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.     

Semantics of learned quackery in the 17th and 18th centuries

In the 17th and 18th century republic of letters the problem of scientific fraud was met with a discourse of charlatanism. Departing from Johann Burchhard Menckes famous treatise on the Charlatanry of the learned the following essay traces how the accusations of academic and scientific misconduct put in terms of 'charlatanry' primarily helped to produce the new species of the erudite 'charlatan'. Facing a growing complexity of scientific culture this new frame of meaning, structured by numerous examples of scientific misconduct offered a new way of orientation in the world of learning. But besides its cognitive impacts the discourse of charlatanry allowed to create symbolic boundaries, which determined decisions upon the affiliation or non affiliation to the new forming scientific community by separating honourable from dishonourable scientific personae. Speaking of charlatanry therefore always implied a social distinction as much as a scientific. The discourses on charlatanry also mirror differentiations within the scientific field. At first dominated by a critique built on courteous or bourgeois values, the scientific field later on developed its own criteria of appraisal like authorship, originality, transparency etc. Attracting the attention of a further growing public sphere, the explicit verbalisation of claims not relating to the value system of a republic of letters primarily concerned with the production and distribution of knowledge finally led up to a more implicit moral economy of science. A change that at a large scale level can be described both as an internalisation of the values of scientific conduct and differentiation between justiciable and unjusticiable transgressions of the norms set up by the scientific community.