Conveners
Historiography of physics
- Leonardo Gariboldi (Università degli Studi di Milano, Dipartimento di Fisica "Aldo Pontremoli")
In this talk I will make a case for the pertinence of a biographical approach to the history of the concept of ether. In the first half of the talk, I will lay out the rationale of that approach by revisiting and extending my earlier work on the topic. I will consider the characteristics of scientific objects that motivate the biographical metaphor, and I will indicate its virtues and...
In the last years, historians have increasingly turned to network concepts and methods for analyzing historical sources and assessing past dynamics. Our group has further extended these approaches by applying multi-layer network techniques to the study of recent science combining social network analysis, citation network analysis and the analysis of the knowledge space generated by scientific...
In the doctoral work I completed last October, I analyzed for the first time in a comprehensive manner the role of the Italian physicist Franco Selleri (1936-2013) in the fields of particle physics, foundations of quantum mechanics and foundations of the theory of relativity during the years 1960-2010. Having had access to his unpublished archives, I found a considerable amount of...
Goethe's polemics against Newtonian optics is not rarely mentioned as a singular instance of incompetent stubbornness, or quickly dismissed as an embarrassing incident, not worthy of Goethe’s stature. Goethe’s presence in the mind of 20th-century physicists is however not a negligible chapter, as systematic omissions of some kind of historians seem instead to suggest. From E.Schrödinger to...
“History of science without philosophy of science is blind. Philosophy of science withouth history of science is useless.” This Lakatos’ motto (of Kantian origin) dominated the panorama of the historians of science in the period 1960-1980. This effort to connect history and philosophy about the study of physics however was only a partial success.
The externalist view of the history of...
