Back to course documents.

The history of science is predicated on the assumption that our science has an identifiable past. It is the present manifestation of an identifiable tradition of investigation of the world that extends back to antiquity. The task of history of science is to produce a record, accessible to modern readers, of the episodes in that tradition.

The most complete history of science consists of a massive inventory of quite specific facts: this person at this time and this place did such and such an act. The totality of such facts exhausts all that has happened historically. However the bare, specific facts are commonly informative and and a massive inventory of them is likely unintelligible. The challenge of history of science is to find a way to reduce this massive catalog to something tractable and intelligible.

This reduction is necessarily selective and such selection requires that the historian apply selection criteria. Different historians may use different criteria. The result is that histories of science that nominally are of the same subject may differ greatly in their content. An historian interested in the intellectual development of key figures in some episode will provide one sort of narrative. Another historian interested in the social conditions surrounding some episode will likely write quite another history.

The selection criteria employed are in turn conditioned by the assumptions made by the historian on the nature of science. At one extreme, a historian may regard science as the study of the objective facts of nature and independent of the larger social conditions surrounding the activity. Another historian may view scientific activity as largely conditioned by these social conditions. Each will write different histories.

These assumptions and many others like them are not simply points of view that may be chosen freely. In so far as they make factual assertions about the specifics of scientific activity, they may be true or false; and their responsible use requires that they are in turn well supported. There is no assurance that an assumption that proves viable for one episode is applicable to others. Once again, responsible use of the assumptions requires that they be well supported for the case at hand.

The best history of science is explicit in the criteria used and what justifies them. The specification commonly comes in the questions asked explicitly at the outset. What led Newton to the ideas in his Principia? That question will lead to a very different history from one that asks: What were the social conditions in 17th century England that enabled the emergence of the new Newtonian science?

What is Good History  of Science?

In addition to transparency on the selection criteria in use are two key notions.

Sources

History requires sources. Without them, we can know nothing of the past. These sources can take many forms. Examples are:

Original publications (books, papers)
Manuscripts, notebooks, letters.
Artifacts
Interviews, recordings, videos.

It is often a matter of great ingenuity to find appropriate sources.

Sources vary in quality. The general rule is the better source is the one closer to the original events. A manuscript written at the time of some event is closer to the activity than the paper, written at the time but purged of the details of the process that led to the paper. A recollection by the author decades later is less reliable than the paper as originally written.

Context

All scientific work occurs within a context. To understand it, we must identify that context. We must ask: to what were the scientists in the history responding?

Identifying the appropriate context can be straightforward. The context of Copernicus' de Revolutionibus is the tradition of scholarship in astronomy, extending from his time through Ptolemy's Almagest to even earlier times. In calling his work the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Newton drew our attention to Descartes Principle of Philosophy, a major part of the context of his work, and the added terms (Mathematical, Natural) flagged his novel contribution.

Sometimes, the appropriate context is far from obvious. In 1943, Max v. Laue published an apparently anodyne paper. It gave a new and simple relativistic proof of a result established half a century before for heat radiation, Wien's displacement law.

"Einstein relativistischer Beweis für das Wiensche Verschiebungsgesetz," Annalen der Physik, 43 (1943), pp. 220-22. ("A relativistic proof of Wien's displacement law.")

What is puzzling is that the result was so familiar and so well established as not to need any new attention. Why did he publish it? The appropriate context would appear to be Wien's work from the later 19th century. That is not the right context. The year 1943 was during the second world war. Science in Germany had been purged of Jewish scientists, including Einstein. Nazi antisemites railed against Jewish science, which they said was opposed to true German, Aryan science. Laue remained a brave anti-Nazi. Publishing the proof was a quiet rebuke to the idea of Aryan science. For the very simple relativistic proof improved greatly on the earlier presumably German derivations, while depending essentially on Einstein's relativistic physics.

What are the Dangers?

Anachronism

Scientists work in the context of their times, using ideas and methods drawn from this context or developed from them. When we report on their activities, there is tendency to use modern terms and expressions not used in the earlier time. These modern terms and expressions are anachronisms.

To some extent their use is unavoidable and not automatically harmful. We must translate terms from an older language to a newer one, if ours is the newer one used to communicate the history. However use of modern terms and concepts can be troublesome. It is all too easy to represent Aristotle as having a dynamics in which force is proportional to speed. This is, we are told that Aristotle made a simple error, which was corrected by Newton when he set force proportional to acceleration. This misrepresents Aristotle as a failed Newtonian. The use of terms is similarly delicate. We can now identify the use of symmetry in earlier works. However the terms "symmetry" with all its modern connotations is a distinctly twentieth century notion. In its place, in earlier times, the terms like "equality" were used.

Whiggishness

The concept of Whig history of science is borrowed from English political history. It is a narrative that divides scientists into the good progressives who we seeking to form our modern science; and the reactionaries who opposed them. It can lead to grave misreadings of history. It becomes a triumphant tale in which modern thought vanquishes ignorance and achieves its destiny.

It is Whiggish to praise the ancient atomists for having the "right" theory, that is, the modern theory; and to demonize the Aristotelians who opposed them. This overlooks the fact that ancient atomism is remote from our modern atomism. Ancient atomism was highly speculative and there was little if any evidence for it. The problem persists. Today we still hear of the progressives, led by Jean Perrin, in the early 20th century, who finally established atomic theory. They were opposed by benighted anti-atomists, such as the energeticist. This overlooks the fact that, at the start of the 20th century, the situation was not so clear. Atomists and ether theorists alike were promoting the existence of a minuscule scale, too small for direct observation, at which all matter and fields would be seen to have simple mechanical foundations. That one tradition was was sound and the other not is easy to see now in retrospect but would not have been so at the time.

Antiquarianism

Fear of anachronism and Whiggishness has taken a dominating position in history of science. They are now uncommon in serious history of science. That fear, however, has created a second problem. In order to avoid any suspicion of anachronism or Whiggishness, too much history of science is now written in complete isolation from what happened after. The narratives exclusively employ terms from the time in question and make no connections to modern science. The result is a history of science that has purely antiquarian interest. It is walled off from the larger context and our present concerns. We are given no clues for why the episode in question might be important for us now. Galileo introduced ways of thinking about problems that evolved into our modern sciences. But if our history of science has no means to connect Galileo's work with later work, it cannot report that important fact. We are left to wonder why anyone other than antiquarians would care about Galileo's work.