Abstract
Progress in science has been always achieved by a diverse community of researchers, working in different countries, under different social, economic, and political conditions, with different traditions, and usually speaking different languages. Despite these profound differences, a common framework of theories and experimental methods has gradually been built up, in which the individual contributions are often partly or totally hidden. Science is an international achievement, and textbooks and monographs are often written without reference to true origins of scientific ideas and without reference to the conditions under which the science was developed. As a result, the reader gets only half the picture. In fact, science has been strongly shaped by the individual researchers. Terminology, symbols, paradigms, and prototypes, i.e., the language of science, are deeply rooted in the thinking of the individual scientists having lived under specific historical conditions. The experimental methods and techniques mirror the individual abilities of the scientists as well as their living and working conditions. Developed by other scientists under different conditions, they would have been different. Between the most ancient inventor and the most recent user exists an evolutionary chain of developments with unpredictable twists and turns, sometimes also revolutionary steps. Similarly, theories are coined by the thoughts and ideas of the people who have developed them; they got the stamp of the time and place of their origin. When I started writing this introduction, the idea that the social environment of a scientist can affect the way in which science is growing, was so plain to me that I did not give it a second thought. I have concluded this from reading original papers written at different times and places and by observing ongoing scientific developments. Later I have seen that sociologists had severe fights about this question, and only in the past decades it became accepted that there are different “Styles of Thought,” as Jonathan Harwood entitles his analysis of the history of genetics in the USA and Germany. Harwood writes: “Since the 1970s, however, a substantial literature on the sociology of scientific knowledge has made the search for styles of science altogether plausible. What this literature demonstrates is that the cognitive processes whereby scientific knowledge is constructed—for example, observation, classification, theory formation, and theory testing—are routinely shaped by the social circumstances of the scientist concerned.” [1].
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Notes
- 1.
“Hier möchte ich nochmals auf die Intuition und Erkenntnis zurückkommen. Jeder Wissenschaftler ahnt mehr oder weniger innerhalb des von ihm bearbeiteten Gebietes Zusammenhänge, die einen Fortschritt versprechen. Das war die Intuition. Und wenn er die Zusammenhänge richtig erfaßt, ohne sie unbedingt formuliert zu haben, so ist es bereits eine Erkenntnis. Die exakte Formulierung ergibt die Theorie. Es sei hier nochmals betont, das jeder Schaffende auch in den exakten Wissenschaften einschließlich der Mathematik eigentlich als Künstler wirkt. Denn er hat die Freizügigkeit, Ungenauigkeiten einzuführen, und er muß von dieser Gebrauch machen, um überhaupt erst zu einem Ergebnis zu kommen. Sonst würde sich fast jedes Problem als hoffnungslos kompliziert ergeben.”
- 2.
Fritz Haber’s was a similar case: “He worked his way into the fields of electrochemistry and thermodynamics, which were critically important for his research, in a most astounding and quite unusual fashion—without having an intellectual mentor in any of the scientific schools.” (Stoltzenberg D (2004) Fritz Haber. Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew. Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, p xxi.)
References
Harwood J (1993) Styles of thought. The German genetics community 1900–1933. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, p 11
Stransky IN (1963) Humanismus und Technik 9(1):21–25
Stock JT (2003) Ostwald’s American students. Apparatus, techniques and careers. Plaidswede, Concord, NH
Gordin M (2015) Scientific Babel: the language of science from the fall of Latin to the rise of English. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
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Scholz, F. (2015). Introduction. In: Scholz, F. (eds) Electrochemistry in a Divided World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21221-0_1
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