Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

When the American Physical Society (APS) awarded me the 2020 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, I was asked to submit a topic for my laureate lecture. After some thoughts I proposed that the APS's Forum for History and Philosophy of Physics should deviate from tradition and have not only the laureate, but also other colleagues speak in a themed session at the 2020 APS Spring Meeting. My proposal was accepted along with my proposed theme, “Farm Hall.”

The internment of ten German atomic physicists at the English manor estate Farm Hall near Cambridge during the second half of 1945 and the transcripts of some of their conversations, which were secretly recorded and selectively transcribed by the British secret service, represent a unique and fascinating source in the history of modern physics. During the past three decades, these transcripts have repeatedly—and almost cyclically—become the focus of intense discussions. It was therefore only natural to use the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the internment for a corresponding session, especially since Farm Hall is also of outstanding importance for my own work in the history of physics.

I was one of the first researchers—perhaps the first German historian (of science)—to examine the transcripts and related documents stored at the US National Archives after their release in spring 1992. This was entirely not so much a merit as sheer researcher's luck, because that spring I happened to make my first ever visit to what for me (as an East German) was literally the “New World.” As a fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, I was a guest of Gerald Holton at Harvard. My journey also took me to Washington, D.C., and, not entirely coincidentally, to the National Archives. After my return to Berlin, and not least through the encouragement of my friend and colleague Mark Walker, the idea of a German edition of the Farm Hall transcripts arose. It was by no means an easy task to find a German publisher, but eventually the German edition was published practically simultaneously with the English edition in the summer of 1993.¹

For the APS session, American scholars were invited who are not only experts on the subject of Farm Hall, but who also belong to my closer American circle of colleagues and to whom I owe many a helpful suggestion and reference on the subject. Unfortunately, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic prevented the scheduled session from taking place as planned at the 2020 APS Spring Meeting; it was instead held as an online event on 15 March 2021.

What follows are revised versions of the papers given by Ryan Dahn (American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD) and Mark Walker (Union College, Schenectady, NY) as well as essays by David Cassidy (Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY) and Gerald Holton (Harvard University Cambridge, MA). A newcomer to the “club of veteran Farm Hall historians,” Dahn takes a fresh look at the transcripts and discusses why th

In this paper, the author, a historian, describes the challenges he encountered as he sought to turn the Farm Hall event and its surviving transcripts into a theatrical play. The play, Farm Hall, was produced in New York in 2014 and published in Cassidy 2017. This paper further discusses what the author learned about the nature and elements of a play, how he applied those lessons to his play, and the advantages and disadvantages of this genre for bringing historical events to the general public.

Drawing upon primary sources and using a comparison with the American Manhattan Project for context, this article examines the question whether Werner Heisenberg understood how atomic bombs work.

Ethology is considered the leading biological discipline within behavioral research in the 20th century. Its history is told as a seemingly straightforward narrative: Ethology has its roots in the 1930s in German-speaking countries, a disciplinary heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, after which it slowly lost relevance. It employs a distinct approach to the comparative study of animal behavior, which is characterized by a physiological method of non-invasive, often observational studies of natural behavioral patterns, which were conceived of as shaped by evolution. Ethology contains stories of charismatic research animals such as the jackdaw Tschock or the goose Martina,¹ draws on academic disciplines such as ornithology, ichthyology, and entomology,² and also incorporates contexts and practices of animal lovers, bird watchers, and hunters, as well as those involved in animal husbandry, wildlife preservation, and livestock farming, or who work in nature reserves or zoological gardens.³ Ethology is further connected to the development of certain visual media, such as chronophotography and the film loop,⁴ and corresponding forms of perception, such as pattern recognition⁵ or comparative visual analysis.⁶ Other methodical highlights include the ethogram,⁷ dummies,⁸ and the Kaspar Hauser experiment.⁹ The history of ethology conventionally focuses on several elements: an illustrious circle of founding figures, indeed founding “fathers,” such as Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989), Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–1988), Karl von Frisch (1886–1982), Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944),¹⁰ Oskar Heinroth (1871–1945),¹¹ Erwin Stresemann (1889–1972),¹² and Otto Koehler (1889–1974),¹³ the importance of the Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie (later renamed Ethology),¹⁴ legendary encounters of individual scholars with their research subjects¹⁵ and colleagues during conferences¹⁶, and towering intellectual achievements such as famous talks¹⁷ or foundational monographs such as Tinbergen's The Study of Instinct, published in 1951¹⁸. Further markers of ethology's disciplinary history are the recognition of its achievement and disciplinary status with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Lorenz, Tinbergen and von Frisch in 1973 and the ensuing controversy about Lorenz's political background.¹⁹

All scientific disciplines, of course, are outlined by a set of protagonists, places, publications, and practices.²⁰ However, ethology is characterized by an unusual preoccupation with its own disciplinary status, demarcating its core and periphery, its borders and boundaries as well as delineating its historical lineage and possible trajectories—all adding to the sense that ethologists’ historical accounts are full of strategic se

Wie kann man einen historischen Blick auf das eigene Fach werfen? Diese Frage ist nicht einfach zu beantworten – will man einerseits nicht in einer Nabelschau und Hagiographie enden, andererseits aber auch keinen umfassenden Entwurf einer zukünftigen Historiographie vorlegen. Die hier als Bausteine zu einer Oral History der Wissenschaftsgeschichte in loser Folge publizierten Interviews mit bekannten Protagonisten der Berliner Wissenschaftsgeschichte von ca. 1970–1990 in West und Ost rücken die Geschichte des Faches deshalb in einem bestimmten Milieu in den Fokus und versuchen, die Historiographie jenseits einer Institutionen- oder Theoriegeschichte voranzutreiben. Welche Motivationen oder Probleme bewegten einzelne Wissenschaftler:innen, sich der Geschichte ihres Faches zu widmen oder sich etwa aus der Soziologie oder Philosophie in die Wissenschaftsgeschichte zu bewegen? Welche Ausbildungspraxen existierten in diesem heterogenen, zwischen den Disziplinen angesiedelten Feld, welche Anregungen bezog man aus welchen Kontexten? Wie war Lehre strukturiert und welche Netzwerke bildeten sich mit der Zeit? Kurz: Mit welchem Interesse kam man zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und was wurde daraus? Die Auswahl der Interviewees erfolgt ohne Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit oder Proporz; der Fragenkatalog der Interviews richtet sich individuell nach den Biographien und dem Werk und entfaltet sich oft spontan im Gespräch. Die Interviews wurden digital aufgezeichnet, transkribiert, der Schriftsprache angepasst, gegebenenfalls gekürzt, annotiert und von den Interviewees authentifiziert. Wir beabsichtigen mit dieser Serie von Interviews zunächst die Dokumentation rezenter Geschichte durch eine Oral History, die subjektive Wahrnehmungen und persönliche Erlebnisse einschließt. Auf diese Weise werden Segmente einer größtenteils ungeschriebenen Geschichte anhand von Biographien erfahrbar und damit auch einer weiteren kritischen Bearbeitung und Integration in ein Gesamtbild zugänglich. Da uns im Zuge der jeweiligen Vorbereitung und Durchführung, Transkription und Abstimmung der Interviews daran gelegen war, aus Sicht der Akteure wichtige Sammelbände und Aufsätze, Graue Literatur oder Monographien zu erfassen, wird nebenbei eine kommentierte Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Wissenschaftsgeschichte entstehen. Unsere Hoffnung besteht darin, mittels dieser Sammlung mit Berlin einen fruchtbaren Raum und mit den 1970er und 1980er Jahren eine produktive Zeit des Faches jenseits von Reminiszenz oder Nostalgie zu erkunden nicht zuletzt auch, um den Blick für gegenwärtige Herausforderungen des Faches zu schärfen.

Mathias Grote, Anke te Heesen

This paper considers the epistemic career of visual media in ethology in the mid-20th century. Above all, ethologists claimed close contact with research animals and drew scientific evidence from these human-animal communities, particularly in public relations. However, if we look into the toolboxes of comparative behavioral biologists, it becomes evident that scientifically valid research results were primarily obtained by experimenting with model images. These visual specimens tell a technical story of the methodological requirements in behavioral science necessary to bridge everyday observations between the laboratory and the field. By neutralizing individual traces of animal bodies as well as their observers, they prompted the abstraction of ethological hypotheses. The case study of East-German biologist Günter Tembrock (1918–2011), who maintained his own collection of newspaper clippings, drawings, photographs, and films, offers a new perspective on the methodological development of this field. Furthermore, this article contributes to a scholarly discussion geared toward expanding the spaces of ethological research. My analysis of the image collections of the Forschungsstätte für Tierpsychologie presents the archive as a relevant site of study in the history of ethology.

Over 75 years after their creation, the Farm Hall transcripts remain a tantalizing source from the dawn of the atomic age in 1945. Declassified in 1992, the transcripts document ten prominent German nuclear physicists, including Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Otto Hahn, contemplating the Nazi defeat, their complicity in the German war machine, and – after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima – whether they truly intended to build a nuclear weapon for Adolf Hitler. As a written record of conversations, one might expect the transcripts to be the proverbial smoking gun that determines, once and for all, whether German physicists intended to build a nuclear weapon for the Nazi regime. Yet the Farm Hall transcripts have been used to support starkly divergent arguments. Some have used them to assert that the Germans would have willingly provided Hitler with a bomb if only they could; others view them as evidence of scientific resistance inside the Nazi regime. This article explores why the Farm Hall transcripts are not the smoking gun they appear to be.

As soon as ethology's status diminished in the early 1970s, it was confronted with two successor disciplines, sociobiology and behavioral ecology. They were able to challenge ethology because it no longer provided markers of strong disciplinarity such as theoretical coherence, leading figures and a clear identity. While behavioral ecology developed organically out of the UK ethological research community into its own disciplinary standing, sociobiology presented itself as a US competitor to the ethological tradition. I will show how behavioral ecology took the role of legitimate heir to ethology by rebuilding a theoretical core and an intellectual sense of community, while sociobiology failed to use its public appeal to reach disciplinary status. Meanwhile, ethology changed its disciplinary identity to encompass all biological studies of animal behavior.

This article offers a canine history of the “critical period” concept, situating its emergence within a growing, interdisciplinary network of canine behavior studies that connected eugenically minded American veterinarians, behavioral geneticists, and dog lovers with large institutional benefactors. These studies established both logistical and conceptual foundations for large-scale science with dogs while establishing a lingering interdependence between American dog science and eugenics. The article emphasizes the importance of dogs as subjects of ethological study, particularly in the United States, where some of the earliest organized efforts to analyze canine behavior began. Further, the article argues that the “critical period” is important not only for its lasting prominence in multiple fields of scientific inquiry, but also as a historiographical tool, one that invites reflection on the tendency of historians to emphasize a particular narrative structure of scientific advancement.

In the 1960s, scientists fascinated by the behavior of free-living animals founded research projects that expanded into multi-generation investigations. This paper charts the history of three scientists’ projects to uncover the varied reasons for investing in a “long-term” perspective when studying animal behavior: Kenneth Armitage's study of marmots in the Rocky Mountains, Jeanne Altmann's analysis of baboons in Kenya, and Timothy Hugh Clutton-Brock's studies (among others) of red deer on the island of Rhum and meerkats in the Kalahari. The desire to study the behavior of the same group of animals over extended periods of time, I argue, came from different methodological traditions – population biology, primatology, and sociobiology – even as each saw themselves as contributing to the legacy of ethology. As scientists embraced and combined these approaches, a small number of long-running behavioral ecology projects like these grew from short pilot projects into decades-long centers of intellectual gravity within behavioral ecology as a discipline. By attending to time as well as place, we can see how this long-term perspective was crucial to their success; they measured evolutionary changes over generations of animals and their data provided insights into how the animals they studied were adapting (or not) to changing local and global environmental factors.