembling
a broad spectrum of positions on the history of science by some of its leading
representatives. Readers will find it illuminating to learn how prominent authors
judge the current status and the future perspectives of their field. Students will find
this volume helpful as a guide in a fragmented field that continues to be dominated
by idiosyncratic expertise and still lacks a methodical canon. The essays were
written in response to our invitation to explicate the views of the authors concerning

the state of the history of science today and the issues we felt are related to its
future. Although not all of the scholars whom we asked to write have contributed
an essay, this volume can nevertheless be considered as a rather comprehensive
survey of the present state of the history of science. All of the papers collected
here reflect in one way or another the strong influence Sam Schweber has exerted
during the past decades in his gentle way on the history of science as well as on the
lives of many of its protagonists worldwide. All who have had the opportunity of
encountering him have benefited from his advice, benevolence and friendship. Sam
Schweber’s intellectual taste, his passion for knowledge and his erudition are all
encompassing. It therefore seemed fitting to honor him with a collection of essays
of comparable breadth; nothing less would suffice.
The history of science, like any other established academic discipline, is subject
to tensions that are well reflected in the papers presented here. Whether these
function as a driving force for its future development or risk tearing it asunder may
be judged differently by different readers, and will in any case remain a topic to be
debated among historians of science. Principal among these tensions is that between
history and science. Both scientist and historian, Sam Schweber has experienced this
tension, even embodied it and has shown us through his life’s work how to resolve
it in a productive way. This tension, so essential for anyone entering the history
of science, which encompasses different interests, cultural values, historiographical
perspectives and methods, is touched upon in many of the essays. Another tension
is that between the focus on content and on context, responsible for much of the
acrimony presently prevailing in our field. Should a historian of science concentrate
on what makes science a human enterprise, that is pomp, power, passion and
circumstance, or rather on what makes science unique among all human enterprises,
that is, its historically situated quest for knowledge? Once again, in his work, Sam
has shown ways to successfully transform this tension into a medium of deep
K. Gavroglu and J. Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, 1–5.
© 2007 Springer.
2 Kostas Gavroglu and Jürgen Renn

historical insights. Yet, that tension is still with us and continues to shape current
intellectual debates and institutional struggles. No wonder then that the issues
surrounding this particular tension are a prevailing topic of many of the papers
included in this volume. Other tensions are perhaps less prominent but no less
vital, for instance that between collaborative ventures in the history of science and
individual intellectual pursuits or between a more methodologically-oriented history
of science and an approach governed by personal taste and connoisseurship, or
that between a history of science focused on the European and American traditions
and a global history of knowledge covering also non-European traditions. These
tensions as well as several others are also reflected in the views of the authors.
The essays in this volume address some of the major questions presently
concerning the community of historians of science, such as the question as to how
science has gone through dramatic transformations in recent decades and what this
change means for doing history, or the question of how history of science as an
interdisciplinary discipline has changed. For instance, have some of the themes that
were so prominent in the research agendas of historians of science in the relatively
recent past actually become themes without a future? What has been the outcome
for historians of science of more than two decades of historiographical controversies
with, at times, strong philosophical and ideological contentions? What possible
syntheses are we envisaging for the not so distant future? And, most importantly,
to what extent have the range and content of questions to be examined within, say,
the coming decade, been re-defined by these controversies?
Historians of science were always very sensitive and aware of the changes
happening in science and the essays in this volume reflect this awareness. Some
of them explicitly address the question of whether we are facing the emergence of
a new paradigm of science. Several ways of characterizing such a new paradigm
are being explored: the end of reductionism, the expanding role of techno-science
and industrialized science comprising a tendency towards the privatization and
commercialization of knowledge, the changing role of the sciences in the structure
of universities, but also the emergence of a new epistemology of processes of

learning and evaluation and the increasing role of historical explanations in the
natural sciences.
Naturally, the changes in science mentioned above constitute major challenges
for the history of science demanding new ways of dealing with its historical objects.
Even the sheer smallness of the number of historians of science when set into
relation to the vastness of scientific activities represents such a challenge. Also,
in an age of industrialized science, moral reflections as they have been part of
some of the best scholarly work in the history of science including that of Sam
Schweber, can no longer be causes championed by individual scientists, whatever
their prestige. Whole communities of scientists are obliged to become aware of
the wider consequences of their work and of the very character of what it is they
are producing. At the same time, this need for awareness represents an important
challenge for the community of historians of science, and can be addressed only
Positioning the History of Science 3
by enlarging the interface between science and the history of science. But can this
interface be really enlarged without, at the same time, ensuring that historians of
science are capable of speaking the same language as the scientists themselves?
As a matter of fact, precisely because of the pluralism at every level in the history
of science, characteristic of almost every established academic discipline, there is
the real danger that typical core activities of the history of science such as detailed
reconstructions of technical arguments, biographical accounts, and other genres in
which scientist-historians such as Sam Schweber have excelled, may have no future.
Several essays express concern about what seems to be a growing consensus among
the younger generation that dealing with the technical and cognitive dimensions of
science has largely become obsolete.
After more than a century, the history of science is still in search of a wider
audience, of its canons, its shared questions and in many cases of its institu-
tional autonomy. In any case, the history of science today has turned out to be
dramatically different from what its founding fathers imagined. Its development
has been marked by disappointments as well as contributions through which we

came to understand the extreme complexity of scientific developments. While it
has become ever more clear how cognitive, social, ideological and political factors
interact in the development of science, the grand dream of intellectual synthesis has
remained unfulfilled. Institutional diversity still prevails, scientists have after all not
become the sought for allies of the historians of science; the dominance of idiosyn-
cratic expertise has often prevented focusing on larger questions relevant to wider
audiences, yet the subject itself has been solidly established and both scientists and
historians appear (alas, very slowly) to be less indifferent to our pursuits. Though,
on the whole, scientists still think of historians of science as having a “soft” take
on science and historians think of our work as hopelessly technical for their skills,
there are progressively more scientists and historians who have actually come into
direct contact with the relevant scholarship in the history of science.
The methodological debates of the last 20 years have deeply split the field and
partisan views have done a disservice to all those who were entering the field. On
the other hand, such controversies underlined the maturity of the field itself, and
looking at these controversies, now that passions seem to have somewhat subsided,
gives reason for hope. Extreme believers and fundamentalist convictions, of any
creed, appear to have been marginalized. The sensitivity for the complementary
relationship between content and context has been increased. The emergence of
major institutions has stabilized the field without inhibiting the positive effects of
its institutional and disciplinary biodiversity. The fact that the history of science
has become not only faute de mieux, but by inner necessity a multidisciplinary field
is being recognized more and more.
There are at least two aspects within history of science that have expressed
the new dynamics of the discipline. The first is the emerging communities of
historians of science in countries where most of the related works for many
years could not overcome an antiquarian problematique. Members of the emerging
4 Kostas Gavroglu and Jürgen Renn
communities – from Latin America to countries at the European periphery to Korea –
are recasting what have often, and for many years, been local topics in ways that

are being linked to contemporary historiography of science. New areas of research
are being successfully investigated; there are dynamic institutional initiatives and
promising challenges in the charting of new research agendas.
The second aspect is the amazing impact of the information revolution and the
introduction of electronic media for the way the history of science is being pursued.
In particular, new possibilities have emerged for crossing boundaries of special-
ization imposed by a fragmented landscape of sources, which are distributed over
archives, libraries, and museums, but can now be united in virtual working spaces for
the history of science. Also the traditional separation between theoretically-oriented
surveys and source-oriented case studies can now be overcome by integrating inter-
pretations and sources within the electronic medium, where footnotes referring to
sources located a continent away can now be turned into links to digital libraries just
a mere click away. But the realization of this vision presupposes the availability of
and free access to the sources themselves, the vast number of archival collections,
of instruments and of old issues of scientific journals that give rise to unimaginable
research opportunities as well as to totally new possibilities in the teaching of
history of science. The number and quality of the digitization processes presently
undertaken by museums, research institutes and universities are impressive but will
ultimately come to fruition only if the temptation to commercialize cultural heritage
is withstood and historians join forces with the scientists that have made the open
access movement such a success.
From the multi-faceted character of research and education in the history of
science, some qualities have emerged which will last as criteria for work, as
exemplified by the contributions of Sam Schweber. To these criteria every disci-
pline that has been over time interrelated with the history of science has contributed
a number of values of its own. From the essays in this volume, what clearly
emerges is the ‘moral integration’ of the history of science, which has been often
overlooked due to its controversies. There clearly is a common engagement in the
goal among historians of science of quite different types, to contribute to a greater
reflectiveness about science, to highlight the moral and edifying aspects of science,

to remind us that social choices are at the core of science and to stress the communal
aspects of the history of science, including the need for the public accessibility
of knowledge. A related moral issue emerging as a common denominator is the
striving for the accountability of science with regard to society and the realization
that such accountability also needs structures, including an institutional role for the
history of science. This may also be an argument for bringing the scientist back
into the history of science: as science has to face history, scientists have to face
historians of science.
The values mentioned above together with issues of style, such as modesty,
tolerance, tact and taste – which have always been the hallmark of excellent contri-
butions to the history of science – can only be upheld if the community is prepared
Positioning the History of Science 5
to stand up for its principles under the new challenges described above. Growing
specialization and industrialization of science will make ever-higher demands on
spaces for multi-disciplinary autonomous work, not hiding in intellectual niches
and shying away from the burning issues that are also relevant to society. The
privatization of knowledge makes it necessary that historians of science add their
voices in order to defend and secure knowledge in the public domain, struggling
for public access to scientific knowledge. The globalization of knowledge makes
it necessary to take into account the interests and perspectives of the emerging
communities of historians of science addressing the challenges of cultural diversity.
There can be no doubt that the way toward the future exemplified by the works
of Sam Schweber will give encouragement and enlightenment to the brave who
address these challenges.
BABAK ASHRAFI
BIG HISTORY?
Historians have described extensively the dramatic changes in the organization of
physics research during the twentieth century. To what extent do these changes
foreshadow changes in the organization of history of physics?
In the afterword of the collection of essays in Big Science: The Growth of Large

Scale Research,
1
Bruce Hevly summarized some of the new features of large-scale
research that arose in physics. Big Science, he wrote, was more than just an increase
in relative or absolute size of science projects or scientific institutions. Other factors
include the increased concentration of resources in fewer research centers, increased
workforce specialization, increased attachment of social and political significance
to scientific projects. Furthermore, new forms of relationships have arisen between
science and technology, as well as new kinds of interactions between scientists
and engineers and the military. For the historian, Hevly observed, studying big
science requires renewed attention to institutional contexts and the importance of
collaborative research.
2
Opinions vary as to whether these changes occurred during
and after World War II, or throughout the twentieth century, or have always been
occurring.
In any of these three periodizations, several questions arise about possible
relations between changes in the practice or organization of physics and history of
physics. As Hevly notes, “History, like physics at the turn of the century, has been
seen as essentially the province of individual researchers, perhaps working at times
with mentors and apprentices.” But he claims, “for many historians the traditional
setting is beginning to change.”
3
Hevly called on historians to reflect further on
these changes. Drawing out the analogy in the increase in sponsored research, the
beginnings of change from a mentor-apprentice organization to larger collaborative
structures and the increasing complexity in the objects of study, Hevly concludes
that, “Scholars engaged in such projects [history of recent science] should remain
sensitive to the impact of these arrangements on our own work – arrangements that
could influence the choice of topics, modes of presentation and training of students.

We historians should not imagine that we are any more free of our own complex
institutional and cultural contexts than are the scientists and engineers.”
4
1 Galison, Peter and Bruce Hevly, eds., Big Science, The Growth of Large-Scale Research. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1992.
2 Ibid., 355.
3 Ibid., 362.
4 Ibid., 363.
K. Gavroglu and J. Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, 7–11.
© 2007 Springer.
8 Babak Ashrafi
Sam Schweber has been one of the historians examining changes in the cultural
and institutional contexts of physics and how physics went from being a craft of
individuals to a profession involving large-scale organizations. These transforma-
tions are interesting in their own right, and they may also foreshadow the future of
history of science. For example, in his “The Empiricist Temper Regnant: Theoretical
physics in the United States 1920–1950,”
5
Schweber examined transformations
in the institutional relationships between experimentalists and theorists. He also
contrasted such relationships in America with those in Europe. Schweber observed
that the European physicists who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s and
1940s did not so much remake American physics as become participants in changes
that were already well underway or in place, changes resulting in a mutual transfor-
mation of American physics and immigrant physicists. The ingredients comprising
this transformation were the following: the increasing complexity of the topics
of research, including the advent of quantum mechanics and the rise of atomic
and nuclear physics; the rapidly changing institutional setting, including the large
size and rapid growth of American physics departments; and American physicists’
prevailing habits of pragmatism and empiricism that encouraged theorists to better

integrate their work with that of experimentalists.
Schweber’s “The Mutual Embrace of Science and the Military: ONR and the
Growth of Physics in the United States after World War II”
6
describes the efforts to
move the large-scale structures developed for doing war-time research into a postwar
environment. In this article, as in the “Empiricist Temper Regnant,” Schweber
examined the interplay between changes in the personal, institutional and political
spheres. He described also physicists’ loss of (their perception of) control over their
own research as their dependence on sponsored research grew.
In a third article, “Big Science in Context: Cornell and MIT,” which was
Schweber’s contribution to the volume Big Science, he contrasted the attempts of
two research universities to reconcile their different ideologies of basic or applied
science with the broader interests and trends that drove sponsored research in the
United States during and after World War II.
We can believe that the complexity of Big Science, the increase of sponsored
research, and impending challenges to historians’ dearly held ideologies about
themselves present new obstacles. But historians have faced new obstacles before.
The nature and volume of sources, for example, have been changing all along, and
historians have developed new skills to cope. Perfectly familiar responses, such as
producing more historians in larger departments with more funding, may suffice
this time as well. If historians could multiply as quickly as scientists, then we
could create more case studies and more biographies. Perhaps keeping up with the
5 Schweber, Silvan S. “The Empiricist Temper Regnant: Theoretical Physics in the United States,
1920–1950.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17 (1986): 55–98.
6 Mendelsohn, Everett, Merritt Roe Smith, and Peter Weingart, eds., Science, Technology and the
Military, pp. 3–45. Sociology of Sciences Yearbook, 1988. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1988.
Big History? 9
growth in the scientific community is not as easily done as said. Nor is it clear
that more individual studies will lead to more or better historical insight. If, on

the other hand, the changes occurring in science and history of science really
are deeper than just an increase in scale, then historians should consider how to
enhance their effectiveness in the new environment, regardless of the size of the
communities involved. Greater effectiveness could involve refining and refocusing
historical questions, using technology like every other sector of society to increase
productivity, and working together more often, more closely, and more effectively.
There are several examples of attempts to address the obstacles that Big Science
presents to historians. In 1992, a large international collaboration published Out
of the Crystal Maze,
7
a study of the history of solid state physics. The project is
interesting both for its pioneering work on the history of solid state physics and
for its scale of collaboration, which is so rare in the history of science, or the
humanities more generally for that matter. The project was undertaken because
the investigators, both historians and scientists, felt that the topic of their interest
is “huge and varied and lacks the unifying features beloved of historians.”
8
They
embarked upon a collaboration because “given the breadth and complexity of
solid-state physics, progress in the traditional mode of research would be painfully
slow.” The participants held meetings to discuss how to work together, which
is common in other disciplines. The fact that such organization does not happen
automatically or by accident seems to be a lesson often relearned. The fact that
effective collaborations need to be planned and actively organized is worth noting
here because humanists, who spend so much time studying how other communities
organize, seem to be such determined individualists.
Incontrastwithhistorians,thoseinalliedprofessions,suchasarchivistsandcurators,
are more familiarwith collaborative endeavors.One way forhistorians to learnhow to
organize more effectively wouldbe to see how these allies have organized themselves
to explore some of the features of Big Science that are of mutual interest. For example,

in 2001, the Center for History of Physicsat the American Instituteof Physics reported
the results of a ten yearstudy of documentation practicesin multi-institutional collabo-
rations.
9
Thisstudywas motivated by the observation that as multi-institutional collab-
orations are becoming more common, their archives might be scattered or destroyed.
Although this study was about documentation rather than history and resulted in
publications in sociology journals, it is interesting for historians because it was an
attempt to address one of the aspects of the rise of Big Science. It is also interesting
as a collaboration involving, in part, historians of physics. The study was aimed at
identifying the patterns of collaboration, defining the scope of the documentation
7 Hoddeson, Lillian, Ernest Braun, Jürgen Teichmann, and Spencer Weart, eds., Out of the Crystal
Maze, Chapters from the History of Solid-State Physics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
8 Ibid, viii.
9 Warnow-Blewett, Joan, Joel Genuth and Spencer Weart, AIP Study of Multi-Institutional Collabora-
tions: Final Report. College Park: American Institute of Physics, 2001.
10 Babak Ashrafi
problems, working with institutional archivists to locate and preserve records, field-
testing proposed solutions, and making recommendations about documentation. The
investigators prepared a census of collaborations; interviewed hundreds of partic-
ipants in those collaborations including those with “special perspectives,” such as
women and minorities, as well as pivotal individuals such as directors and program
officers; conducted a qualitative analysis of these interviews; and conducted focused
case studies of a few collaborations.
The study itself had some of the features that mark Big Science projects. There
were five sponsors, and several more institutions that were the sites of multi-
institutional collaborations, such as Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory and Brookhaven, provided support of various
kinds. The researchers consisted of eight Center staff and six main outside consul-
tants. There was a working group for each of the three stages of the study, numbering

27, 33 and 19 members, respectively. The members of the working groups were
scientists, historians, archivists and sociologists drawn from academia, business
and government. Each working group met once or twice a year, but each of the
members was expected to respond individually to queries and requests for advice.
The working groups designed the project’s methodology and reviewed its findings
and recommendations. Those findings continue to influence the Center in its efforts
to preserve the archives of physics and physicists.
The final example of a project addressing obstacles that historians face when
studying large and sometimes widely dispersed projects with many participants
generating vast archives in various media is one that involved the preservation
of archival materials as well as the production of historical narratives. In 2000,
Schweber joined a collaborative Web-based project called the History of Recent
Science and Technology Project (HRST), for which I served as one of the historians
and the project manager. This project was commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation (with matching support provided by the Dibner Fund) as one of a range
of experiments in the history of recent science and technology. We attempted to
foster collaborative teams of historians, encourage collaborations between historians
and the scientists and engineers involved in the projects we wished to study, and
used Web-based tools to support these collaborations. We developed a suite of
database-backed Web applications to extend the reach of historians across large and
dispersed formations and to help them design and establish flexible, interdisciplinary
collaborations for collecting and annotating digital archives.
We faced technical, historiographic and organizational problems in HRST. The
technical problems were straightforward to address. The historiographic issues about
the use and reliability of evidence, narratives of recent science and collaborations
with the subjects of our studies are more interesting. But here too, we face questions
Big History? 11
that are familiar. Indeed, we are preceded here by many, including other historians,
10
sociologists and anthropologists.

Historians can be much less confident in facing the organizational problems of
the kind that arose during HRST. None of the examples described above has led
to more than a temporary change – if that – in how historians work. The features
of Big Science have not translated well to history of science. Specialization of the
workforce in history has been on topics such as the study of particular periods or
disciplines, rather than on skill sets that could be applied to various topics. This is
reflected, for example, in the structure of Out of the Crystal Maze. Collaboration
has been much less common among historians than among museum curators or
archivists and librarians. Individual historians of science and technology are still
not inclined to move to organizational models beyond scholar-and-assistant, and
the institutions that house historians are not set up to facilitate, support and reward
collaborations. One of the lessons of the HRST project was how highly historians
value their intellectual and professional individuality and how difficult it currently
is for historians’ institutions to sustain collaborative projects.
There is a deeper issue underlying these problems. Almost no consensus exists
on a shared set of questions or research approaches among historians of science.
Scholars and their readers would be justified in celebrating the resulting diversity
of perspectives, but they should also acknowledge the resulting obstacles to collab-
orative organization. We might conclude from this robust individualism that the
history of science and perhaps the humanities in general, will remain almost exclu-
sively solitary endeavors. Or historians may yet be pushed by their sponsors or
pulled by their sources into doing more collaborative larger-scale work. Alas, it
seems, much kicking and screaming will ensue.
Center for History of Physics
American Institute of Physics
College Park, Maryland
10 Söderqvist, Thomas, ed., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, Studies in
the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, v. 4. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1997.
STEPHEN G. BRUSH
SUGGESTIONS FOR THE STUDY OF SCIENCE

Recently, an education columnist in the Washington Post wrote that students should
be given some idea of “how the various disciplines fit together (the history of
science, the mathematics of sport…)”.
1
This reminded me once again of the great
potential audience for our field. In an age when education seems to be dominated
by relentless specialization and the testing of factual knowledge, many teachers,
parents and other citizens are fascinated by the Big Questions: What is the origin
and structure of the universe? Are science and religion compatible? Did humans
evolve from simpler organisms? Is human behavior determined by genes or culture?
Why did European civilization come to dominate the world after the fifeteenth
century? Do science and society influence each other?
If historians of science do not give intelligible answers to these questions,
someone else will. In fact, others already have done so. In the general science
section of any comprehensive bookstore you will find many books that seem to use
the history of science to tell fascinating stories about how we arrived at our present
understanding of the world and the lively controversies along the way. Plays about
physicists and mathematicians (Copenhagen, QED, Proof) have been popular. The
authors of these works are often very good writers and some of them even read our
publications. However, few of them are historians of science in the modern sense.
They repeat old myths and stereotypes about the history of science without making
the effort to study original sources and do serious research in archives.
Historians of science often write more accurate and interesting accounts than the
traditional stories but their language should appeal more effectively to students and
the public. For many years, historians of science were reluctant to write textbooks
and popularizations, perhaps because they realized how much research needed
to be done to get past the myths or because they feared that addressing issues
of current interest would legitimize the much-maligned “whig” interpretation of
history. Recently however, there has been a revival of good expository writing for
a wide audience: several comprehensive textbooks and short monographs, readable

and reliable, are now available.
1 Karin Chenoweth, “Homeroom: Taking the Measure of Magnet’s Attractions,” Washington Post,
Prince George’s Extra (15 November 2001), p. 6.
The first four paragraphs of this article are taken from “A Wider Audience for History of
Science” in the American Institute of Physics Center for History of Physics Newsletter, 34, no.
1 (Spring 2002), p. 4, reprinted by permission of the American Institute of Physics. I have also
incorporated material from my Keynote Lecture, “Different Directions in the History of Physics in
the 1990s” presented at the Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of the Physical Sciences, College
Park, Maryland, 17 September 1999.
K. Gavroglu and J. Renn (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, 13–25.
© 2007 Springer.
14 Stephen G. Brush
In science education, the historical approach can no longer be considered just
a distraction that takes time away from learning “real science”. On the contrary,
research done on the Project Physics course for high schools showed that this
historically-oriented text, in combination with simulations of the experiments done
by Galileo and other great scientists, enhanced students’ understanding of the nature
of science while preparing them to do as well on standardized tests of subject-matter
as students taking a traditional course.
2
Nor is there necessarily any conflict for a historian of science, between research
and educational or popularizing activities. At least in my own case, the effort
to present an intelligible and accurate view of science to undergraduate students
inspired me to undertake new research projects, and the results of those projects
were directly incorporated into my teaching.
The purpose of this essay is not to persuade historians to put more effort into
teaching undergraduates or to write more books and articles for the public. Instead, it
is to argue that more attention to the historical questions that interest non-historians
would stimulate research and analysis that is beneficial to us as professional histo-
rians of science. The problems we have been addressing during the last two or three

decades are important and worth studying, but it is time to look at other kinds of
problems that have been neglected.
I am not alone in my dissatisfaction with the present state of the discipline but
others have rather different reasons for being dissatisfed. Let us begin with a recent
assessment of the state of our field, as seen by one eminent practitioner, in a review
of Jan Golinski’s book Making Natural Knowledge:
3
“The place of the history of science in the academy (in the United States as well as
elsewhere, save perhaps for Holland) is appalling. Only a few universities have free-
standing departments; where these are lacking, history departments may employ one or
two professors in this area. Historians, by trade, know “nothing about science.” Thus,
although we have learned quite a lot about women and workers, wars, political movements
and other important aspects of ordinary life, science – the muscle of twentieth-century
North America – has been understudied and poorly understood.
And for a number of reasons. Chief among them is a prevailing epistemology that
has lent privileged status to science as pure and objective, largely unsullied by the mess
of human subjectivities. Jan Golinski explains how constructivism, which he defines
as a methodology that “directs attention to the role of human beings, as social actors,
in the making of scientific knowledge” (p. 6), has exploded this foundational belief.
Constructivism has historicized science and in so doing has called for analysis of all
its associated categories: discovery, evidence, argument, experiment, expert, laboratory,
2 See my article “History of Science and Science Education,” in Scientific Literacy Papers: A Journal
of Research in Science, Education and the Public (Oxford), Summer 1987, pp. 75–87; reprinted
in Teaching the History of Science, edited by M. Shortland & A. Warwick (Oxford: The British
Society for the History of Science/Blackwell, 1989), 54–66 and in Interchange: A Quarterly Review
of Education (Toronto), 20, no. 2 (1989): 60–70. The success of the journal Science & Education:
Contributions from History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science and Education (Kluwer, volume
12 published in 2003) documents the widespread international interest and activity in this enterprise.
3 Review by Londa Schiebinger in American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1554–1555.
Suggestions for the Study of Science 15

instrument, image, replication and law. The heat of the current “science wars” – those
unproductive tussles between scientists and their critics – reflects perhaps the success of
the last thirty years of science studies.
This quotation raises some interesting questions. Is the pitiful state of history of
science worse than it was 30 years ago, and is this despite or because of the
“success” of constructivist science studies? Is constructivism the only acceptable
way to “historicize science,” and is it in fact the dominant trend in history of science
at present? If the two sides in the science wars are identified as “scientists and their
critics” does that mean that constructivists are really anti-science, as some scientists
claim and many constructivists indignantly deny?
Whatever may be the state of history of science as a whole, research in the history
of physical science is flourishing and highly regarded by scientists. One reason
for this relative success is that physicists, chemists, astronomers and geologists
have strongly supported historical research through their societies (for example, the
Center for History of Physics, financed partly from the revenues of physics journals)
and journals (one can publish historical articles not only in the relatively new
Physics in Perspective but also in the well-established Physics Today and Reviews
of Modern Physics). Historical sessions at meetings of these societies attract large
audiences. Authors whose primary training is in science publish in professional
history of science journals, hold professorships in university departments of history
or history of science and win prizes offered by history of science societies. Thus,
the premise that there is some inherent hostility between scientists and historians is
certainly not universally valid.
I begin by describing some trends in research on the history of science; only
one of them, and not the most popular in the 1990s, is constructivism. Two other
approaches, which I call “modernism” and “contextualism,” dominate the publica-
tions I am familiar with.
Next, I propose a couple of unsolved problems that should, in my opinion, provide
fruitful research opportunities in the twenty-first century (although historians of
science now seem reluctant to tackle them): explaining the Scientific Revolution

and elucidating the “nature of science”. Finally, I mention a topic we already know
a lot about but have not made into a coherent theme: the role of mathematics in the
introduction of new ideas about the physical world.
MODERNISM, CONTEXTUALISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM
Thirty or forty years ago one could clearly distinguish between publications by
scientists, which were generally internalist and whiggish, and works by histo-
rians, which were more likely to be externalist and contextual. In fact, historians
proclaimed their rejection of the “whig interpretation of the history of science” to
demonstrate their independence from the scientific community they were studying,
while scientists simply ignored what historians were writing about them. Since
then the two groups have moved much closer together and their approaches can be
16 Stephen G. Brush
regarded as complementary rather than antagonistic. At the same time, scholars from
other disciplines – sociology, women’s studies and literary criticism to mention only
three – have become interested in the history of science from their own perspec-
tives and their work has greatly enriched the history of science by introducing new
questions, methods and sources.
Lacking a generally-accepted term, I have used the term “Modernist” for the
successor to the old whig internalist history; it may be considered “presentist” in its
choice of subjects, but is no longer whiggish in its treatment of those subjects. The
Modernist is still interested in long-term trends, revolutions and the role of ideas like
continuity,atoms,force,progress,etc.,inearlyaswellasmodernscience.However,the
focus is on the development of the scienceitself, with the technicaldetails explained in
a way that engages the attention of experts as well as general readers. Sam Schweber’s
magnificent history of quantum electrodynamics (QED, 1994) is a good example
of a Modernist history, although he has also written in the Contextualist mode.
“Contextual” is a familiar term for the analysis of science in relation to other
factors (social, institutional, economic, political, psychological, etc.) pertaining to
a particular time and place; it is the successor to the old “externalist” approach,
having been enriched by much greater attention to the technical aspects of the

science. However, it is more limited to particular times and places (thus giving rise
to the complaint that the “Big Picture” is ignored). Contextualism is not the same
as “Social Construction,” though there is obviously some overlap between the two:
both may use the same kind of evidence but interpret it with different assumptions.
The Contextualist, like the Modernist, assumes that scientists are discovering facts
and laws that correspond at least approximately to some reality in the physical world;
the Social Constructionist does not. Among other approaches are the “Artistic”
(studies that emphasize the role of visual presentation, musical harmony or aesthetic
factors in the development of science) and the “Feminist/postcolonial” (studies
that discuss the development of science from the perspective of disadvantaged
groups such as women, ethnic or racial minorities and third world populations).
I am especially interested in “Philosophical” approaches that analyse phenomena
such as the acceptance or rejection of theories in terms of philosophical criteria
(e.g., testing of novel predictions).
Most professional research in the history of science in the past couple of decades
has been done in the Modernist or Contextualist mode. Social Construction, despite
the large amount of publicity it has received and its apparently widespread influence
within the larger community of Science and Technology Studies (STS), is found
in only a small number of publications. This may reflect its faddish character:
by now most of the founders of Social Constructionism have either rejected or
substantially modified their original radical positions.
4
The other three approaches
4 Thomas S. Kuhn, whose famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions inspired many of the Social
Constructionists, explicitly rejected their work in “Reflections on Receiving the John Desmond
Bernal Award,” 4S Review 1, no. 4 (1983): 26–30 and in The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy
of Science (Cambridge, MA: Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, 1992).
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, whose book Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific
Suggestions for the Study of Science 17
(artistic, feminist/postcolonial and philosophical) are also sparsely represented in

the general history of science journals, though they flourish in specialized journals.
Another dimension is the subject-matter studied by historians of science. A glance
at the contents of a journal like Isis shows that “science” does not usually include
mathematics, technology or medicine. (By contrast, the scope of Isis in its early
years or of Social Studies of Science currently, seems much broader.) I think this
contraction of our field has been umfortunate; a historian of science should not have
to seek out specialized journals on history of mathematics, technology or medicine
to learn about the relevance of those subjects to physics, chemistry and biology.
EXPLAINING THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
To me the most important question in the history of science is “why did the
Scientific Revolution happen in Europe in the 17th century”? It is also one that
undergraduates find fascinating, judging by class discussions and their choice of
topics for an assigned essay.
Many factors have been proposed: social/economic/religious conditions in Europe
in the 15th and sixteenth centuries, recovery of ancient Greek science and mathe-
matics, Humanism, the “natural law” concept, geographical discoveries, etc. But
how can we determine which of these factors is important, necessary or sufficient
Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979) is still a canonical text of the movement, pointedly omitted
the word “social” in the subtitle of their second edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1986) and Latour himself elaborated his view that STS based on Social Constructionism is
obsolete, in “One More Turn after the Social Turn,” in The Social Dimensions of Science, edited
by E. McMullin, pp. 272–94 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). Harry M.
Collins first reduced his “relativism” from an ontological to a methodological position [compare
“Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism,” Social Studies of Science 11 (1981): 3–10
on p. 3 with “Son of Seven Sexes: The Social Destruction of a Physical Phenomenon,” ibid. 11
(1981): 33–62, on p. 54]; he now seems to have abandoned it completely, in his article with
Robert Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience,” ibid.
32 (2002): 235–96, on pp. 239, 240. David Bloor, founder of the social constructionist “Strong
Program,” later admitted that this program seems to have been forgotten [“Remember the Strong
Program?” Science, Technology & Human Values 22 (1997): 373–85] and, with his colleagues,

explicitly rejected the radical anti-realism of other sociologists [Barry Barnes, David Bloor & John
Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996,
pp. 76–77, 87]. Andrew Pickering, in response to severe criticism by philosophers of his book
Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), did not defend it but changed his position in a way that seems to me to water down
Social Constructionism [“Knowledge, Practice, and Mere Construction,” Social Studies of Science
20 (1990): 682–729; The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995)].
Challenged by Stephen Cole to give just one example in which established knowledge had been
socially constructed, Bloor cited Andrew Warwick’s study of the reception of relativity theory at
Cambridge University; however, this is not very convincing since Warwick covered only the period
up to 1911, when the theory had not yet become established knowledge and (as often happens
in research at the frontiers) there are different views about what the theory actually means. See
S. G. Brush, “Why Was Relativity Accepted”? Physics in Perspective 1 (1999): 184–214.
18 Stephen G. Brush
on the basis of only one historical event? To do that we must analyze other situa-
tions where some but not all of those factors were present, just as Conrad Russell
tried to eliminate proposed causes of the English Revolution by studying an earlier
period in English history when that Revolution didn’t happen.
5
In particular, you cannot plausibly explain why the Scientific Revolution did
happen in Europe in the seventeenth century – what has been called “The Grand
Question” – unless you try to explain why it didn’t happen in other places where a
very high level of science (and technology) had been reached earlier. The leading
candidates are Islam and China. As Raymond Martin argued, we can learn something
about historical causation by studying counterexamples.
6
But only a handful of
historians of science – notably Joseph Needham and H. Floris Cohen – have
seriously considered the question in this way.

One must deal with a set of questions that many historians do not want to discuss,
for two reasons. First, they tend to rule out hypothetical questions (why something
did not happen) as a matter of principle – “that’s not history”. Cohen complains that
“quite a few scholars have indeed denied flatly” that the question “makes sense.”
7
Second, historians deem it offensive to ask why another civilization “failed” to
achieve what the West did. Doesn’t that presume that the West succeeded and the
others somehow took a wrong turn?
The biologist Jared Diamond dared to tackle the larger question: why did
European civilization dominate the rest of the world after the fifeteenth century? In
so doing, of course, he was careful not to insult the people who lost power, wealth
and their lives to the Europeans. The commercial success of his book Guns, Germs
and Steel
8
suggests that there is a popular demand for explanations of major events
in history. However, in this case the excuse “that’s not history” is unconvincing,
since general historians (unlike historians of science) do regard this as a legitimate
question, suitable for discussion in a professional journal as well as in a magazine
edited for a broader audience.
9
There is a small amount of historical analysis directed toward The Grand
Question; some of it is summarized in Floris Cohen’s historiographic book on The
Scientific Revolution. But when I decided to include the topic in my undergraduate
course, I could not find any general books by historians of science suitable for
students. In fact, it is shunned by the handful of good textbooks on science and
5 Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990). See my
article “Why Did (or Didn’t) it Happen? “Historically Speaking 4, no. 5 (June 2003): 20–21, and the
letter to the editor about this article by Roger L. Williams, with my reply, ibid 5, no. 1 (September
2003), 49–50.
6 Raymond Martin, “Historical Counterexamples and Sufficient Causes,” Mind 88 (1979): 59–73.

7 H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 381.
8 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1998).
9 Gale Stokes, “The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories,” American
Historical Review 106 (2001): 508–25; “Why the West? The Unsettled Question of Europe’s
Ascendancy,” Lingua Franca 11, no. 8 (November 2001): 30–38.
Suggestions for the Study of Science 19
technology in world history, as well as by books on the Scientific Revolution. One
of the best such books in the first category calls the question “illicit” – “foreign to
the historical enterprise and not one subject to historical analysis.” So I have had
to use a book by a sociologist, Toby Huff’s The Rise of Early Modern Science:
Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge University Press, 1993), which is useful
but apparently not based on research using original sources.
10
The challenge to historians of science is: if you do not provide a satisfactory
explanation of why the Scientific Revolution happened in seventeenth century
Europe but not at another time and place, someone else will do it.
11
My thesis is
that if you do undertake to explain why an event happened by invoking certain
causes, you should be willing to back up your argument by discussing counterex-
amples – other situations in which some of those causes were present but the
event did not happen. Otherwise you cannot claim that your explanation is satis-
factory. Although the task may involve more theoretical reasoning than historians
find congenial, it does not mean that the historian has to be scientific, either in the
sense of Popper (making predictions of future events) or in the sense of modern
physics (developing general laws and mathematical theories to explain or predict
empirical facts). In fact, given the eagerness of many historians of science to
emulate what they consider to be the methods of “general” historians, it is ironic
that my colleagues seem to avoid the kind of causal questions that specialists in, say,

the seventeenth century English Revolution, find worthy of serious research and
debate.
THE NATURE OF SCIENCE
In the 1970s there was a brief flirtation between historians and philosophers of
science; each group thought it might learn something useful from the other. Philoso-
phers of science were tired of arguing with each other about how science should
work and decided they should take some account of how science actually does
work, now and in the past. Historians of science welcomed this movement at first
because it promised to fill a perceived need for some theory to explain or at least
rationalize the large amount of descriptive data they had collected on the behavior
of scientists. If it were possible to establish a philosophically-respectable theory of
the nature of science by historical work, one might even be able to predict how
science would develop in the future.
10 James McClellan and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 137; see also pp. 115, 139. Toby E. Huff, The Rise of
Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999;
2nd ed., 2003)
11 One way to avoid the question is to deny that there was a Scientific Revolution in seven-
teenth century Europe. Judging by the ever-increasing demand for and supply of books about the
supposedly nonexistent event, I would say that strategy has not yet been successful.