Lewis Pyenson

Elements of the modernist creed in henri pirenne and george sarton

As a humanistic discipline, the history of science has evolved, over the past century, in the way of its academic cousin, the history of art, by powering through a number of disorienting controversies, both abstract and political. Just as the history of art swept from Wõfflin through Panofsky to Schama, so the history of science swept from Tannery, Heiberg, and Merz through Koyré, Dijksterhuis, and Neugebauer, to Needham, Merton, Price, Kuhn and beyond; the great editions of the works of scientists past, beginning in the nineteenth century, led to significant harvest today; large compendia grew in sophistication and diversity; and persuasive, even great, treatises continue to appear which could have been read with profit and admiration by historians of science on the eve of the First World War. Disciplines, however, are subject to mutation. In the twilight of the modern world, a time of dramatic changes in the structures and the sentiments behind intellectual creation, it is of interest to ask why the discipline of history of science remains very much with us, while a number of other fields have been either radically transformed (notably, the disciplines of psychology, physics, and library science) or dramatically attenuated (for example, the disciplines of tropical medicine, journalism, and decorative arts). That the principality of history of science has retained a measure of independence is striking because it has generally bowed before neighbouring monarchs, whether philosophers (at the beginning of the twentieth century), political economists (during the middle of the twentieth century), sociologists (toward the end of the twentieth century), or semioticians (in our own time), all the while taking care not to alienate the scientists and their sources of funding. Indeed, historians of science today are not infrequently trained by card-carrying philosophers or sociologists, and scientific credentials are still bona-fides for significant academic positions in the field. In its resilience, however, the discipline of history of science resembles the discipline of history itself, which has been pulled this way and that, since its institutionalization at the dawn of the modern age, by philosophers, political economists, sociologists, and literary critics. The ontogenic resemblance is reinforced by a certain mutual sympathy, for historians of science have been lodged, for a century, among their ecumenical historian colleagues. In the following pages, we consider the extent of the sympathy between two academic fields at the beginning of the twentieth century. We explore the interrelation

The Young Einstein: The Advent of Relativity

A detailed account of Einsteins childhood and formative years focuses on the intellectual climate of Germany where, before 1919, his trailblazing work on the special and general theories of relativity received widest notice. The author explores the response to the theories by pure mathematicians, who did not have to face the prospect of a fundamental revision of their basic principles, and by physicists and astronomers, who did. Of interest to physicists, academics and students interested in Einstein himself and in the wider history of science and ideas, or in the social and intellectual history of Germany.