Conference: The Cultural Alchemy of the Exact Sciences: Revisiting the Forman Thesis, March 2007; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Conference: The Cultural Alchemy of the Exact Sciences: Revisiting the Forman Thesis, March 2007 Intellectual Merits This grant supports a conference organized by the co-PIs (Cathryn Carson and Alexei Kojevnikov) to debate a classic problem in the history of modern science, the Forman thesis on the influence of Weimar culture on quantum mechanics. Formans essay of 1971 deeply affected the work of a generation of historians and contributed powerfully to the emergence of the sociology of scientific knowledge. Although one of the most cited works in the field, it nevertheless cannot be considered generally accepted, but, on the contrary, remains the subject of widely diverging opinions and scholarly positions. Broader Impacts The goal of the meeting is to foster critical dialogue, bringing the classic formulations of Formans problem into interaction with the wealth of new empirical studies and more recent methodological developments and to make the results widely available in a special journal issue. The conference will help pull together a new community of scholars, many of them younger researchers, and spur collective reflection on contemporary trends and promising targets of future investigation. In line with the Forman thesis foundational significance, the projects impacts range broadly. The conference talks will be opened to the public, including possibly a large graduate student gathering. The published product will be a resource for graduate teaching in the history and philosophy of science. Moreover, the widely recognized status of modern physics as a test case for the new cultural history of science means that its findings will carry far afield.