Zur Geschichte des Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituts für physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie. Zur geplanten Veränderung des Instituts in eine Forschungs- und Entwicklungsstätte des Heeres für den Gaskampf und Gasschutz auch in Friedenszeiten 1916 und nach 1933

A Contribution to the History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry: On Projected Changes of the Institute into a Research and Development Center of the Army for Chemical Warfare also in Times of Peace 1916 and after 1933. — The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and Electrochemistry, today named after its first director Fritz-Haber-Institut, was in the first World War a place of research on chemical warfare. Evidences in the Archive for the History of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft show that it was planned during the war to continue research in this area in peacetime. To realize this Fritz Haber proposed to found a special Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. As this could not be accomplished the war ministry founded 6 million marks to establish an extra department in the KWI of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry just before the end of the war. After Germany lost the war these were used for other research areas while work on chemical warfare was carried out elsewhere. When Fritz Haber resigned 1933 because of the race-laws of the nationalsocialists the war ministry in cooperation with the ministery for culture nominated an obliging scientist as director of the institute with the aim to take up again research in the area of chemical warfare despite of the opposition of the president of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft and the ministery of the interior. After that time until the end of the second world war 1945 a good part of the work carried out in the institute was done for the war ministry.     

Mathematik und Religion in der frühen Neuzeit

Some protestant Mathematicians had a strong preoccupation with the Day of Judgement. Stifel, Faulhaber, Napier and Newton made calculations in order to determine the date of the end of the world. Craig gave mathematical rules for a decline in the reliability of Christian tradition; in order to prevent a reliability of nearly zero, the Day of Judgement must come before. Furthermore, some conflicts between theology and mathematics are discussed. The Council of Konstanz condemned Wyclif's theory of the continuum. It seems that the relation between part and whole was a crucial point between the Aristotelians and the “moderns”.     

Im Blickwinkel der Technik: Neue Verhältnisse von Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Changing Perspectives – From the Experimental to the Technological Turn in History and Philosophy of Science. In the 1960s the philosophy of science was transformed through the encounter with the history of science, resulting in a collaborative venture by the name of “History and Philosophy of Science” (HPS). Philosophy of science adopted ever more regularly the format of the case study to reconstruct certain episodes from the history of science, and historians were mostly interested in the production of scientific knowledge. The so‐called “experimental turn” of the 1980s owed to this interaction between philosophy and history. Its guiding question remained quite traditional, however, namely “How do the sciences achieve an agreement between representation and reality?” Only the answers to this question broke with tradition by focusing not on theory but on the role of instruments and experiments. – Roughly 30 years after the experimental turn, another transformative encounter appears to be taking place. HPS is being transformed in the encounter with philosophy of technology. From the point of view of philosophy of technology, the question does not arise whether and how the agreement of mind and world, representation and reality can be achieved. When things are constructed, built or made, human thinking and physical materiality are inseparably intertwined. Instead of seeking to describe a mind‐independent reality, technoscientific researchers are working to acquire and demonstrate capabilities of experimental or predictive control. When science is regarded as a kind of technology, a program of study opens up for epistemology and so do avenues for the historiography of science. History of science might now show how the problems and procedures of the sciences arise from and impinge back upon a world that is itself a product of science and technology. It thereby abandons its traditional HPS niche existence and joins forces with environmental history, history of technology, social, labor, and consumer history.     

Geschichte ohne Kausalität. Abgrenzungsstrategien gegen die Wissenschaftssoziologie in zeitgenössischen Ansätzen historischer Epistemologie

History Without Causality. How Contemporary Historical Epistemology Demarcates Itself From the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Contemporary proponents of historical epistemology often try to delimit their enterprise by demarcating it from the sociology of scientific knowledge and other sociologically oriented approaches in the history of science. Their criticism is directed against the use of causal explanations which are deemed to invite reductionism and lead to a totalizing perspective on science. In the present article I want to analyse this line of criticism in what I consider are two paradigmatic works of contemporary historical epistemology: Lorraine Daston's und Peter Galison's Objectivity and Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger's Toward a History of Epistemic Things. I first present their arguments against the sociological and causal analysis of scientific knowledge and practice and then try to defend sociological work in the history of science against their charges. I will, however, not do so by defending causal explanations directly. Rather, I will show that the arguments against sociological analysis put forward in contemporary historical epistemology, as well as historical epistemology's own models of historical explanation and narration, bear problematic consequences. I argue that Daston, Galison and Rheinberger fail to create productive resonances between macro‐ and microhistorical perspectives, that they reproduce an internalist picture of scientific knowledge, and finally that Rheinberger's attempt to deconstruct the dichotomy between subject and object leads him to neglect questions about the political dimension of scientific research.     

Die Entwicklung der Sozialgeschichte der modernen Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft und die Frage nach dem sozialen Raum zwischen Disziplin und Wissenschaftler

The use of the concept of social history of science is sketched in the Anglo‐American and the German discussions from the mid 1970s up to recent work. By presenting a ‘social map’ of a selected scientific community it is argued that between the categories of discipline and single scientist there exists a wide ‘social space’ of groups within which science is pursued. In adopting a milieu theoretic approach an ecology of science is proposed as a suitable extension of the social history of science.     

Wissenschaftswachstum in wichtigen naturwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen vom 17. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert

The Growth of Science within Important Scientific Disciplines from 17th to 21st century. – In this paper the growth of knowledge is investigated for the disciplines of Astrophysics / Astronomy, of Physics and of Chemistry in the last centuries. In this context the main emphasis is devoted to the discussion of the growth of literature. Besides, this is also illustrated by the growth of indicators like for example important books, new discoveries in science, the chemical elements, the known chemical compounds and the number of known inorganic chemical structures. Compared to numerous earlier studies a systematic evaluation of all presently available data sources is carried out. The data are fitted by different mathematical growth models (linear, quadratic, exponential, hyperbolic). These are discussed and compared. As far as the exponential growth model is applied the doubling periods obtained have values between 11 and 32 years for the cumulative total of publications, between 24 and 98 years for that of important books, between 79 and 163 years for that of new discoveries and between 10 and 14 years for that of chemical substances. From an order of magnitude point of view this is in agreement with the results of other authors. It is however also demonstrated that the exponential growth model which is normally used is not necessarily the best to describe the growth of the data. Other models are often better suitable to explain the growth. It is shown that linear growth of the yearly publications describes the data better than exponential growth in certain epochs. In this latter case it is demonstrated that the parameter (linear slope) for the rate of increase has a constant values in certain epochs, but rises in steps from epoch to epoch by a factor of 3 to 40. After the second world war the linear growth model for the yearly publications or the quadratic growth model for the cumulative total of publications respectively delivers the best results. This is therefore used for forecasting the future.     

Physik und Politik in der frühen Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Max Born,Werner Heisenberg und Pascual Jordan als politische Grenzgänger

Physics and Politics in the Early Federal Republic of Germany. Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan between Scientific and Political Discourse. – Contrasting the historiography of two major developments in 20th century German history, the creation of quantum mechanics in 1925 and the dispute on the nuclear armament of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957, the question is raised to which extent the scientific culture was able to bridge political disagreement within the German physicists' community. A twofold story of the private and public exchange between Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan among others on the scientists' position to nuclear armament on the one hand and the writing of the history of quantum mechanics on the other hand displays different types of relating scientific work and moral responsibility. Neither politics nor science went on unaltered after the disputes between physics and politics in the early Federal Republic of Germany.     

Strukturwandel der Wissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus

National Socialism brought about profound changes for the German academic system. Forced emigration not just sent outstanding scholars into exile, thus closing down promising research venues. In fact, it changed the entire climate of scientific inquiry by removing intellectual outsiders from the scene, whose absence usually precludes any success of innovative research. In most disciplines this led to a dominance of just a few academic ‘schools’ and paradigms, which severely harmed intra‐discipline accountability and innovation. The academic bureaucracy worked more effectively than has been assumed for a long time: practice‐oriented research enjoyed massive state support, and huge research projects outside the universities flourished. At the same time the National Socialists looked ambivalently at the universities themselves. They savored the legitimizing functions of the arts and sciences, and yet they distrusted the professors as exponents of the bourgeois world of old. Contrary to the blooming sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics, the arts and humanities had a hard time demonstrating their practical applicability. In order to prove their worth by means of giving advice to the political sphere, they formed interdisciplinary combines, which were massively funded by the ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’. The ‘Deutsche Wissenschaft’, which has been incorrectly marginalized in numerous accounts, served in part to provide a Weltanschauung justification for these networks. While the German academic community in 1945 tried to pick up the threads of the a‐political self‐ understanding of the 1920s, in fact there were numerous continuities to academic life before and after 1945. Among them were the encompassing loss of international contacts, the strengthening of hierarchical structures, and the importance of feasibility criteria for the culture of innovation. The arts and humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) could not regain the lost territory of significance, which they had suffered during the Third Reich. It is mainly their development which showed an amazing persistence of national socialist patterns of view and of concepts of the enemy, which in turn as late as 1968 inspired in part the anti‐bourgeois thrust of the critique of the academic world.     

Wissenschaft im Gehäuse: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil institutionengeschichtlicher Perspektiven

Research is realized in social and cultural context, it is established in institutions, as far as different forms and conditions of practice are concerned. In this article some German examples demonstrate how flexible and varied the institutions of research can be during the course of history of science. The first part deals with historically grown, yet chronologically overlapping institutions of research: beginning with the lonely scholar, going on to hierarchally organized big science and ending up with virtual institutions. In the second part, at the intersection of political‐social administration and styles of scientific thought terms like German Realpolitik, science in context, and science policy are discussed within the modernization process.