Synopses & Reviews
New scientific ideas are subjected to an extensive process of evaluation and validation by the scientific community. Until the early 1980s, this process of validation was thought to be governed by objective criteria, whereas the process by which individual scientists gave birth to new scientific ideas was regarded as inaccessible to rational study. In this book Gerald Holton takes an opposing view, illuminating the ways in which the imagination of the scientist functions early in the formation of a new insight or theory. In certain crucial instances, a scientist adopts an explicit or implicit presupposition, or thema, that guides his work to success or failure and helps determine whether the new idea will draw acclaim or controversy. Using firsthand accounts gleaned from notebooks, interviews, and correspondence of such twentieth-century scientists as Einstein, Fermi, and Millikan, Holton shows how the idea of the scientific imagination has practical implications for the history and philosophy of science and the larger understanding of the place of science in our culture. The new introduction, "How a Scientific Discovery Is Made: The Case of High-Temperature Superconductivity," reveals the scientific imagination at work in current science, by disclosing the role of personal motivations that are usually hidden from scientific publications, and the lessons of the case for science policy today.
Review
A major contribution to a field that will surely become one of great interest to historians, philosophers, and sociologists alike. -- James Trefil - New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
New scientific ideas are subjected to an extensive process of evaluation and validation by the scientific community. Until the early 1980s, this process of validation was thought to be governed by objective criteria, whereas the process by which individual scientists gave birth to new scientific ideas was regarded as inaccessible to rational study. In this book Gerald Holton takes an opposing view, illuminating the ways in which the imagination of the scientist functions early in the formation of a new insight or theory. In certain crucial instances, a scientist adopts an explicit or implicit presupposition, or thema, that guides his work to success or failure and helps determine whether the new idea will draw acclaim or controversy. Using firsthand accounts gleaned from notebooks, interviews, and correspondence of such twentieth-century scientists as Einstein, Fermi, and Millikan, Holton shows how the idea of the scientific imagination has practical implications for the history and philosophy of science and the larger understanding of the place of science in our culture. The new introduction, "How a Scientific Discovery Is Made: The Case of High-Temperature Superconductivity," reveals the scientific imagination at work in current science, by disclosing the role of personal motivations that are usually hidden from scientific publications, and the lessons of the case for science policy today.
Synopsis
Using firsthand accounts gleaned from notebooks, interviews, and correspondence of such twentieth-century scientists as Einstein, Fermi, and Millikan, Holton shows how the idea of the scientific imagination has practical implications for the history and philosophy of science and the larger understanding of the place of science in our culture.
About the Author
Gerald Holton is Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of History of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, Science and Anti-Science, The Advancement of Science and Its Burdens, and The Scientific Imagination (all from Harvard).
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: How a scientific discovery is made: The case of high-temperature superconductivity
On the Thematic Analysis of Science
Themata in scientific thought
Subelectrons, presuppositions, and the Millikan-Ehrenhaft dispute
Dionysians, Apollonians, and the scientific imagination
Analysis and Synthesis as methodological themata
Studies in Recent Science
Fermi's group and the recapture of Italy's place in physics
Can science be measured?
On the psychology of scientists, and their social concerns
Public Understanding of Science
Lewis Mumford on science, technology, and life
Frank E. Manuel's Isaac Newton
Ronald Clark and Albert Einstein
On the educational philosophy of the Project Physics Course
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index