| Abstract: | By scientiometrically analyzing the physics-literature produced between 1925 and 1933 it is shown that the purely quantitative contribution of physicists subsequently emigrating from Germany to the literature produced by the physics community in this country was much lower than hitherto estimated. The actual figure is not in the range of 30%, as is generally assumed, but much nearer to 11%. Control analysis of three leading German physics journals and of memberships in the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft confirms this result. Further investigation of university calendars shows that transferring these results to purely academic physics would amount to committing a “universalistic fallacy”. In academic physics emigré-physicists held a total of 15,5% of all teaching postitions. Differentiating the physics literature into various specialties allows further insights into the cognitive and social structure of the German physics community before 1933. Works of emigré-physicists are not randomly distributed over specialities; instead, the distribution reveals a nearly perfect correlation with what could be called “the specialty's paradigmatic age”. The spectrum begins with quantum theory, where future emigrants produced more than 25% of the literature, and fades away with acoustics, where their contribution amounts to less than 4%. The commonly accepted explanation of this phenomenon, which is based on the assumption that time of institutionalization of a specialty, “prestige” of that specialty, and entrance barriers for Jewish scientists are correlated, is falsified by two cases of non- or zero-correlation: by the very old specialties and by the technical disciplines. A new explanans is proposed which is based on the hypothesis of cognitive and social marginality being correlated and on a certain amount of cognitive marginality enhancing the disposition to innovative behavior and creativity. |
