Introduction. The Library is the central information unit of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Its task is to assist research by providing literature, reference and modern information services ranging from acquisition or delivery of traditional printed sources, microfiche, microfilm, and bibliographic reference files to electronic documentation and electronic archives. With its electronic documentation services, the Library seeks not only to supply reference information and sources in the history of science, but also to provide the appropriate tools to search and access the wealth of electronic information available world wide. In its first full year of operation, the Library continued to develop these services while completing the computerized infrastructure of the Institute. After establishing an efficient framework for delivering basic services by the end of the previous year, the following priorities were set in 1995:
Library Developments. Construction work necessitated the removal of the Library collection twice during the year, delaying the move to the present quarters until December. Now that the Library has assumed its permanent shape, the stacks are open, and arranged according to the Dewey Decimal System. The Library provides a reading area, with connections to the inhouse LAN system and the Internet, as well as a casual reading corner for newspapers. These areas can be converted to meet needs ranging from discussion groups to Institute receptions. For members of the Institute, most Library collections and resources are also accessible during evening hours and on weekends.
Collection development during 1995 concentrated on reference works, major primary source works, and critical standard editions. The remaining part of the donated personal library of the late Lorenz Krüger was brought to Berlin, where it now forms a special section in the Library. The Institute benefitted greatly from integrating part of the holdings of the library of the former Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte into its collection, which comprises now some 13000 volumes.
Ninety current journals covering the main research areas of the Institute form a further information resource, which will be further developed. The Library also began work on a comprehensive collection of current newsletters of the major learned societies in fields of interest to the Institute. A selection of national and international newspapers are also available.
The Library's microform collection was expanded and now contains some 9500 historical works, including Landmarks of Science, Newton's Manuscripts and Papers, and Einstein's Collected Works. Microfilm readers and reader printers are provided to take full advantage of this strategic resource for research at the Institute. The bibliographic data for the Landmarks of Science have been acquired and will be loaded into the Library's electronic catalogue.
Thanks to its newly upgraded Internet connections, the Library was able to enhance its range of electronic services, and is well on its way to becoming a provider of "virtual information." The Library's electronic resources include a catalogue of its holdings, bibliographic reference and full-text databases, encyclopedias, and electronic library catalogues. While most resources are on CD-ROM, some are networked via the inhouse LAN system and can be accessed from the individual work stations. In addition to these local resources, the Library has access via Internet to the databases of the German Library Service Center (DBI, Berlin), STN, DIALOG, Questel and the catalogues of major libraries world wide. The Library has made special arrangements for the databases Current Contents, Medline, Biosis, and History of Science and Technology (Eureka) to offer direct end user access for the members of the Institute. All these local and remote services will be integrated in the Library's planned World Wide Web Homepage. The ultimate goal is to provide unified access to the different electronic resources.
The Interlibrary Loan system (ILL), as another of the Library's service priorities, has been expanded considerably to keep up with a very high level of demand. This system offers bibliographic reference and document delivery from the major research libraries in Berlin, Germany and abroad. Thanks to agreements with lending libraries housing special holdings in the history of science, it is possible to obtain historic material which otherwise would not be circulated. ILL also provides copies of journal articles, as well as microfilm copies of books and other documents. Provisions for receiving remote documents in digitized form will be completed in the near future. The catalogues from the lending libraries can be consulted on microfiche, electronic files and through the Internet as a part of the Library's reference service.
To keep pace with the expansion of the services in 1995, two more librarians were appointed. The Library team is currently supported by three student assistants.
In 1995, the Library staff placed particular emphasis on integrating itself into the professional networks of the information management community. On the local level, Urs Schoepflin regularly discussed policy and technical issues at the librarians' meetings of the of the Max Planck Society. On the international level, he established contacts with the library of the Institute and Museum for the History of Science in Florence, the library of the University of Chicago, and was a delegate at the Workshop on Bibliographical Tools of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science in Liège.
Scholarly activities. In addition to his duties as head of the Library, Urs Schoepflin also carried out scientometric research in the areas of scientific communication structures and reception processes in scientific literature.
An ongoing study (in cooperation with Wolfgang Glänzel, Information Science and Informetrics Research Unit at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest), investigates the differences in reception between fields of science. It has been shown that literature in the sciences, technology and social sciences have a clearly different ageing behavior, and that within the sciences, theoretical papers tend to have a significantly slower reception than applied and technology-oriented publications. So far, ageing of literature has been interpreted as the change of citation rates over time. The databases - Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)- which form the empirical basis for all such studies, cover only the scientific literature published in serials. However, in subject areas where monographs, books or reports are important means of scientific information, communication is not adequately reflected by journal literature alone. The study therefore investigated whether the observed differences in ageing behavior are due to the dependence of those subjects on books as a communication medium. To examine subjects with a significant share of non-serial literature, all the references in the bibliographic citations (including articles, notes, letters and reviews) indexed in the 1993 annual cumulation of the SCI database were analyzed. A number of statistics measuring the share of serials references and the age of references were calculated for an analysis at different levels of aggregation. Results suggest that the influence of the share of serials on the age of references is negligible, both at the level of journals and of entire subfields. The share of serials as well as the age of references, however, both depend on the subject matter of the publications to a great extent. The results of the study may help to choose appropriate citation segments and to validate the application of bibliometrics-based indicators for certain subjects and scientific fields in research evaluation.
A second study investigated scientific fields where monographs, books or reports form important means of scientific information. As stated above, science communication is not reflected adequately by journal literature alone. In order to identify fields where the role of non-serial literature is critical in terms of bibliometric standard methods, all references in the bibliographic citations indexed in the 1993 annual cumulation of the SCI and SSCI databases have been processed. The analysis was based on three indicators in particular: the percentage of references to serials, the mean references age, and the mean reference rate. The application of these measurements led to the following conclusions: the percentage of references to serials proved to be a particularly useful tool for measuring and characterizing typical differences between the communication behavior in the natural sciences and the social sciences. There is some overlap between fields such as mathematics, technology-oriented science and some social science areas. In certain social science areas, scientific information seems to originate in non-scientific literature to a considerable extent. Consequently, the model of information transfer from scientific literature to scientific (journal) literature assumed by bibliomteric standard methods has to be substantially revised before valid results can be expected from its application to social science areas.
The computer service unit started work in May 1994. Its main tasks in the past year were
Hardware. During the last year, the Institute's hardware capabilities were greatly expanded. The capacity of the fileserver was upgraded to 30 GByte hard disk space. In addition to the servers for the database system of the Institute (FileMaker) and the server for modem connections, two additional Macintosh based servers were installed. The first server was for the institute-wide calendar, the second for the internal and external electronic mail facilities. Most of the personal computers at the Institute are Macintosh, but the server for the connection to the Internet and World Wide Web is an Unix-based machine (an Intel Processor with a Linux operating system). At the moment, two more Linux machines and a Sun Double Spark System with Solaris make up the Unix site of the Institute, and there are also some DOS/Windows-based computers available.
The network. Together with eight printers serving the computers mentioned above, the Local Area Network covers more than 100 users at the Institute. The LAN was designed with a 100 MBit FDDI backbone from the ground floor to the sixth floor. From every floor, 10 MBit Ethernet lines connect the users through routers and repeaters to the Institute's LAN. The Institute operates with a 64 k Bit permanent link to the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, which connects the Institute via a 2 MBit line to the Internet.
The Institute now has a provisional server for the World Wide Web. A preliminary home page can be visited at http://demokritos.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/.
The administration unit is separately connected through a permanent link to a VAX PDP 11 system located at the Max-Planck-Institut für Infektionsbiologie.
Support of research activities. Although the capacity of the computing service unit is small, it has been able to support Institute research activities such as
The computing service unit also held several training sessions for users, including
In addition, a weekly jour fixe was introduced, where computer problems were discussed.
The staff of the computing service unit also participated in several workshops, congresses and exhibitions for obtaining information on the future development of computer facilities in the sciences and humanities.
Organized by Wolfgang Lefèvre and Ursula Klein
The history of chemistry is a promising field for studies in historical epistemology, because one is able to study the interrelationship of forms of experience, ways of representation, and layers of knowledge in a different manner than the history of physics or the history of life sciences. The history of chemistry not only confronts the history of science with yet another discipline, but can significantly complement our understanding of the processes of scientific thinking. Despite the efforts of many scholars in this field, one cannot claim that this aspect of the history of chemistry is a well-explored area. The Institute has therefore taken the initiative of encouraging further research in this direction. A first step was the organization of a symposium on early modern chemistry.
The so-called "Baconian" sciences deserve special attention if one wants to study the relationship between the experience of practitioners and the formation of scientific concepts in the emerging early modern sciences. Post-Paracelsian and pre-Lavoisierian chemistry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has, until now, not been studied systematically from this perspective. When early modern chemistry has been viewed in any way as the beginning of modern chemistry, it has been almost exclusively regarded as the result of the victorious struggle of the ideas of atomism over Peripatetic natural philosophy. Early modern chemistry before Lavoisier is, on the other hand, especially promising for gaining insights into the role reflections of processes within certain chemical operations played for concept formation, as well as insights into the relationship between those operations and scientific experiments. Both aspects were central interests at the workshop.
The following presentations were given at the workshop: Marco Beretta (Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence): "Humanism and the Emergence of Early Modern Chemistry: The Spread of Georgius Agricola's Metallurgical Writings;" Maurice Crosland (Kent University at Canterbury): "Changes in Chemical Concepts and Language in the Seventeenth Century;" Owen Hannaway (Johns Hopkins University): "Reading the Pictures relating to Chemistry in the Time of Georgius Agricola;" Frederic L. Holmes (Yale University): "Concepts, Operations, and the Problem of `Modernity' in Early Modern Chemistry;" Ursula Klein (then Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin): "Experimental Practice and Layers of Knowledge in Early Modern Chemistry;" Christoph Meinel (Universität Regensburg): "Die Praxis der Syndiakritischen Methode bei Jungius." Robert P. Multhauf (San Rafael): "The Importance of the Chemical Technology of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century for the Emergence of Early Modern Chemical Concepts." A preprint including some workshop material and the papers held at the workshop is available at the Institute.
Organized by Jürgen Renn, Tilman Sauer, and John Stachel (local organizing committee)
The conference was the fourth in a series of international symposia devoted to the history of general relativity; earlier conferences were held in Boston (1986), Luminy (1988), and Pittsburgh (1991). These conferences provide a forum for historians, philosophers, and scientists to meet, exchange ideas and review recent work in the history of general relativity. For this year's conference 39 contributions, accepted by an international advisory committee, were presented to a plenary of 65 scientists and 13 students from 16 countries.
Three main topics formed the focus of this year's conference. First, investigations on the origins and development of the theory of general relativity until 1916 and on alternative historical lines of development were discussed and reviewed. Important progress had been made in this field in the past few years, due to the analysis and reconstruction of Einstein's research notes as well as to the exploration of his scientific context. These developments have combined to shed new light on Einstein's as well as on the alternative paths towards a relativistic theory of gravitation.
Second, several aspects of the further development and vicissitudes of the general theory of relativity after its formulation in 1915 were discussed. Recent historical work was presented on the development of the theory, on the application of the new concepts of relativity theory in special fields of physics such as cosmology, on its experimental verifications, and on the exploration of further consequences of the theory, such as gravitational radiation. These problems very often transcend the purely historical dimension and raise questions of philosophical and methodological relevance, to which special sessions of the conference were dedicated.
Third, the public debates about the philosophical and ideological relevance and implications of the theory of general relativity, in particular during the years of the Weimar Republic, show that the history of general relativity cannot adequately be understood as a purely scientific development. After the verification of gravitational light deflection in 1919, Einstein became a public and political figure, and cultural and philosophical disputes as well as ideological and political conflicts were often incited by differing assessments of his work. Consequently, investigation of the reception of the theory across this wider spectrum was another focus of the conference.
The conference was organized by the Institute with financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and in cooperation with the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education. A conference excursion and a public round table discussion were organized in cooperation with the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. A press conference was held to inform the media. Following the conference, a meeting of the scientific advisors of the Arbeitsstelle Albert Einstein was organized on August 4, 1995. About half of the contributors to the conference were invited to submit a written version of their paper for publication in a special volume of the Einstein Studies series to be edited jointly by Hubert Goenner, Jürgen Renn, James Ritter, and Tilman Sauer.
Organized by Lorraine Daston, Simon Schaffer, and H. Otto Sibum
The Berlin Summer Academy was initiated in 1990, in conjunction with the Rathenau Fellowhip Program in the History of Science and Technology, Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, and the International Network. The sixth Berlin Summer Academy addressed the epistemological and aesthetic claims of bodily knowledge in the sciences. As in previous years, the Summer Academy consisted of an intensive preparatory seminar for advanced doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, led this year by Everett Mendelsohn (Harvard University), Falk Riess (Universität Oldenburg), and H. Otto Sibum (University of Cambridge), where participants discussed key literature on this year's theme, attempted to reconstruct historical scientific experiments, and prepared commentaries on the papers circulated by speakers presenting at the conference that took place during the second week of the Summer Academy.
What can the body know? Traditionally, philosophers have treated the body as at best an imperfect conduit of, and at worst an obstacle to knowledge. Contempt for the body is as much social as epistemological. The hierarchy of head over hand is ancient, echoed in the medieval subordination of the mechanical arts. Yet since the seventeenth century, the natural sciences have trumpeted their preference for things over words, and it is bodies rather than minds that in the first instance interact with things. The hand that senses heat or adjusts the laboratory apparatus, the nose that can distinguish one chemical compound from another, the tongue that identifies plants by shades of sourness, the eye that grasps the morphology of an organism or celestial nebula, the ear that registers the ticking of the clock or the fall of a projectile - these were some of the indispensable ways of knowing nature from things rather than from texts. Dexterity and sensory refinement have long been an essential part of how scientists come to know about nature, but they have been largely invisible and inarticulate in the public presentation of science.
The Summer Academy 1995 was devoted to finding a voice for tacit knowledge in the history of science. Five principal topics structured discussion: (1) What can we learn from the reconstruction of historical scientific experiments? (2) The production and reproduction of bodily knowledge; (3) The education of the scientist's senses; (4) The disembodied scientist; and (5) The mechanized body in twentieth-century art and science.
Speakers were Robert Brain (University of Cambridge), Peter Galison (Harvard University), Caroline Jones (Boston University), Werner Kutschmann (Frankfurt a. Main), Christian Licoppe (France Telecom, Paris), Rudolf zur Lippe (Universität Oldenburg), Dorinda Outram (University of Cork), Antoine Picon (École des Ponts et Chausées, Paris), Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge), Mark Seltzer (Cornell University), H. Otto Sibum (University of Cambridge), Stuart Strickland (Northwestern University), and Norton Wise (Princeton University).
The title of this international conference was taken from Aristotle's treatise De generatione et corruptione, but the subject is nonetheless highly current in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science: how are the objects of science constituted? The objects of a science may be as apparently straightforward as plants in botany, and as complex as the experimental systems of the modern biosciences. Only rarely do scientists work with "raw," unprocessed natural objects. Already in the early seventeenth century physicists had begun to substitute mathematical idealizations for real bodies in motion; botanists of the same period replaced the many individual specimens they had observed with a composite illustration intended to represent the "Typus" of the entire species. Since the seventeenth century, the natural sciences have been extremely fertile in creating new kinds of scientific objects through mathematical, experimental, and visualization techniques, largely in an attempt to eliminate the variable and accidental quality of objects given by nature. Hence, examples from the natural sciences figured prominently among the papers presented at the conference.
However, the human sciences present equally revealing examples of how scientific objects emerge, and sometimes how they disappear. The market in economics, morality in human demography, society in sociology, the self in psychology: these are all examples of scientific objects which came into being only through an effort of reconceptualization. All of these entities had existed since ancient times, but not as objects of scientific inquiry. In order, for example, for human mortality to become such an object, amenable to statistical description, it first had to be seen as a stable, regular phenomenon, not just as the common lot of humanity. In the early eighteenth century, the moment of death was the paradigm of life's uncertainty; by the end of the century, the first mathematically based life insurance company had been launched on the assumption that death followed certain laws, just like the planets. The question posed by these examples is less one of representation (by mathematical model, idealized illustration, or controlled experiment) than of stabilization. For the historian of science, the question then becomes: under what conditions can the market (or the self, or society, or mortality) come to be perceived as having a structure firm enough to support a scientific discipline?
The conference was organized into six sessions designed to address the full range of these questions concerning the constitution of scientific objects for both the natural and human sciences, with examples drawn from both the former and the latter, from the sixteenth century to the present. Each of the six sessions addressed a particular theme or topic in the emergence and disappearance of scientific objects, with an emphasis upon cross-historical and cross-disciplinary comparisons. The topical sessions were primarily dedicated to the special problems raised by the objects of the human sciences, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and their practical applications in medicine and insurance: "The Soul and the Self," "Society and Culture," and "Value and Values." In order to permit sharp interdisciplinary and cross-cultural comparisons, each of these sessions had a fairly narrow chronological focus - for example, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the case of "The Soul and the Self." In contrast, the thematic sessions - "Mathematical Objects and Models," "Disappearing Objects," and "The Laboratory" - juxtaposed papers from different periods, in order to highlight historical dynamics. For example, the session on "Disappearing Objects" included papers on the study of anomalies in early modern natural philosophy and on Quellenforschung in nineteenth-century classical philology.
Four principal areas of consensus emerged from the conference papers and discussions. First, the major contrasts between the ways in which scientific objects were constituted lay not so much between the natural and human sciences as within the natural sciences. The experimental systems of post-World War II microbiology, for example, appear to have a fundamentally different character and function than the mathematical models of the electromagnetic aether devised by nineteenth-century physicists. Whereas the experimental systems require variability in order to produce novel results, the mathematical models are designed to suppress variability. Second, the conditions under which new scientific objects appear in both the natural and human sciences are tightly linked to new modes of representation - for example by graphical methods, photographs, mathematical formalisms, or forms of literary narration. It is relatively rare that a new object is simply discovered; rather, new ways of representing objects make possible new forms of scientific inquiry about them. Third, the opposition between what is given (literally, "the data") and what is constructed, so common in the recent literature of science studies, makes very little sense in an analysis of scientific objects, which are almost always hybrids of both. The challenge lies not in sorting out the given from the constructed, but rather in devising a new ontological vocabulary that does justice both to the stability and historicity of these objects. Productive science is very seldom possible on the unimproved objects provided by ordinary experience; it is the achievement of science to create a secondary world of objects that makes investigation (and application) possible. Fourth, when scientific objects emerge they often create new disciplines, but the disciplines do not necessarily die when their original objects disappear. There appears to be a momentum, cognitive as well as institutional, that sustains most scientific disciplines, once launched.
Speakers were Jed Buchwald (Dibner Institute for the History of Science/MIT, Cambridge), Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Rivka Feldhay (Tel-Aviv University), Jan Goldstein (University of Chicago), Gérard Jorland (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), Doris Kaufmann (Universität Jena/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Bruno Latour (École des Mines, Paris), Glenn Most (Universität Heidelberg), Theodore Porter (University of California at Los Angeles), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Marshall Sahlins (University of Chicago), Peter Wagner (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin).
Commentators were John Carson (Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London), Peter Galison (Harvard University), Johan Heilbron (Amsterdam School for Social Science Research), Krzysztof Pomian (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Norton Wise (Princeton University).
Organized by Lorraine Daston and Jürgen Renn
Professor Lorenz Krüger, Professor of Philosophy, was instrumental in the creation of the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science, and was to have been one of its three directors. Tragically, he died before he could assume this post, on September 29, 1994. In order to honor his memory, a one-day symposium was organized, marking the first anniversary of his death. Family, friends, and colleagues from far and wide attended, but the program of speakers consisted exclusively of colleagues from abroad, who had had no previous opportunity to come together for a memorial. Scholars from several disciplines and nations spoke about Lorenz Krüger as historian and philosopher of science, as organizer of scholarly projects, and as cherished teacher, colleague, and friend. The symposium concluded with a performance of Mozart's Divertimento (KV 563) by the Berliner Streichtrio.
Speakers were Nancy Cartwright (London School of Economics), Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Gérard Jorland (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), Erwin Hiebert (Harvard University), Giridhari Lal Pandit (University of Dehli), Mary Morgan (London School of Economics/University of Amsterdam), Theodore Porter (University of California at Los Angeles), Hans Poser (Technische Universität Berlin), Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Zeno G. Swijtink (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Norton Wise (Princeton University).
Organized by Yehuda Elkana, (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich)
The need to rethink the social sciences at their very foundations stems from the larger conviction that man's most urgent moral dilemma today is to decide whether to accept the fact that the seemingly gloriously successful tradition of the last four centuries in Western civilization has also brought about, or at least significantly contributed to the world's most serious social, political and economic problems. The growing poverty and hunger in much of the world, the pending ecological crisis, the growing menace of AIDS, and the spreading fundamentalism in many of the societies of the world all point an accusing finger not only at Western expansion, imperialism, colonialism, but also at its greatest pride: its science, technology, medicine and socio-political theory. One alternative would be to scuttle the Enlightenment, if under this umbrella concept one includes not only the philosophy of the eighteenth century but the complex of market economy, Scientific Revolution, Industrial Revolution, nineteenth-century developments in the natural and the social sciences and the subsequent Western conquest of the rest of the world. This alternative is neither desirable nor feasible, although various anti-rational and anti-science movements have attempted to do just that, such as the nihilists of the early twentieth century, the hippies of the sixties, and the idealists heading the student revolts in 1968. The other alternative seems to be the path which is being followed by most of the governments of the world today, in one form or another: "If we do more of the same, but more carefully, more thoughtfully, more consenually, we might succeed. If we monitor the sciences more carefully, and regulate industry more rigorously, the ecological crisis will disappear. If we become more tolerantly rational, fundamentalism will disappear." This approach has also failed to produce the desired results. In light of the intense scrutiny the Enlightenment tradition has been subjected to, the workshop sought to rethink the fundamentals of our culture - systematically, deliberately, and daringly - to see whether it would be possible to develop new concepts to help reformulate both the natural and the social sciences.
A small group of prominent scholars from Europe, the U.S., India and Israel convened for a first round of discussion (no formal papers were given) on this complex of problems. At the end of the two days, each participant gave a final statement, which was recorded and will serve as the basis for a summary paper on the workshop and for the continuation of the project in other venues.
The workshop was attended by Partha Chatterjee (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta), Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Arnold Davidson (University of Chicago), Rivka Feldhay (Tel-Aviv University), Gerd Gigerenzer (Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Munich), Thomas Hughes (University of Pennsylvania), Sally Humphreys (University of Michigan), Michael Lackner (Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen), Alexandre Métraux (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg), Helga Nowotny (Universität Wien), Gyan Prakash (Princeton University), Jürgen Renn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Universität Salzburg), Sam Schweber (Brandeis University), Georg Stauth (Deakin University, Australia), Anna Stetsenko (Universität Bern).