Recollections and New Directions: Symposium in Memory of John Heilbron (1934–2023)

Recollections and New Directions: Symposium in Memory of John Heilbron (1934–2023)

Organisatoren
Kärin Nickelsen, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Johannes-Geert Hagmann, Deutsches Museum
Ort
München
Land
Deutschland
Fand statt
In Präsenz
Vom - Bis
05.07.2024 - 06.07.2024
Von
Nanina Föhr, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

With the passing of John Heilbron in 2023, history of science undoubtedly lost one of its most accomplished figures. As KÄRIN NICKELSEN (Munich) noted in her introduction, the broad scope of Heilbron’s achievements is not least reflected in the fact that he published over twenty books on a stunning variety of topics. Nickelsen also recalled his legacy as a dedicated teacher and mentor, and as the exacting editor of Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences. She argued that it was Heilbron’s deep commitment to all these endeavors that turned him into that pivotal figure so often studied by historians of science: a discipline builder. The symposium thus provided an opportunity to look back on the growth and development of the discipline in John Heilbron’s lifetime through the lens of his work and ideas in honor of this much valued and gravely missed friend and colleague.

FINN AASERUD (Copenhagen) gave a sweeping presentation on Heilbron’s time in Copenhagen, as well as his influential work on quantum physics and its connection to the Niels Bohr Archive, interspersed with colorful anecdotes of Aaserud and Heilbron’s long-time correspondence and eventual friendship. Aaserud recalled Heilbron’s part in the creation of the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics (AHQP), spearheaded by Thomas Kuhn, and elaborated on Heilbron’s groundbreaking texts on both Niels Bohr1 and Max Planck.2 According to Aaserud, a throughline in Heilbron’s biographical work proved to be the importance he placed on considering historical scientists and their achievements in the former’s personal and cultural context, as exemplified in Aaserud and Heilbron’s book Love, Literature, and the Quantum Atom: Niels Bohr's 1913 Trilogy Revisited.3

AMELIE MITTLMEIER (Munich) made a first step toward historicizing the internalism/externalism debate in the history of science waged by Arnold Thackray, Charles C. Gillispie, Frederick L. Holmes and others around 1980, and specifically traced Heilbron’s winding path incorporating both internalist and externalist accounts of the history of science. Mittlmeier argued that the debate was not solely about whether science should be studied as something that develops autonomously based on its internal dynamics (internalism) versus as something that is inextricably connected with the social, political and economic realities of its time (externalism). The internalism/externalism debate of 1980 rather was a proxy for a fundamental dispute about the aims and intended audience of history of science as a discipline. This talk kicked off a lively discussion in which KLAUS HENTSCHEL (Stuttgart) pointed out that Heilbron’s supervisor and colleague Thomas Kuhn often tried to incorporate both internalist and externalist elements into his work, and that Heilbron himself shifted his position over the years and would have probably eschewed the internalist/externalist distinction later in life.

STEFANO GATTEI (Trento) presented a vast survey reconstructing the role of academies in the modern European history of science, on which he and John Heilbron collaborated. Their project aims to show what constraints and opportunities resulted from the institutional structure of the academies. It also seeks to illuminate the early ascendancy of scientific academies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by understanding why this phenomenon occurred nearly simultaneously across much of Europe, and how the shift to this institutionalized system directly impacted scientific work of the time. Gattei followed the arc of this development into the nineteenth century, when the old academies waned in importance as some of their roles shifted to the newly emerging scientific associations and specialist proprietary journals. Gattei’s conclusion presented the contemporary role of these academies as guardians of the history, ethics, and values of science. The subsequent discussion latched onto this last point in particular, focusing on the potential future role of the scientific academy as a nexus for the history of science.

JULIA BLOEMER (Flensburg) showed how three case studies drawn from her own work were influenced by the books by John Heilbron. The first of these case studies built on John Heilbron’s insights concerning the complex scientific and political dimensions of sacred spaces as places of knowledge production in The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories4. Bloemer linked this book with an exploration of weather observation in German monasteries of the eighteenth century. Confronted with political and economic uncertainties, many German monasteries placed an increasing importance on the scientific work being done by the monks during the second half of the eighteenth century. The second case study started with the expanded picture of the history of electricity in Electricity in the 17th and 18th Century: A Study of Early Modern Physics5. Bloemer related how this informed her investigation of both the practices of thunderstorm ringing and shooting and the adoption of lightning rods in the eighteenth century, painting a picture that cannot be reduced to a simple linear conception of progress. The last case study linked to Heilbron’s study of laboratory culture in the twentieth century in Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory6, which Bloemer connected with a work in progress that shines a spotlight on Harvey Fletcher’s work on Brownian Motion during his time at the Ryerson laboratory under Millikan.

JÜRGEN RENN (Jena) opened his keynote lecture with an anecdote of his first meeting with Heilbron during their work on the Albert Einstein Papers Advisory Board and went on to discuss Heilbron’s 1985 paper “The Earliest Missionaries of the Copenhagen Spirit”. His own focus, however, was the second half of the twentieth century, from the 1950s until the so-called “Second Quantum Revolution” that is still going on today. Renn argued that Kuhn’s conception of scientific change is misleading when investigating the development of interpretations of quantum mechanics. Instead, Renn employed the conception of a political epistemology of knowledge to highlight the central role played by Bohm’s political convictions and their corresponding normative beliefs. Bohm’s understanding of dialectical materialism and his study of the work of Georg W. F. Hegel underpinned his divergence from the standard Copenhagen interpretation and his famous critique of Niels Bohr’s work, Renn argued. He embedded this discussion in a broader argument about the importance of symposia and conferences: meetings, such as the Solvay Conference of 1911, the meeting of the Colston Research Society in 1957, and others, repeatedly marked turning points in the history of quantum theory and acted as catalysts of innovation. In his conclusion, Renn returned to considering the observers of the history of quantum physics by discussing the influence Bohm had on Feyerabend’s understanding of science as a pluralist enterprise.

LIBA TAUB (Cambridge) looked back upon discussions she had with John Heilbron during many shared walks and touched upon various ways in which his perspectives had left impressions on her over the years. She then used Heilbron’s writing on Heisenberg in The History of Physics: A Very Short Introduction7 as a jumping-off point to talk about Heisenberg’s use of Aristotelian terminology and ideas in his popular writing. Taub connected Heisenberg’s reading and discussion of Aristotle with his discussion of the concept of potentia, which Heisenberg used to clarify the ontology of quantum physics in his 1958 book Physics and Philosophy. Taub then highlighted Heisenberg’s shift from the Latin potentia to Aristotle’s term of dunamis in a later publication of 1960 and discussed his argument that the laws of quantum physics are a mathematical expression of the latter term – a topic that she invited the audience to explore further. ARNE SCHIRRMACHER (Berlin) suggested that Heisenberg’s undertaking to establish himself as a public intellectual starting in the 1950s also played a role in how he formulated his more philosophical output.

JOSEPH D. MARTIN (Durham) gave an impression of Heilbron’s distinct editorial vision and the influence it had on the development of the Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences. In Heilbron’s first editorial after he had taken over the journal in 1980, he made an argument against unnecessary pedantry, and the discussion of philosophical ideas not relevant to the issues at hand. Heilbron furthermore called on historians of science to produce work that better reflected the fact that the history of science is polyglot, international, not intrinsically structured by the periodization of centuries and not limited to the work of famous protagonists. Martin framed this as a reflection of the ethos of Heilbron’s editorship. He talked about how Heilbron held the course during the tumultuous time of the science wars, and how the journal continued to focus on institutional and conceptual aspects of science under his leadership, even as it became unfashionable to do so. Martin argued that in the current time, in which the history of science is getting both larger and more diffuse, we more than ever require journals to be sources of unity and identity for the field. For him, the importance of editorial labor, which plays a central role in this context, is getting lost in the current system of peer review.

John Heilbron frequently commented on myths as something worth taking seriously – they are not mere errors, but ideas that can be both useful and inspiring, if sometimes only to debunk them. CATERINA SCHÜRCH (Berlin) connected this insight to her own work on a myth that was common among 18th century European scholars: that electricity increases plant growth. Interestingly, the controversy around this myth not only precipitated several attempts to experimentally verify it (with ambiguous results) but also a critical discussion of the faults of experimental verification itself. Contemporary critics of the experiments on plant growth took issue with the experimental setups employed but also argued that there is a bias in the fact that experimenters tend to exaggerate favorable results while neglecting to publish negative results. Schürch concluded her presentation by pointing out that this was itself an exercise in myth-busting. She showed that biology has a history of experimentation that far precedes the twentieth century, that physics was once very much concerned with living organisms, and that there is no such thing as a single, monolithic history of science.

SVEN DUPRÉ (Utrecht) reminded us of Heilbron’s call to create a history of learning that links seemingly distant areas of human understanding, which he made in his article “History of Science or History of Learning”.8 Dupré took this as a jumping-off point to present his own work on the introduction of x-ray technology in art history and conservation. His work considered the practice of x-raying of paintings, which was first done in the late nineteenth century and applied more widely starting in the 1920s and 1930s. Art history is often thought of as a field that is resistant to new technology, and indeed, many perceived the use of x-rays of paintings to run against the tradition of connoisseurship. Yet Dupré showed that figures such as Alan Burroughs created a vocabulary to enable students to analyze x-ray images that drew upon and continued connoisseurship. According to Dupré, a new way of doing art history was propagated by hybrid figures such as Burroughs, who had one foot in art history and one foot in the laboratory – a part of the history of this field that goes entirely overlooked by classic narratives that only consider art and science in opposition to one another.

As JOHANNES-GEERT HAGMANN (Munich) emphasized in his conclusion, the symposium not only provided a space to share memories of John Heilbron and celebrate his work. It also ended up being a colorful showcase of all the ways Heilbron and his work have informed, challenged, and inspired the researchers that came after him. The generosity Heilbron showed in life thus survives his passing as the ideas he planted continue to bear fruit for many current and future scholars.

Conference overview:

Kärin Nickelsen (Munich): Welcome & Introduction

Panel 1
Chair: Johannes-Geert Hagmann (Munich)

Finn Aaserud (Copenhagen): John Heilbron, Copenhagen, and the Quantum

Amelie Mittlmeier (Munich): “The Great Divide”: Debates in History of Science, ca. 1980

Panel 2
Chair: Cora Stuhrmann (Munich)

Stefano Gattei (Trento): The Institutionalization of Science in Early Modern Europe

Julia Bloemer (Flensburg): Lightning in the Monastery: From Natural Philosophy to Laboratory Science

Keynote
Chair: Helmuth Trischler (Munich)

Jürgen Renn (Jena): David Bohm’s Lectures on Quantum Theory and Dialectical Materials

Panel 3
Chair: Daniel Liu (Munich)

Liba Taub (Cambridge): John Heilbron as Peripatetic / Werner Heisenberg Reading Aristotle

Joseph D. Martin (Durham): “A Few of the New Editor’s Crotchets“: Heilbron at HSPS

Panel 4
Chair: Kärin Nickelsen (Munich)

Caterina Schürch (Berlin): Exploding Myths: Electrifying Philosophers’ Reflections on Science as a Social Affair

Sven Dupré (Utrecht): X-Rays in the History of Learning

Johannes-Geert Hagmann (Munich): Wrap-Up and Farewell

Notes:
1 John Heilbron, The Earliest Missionaries of the Copenhagen Spirit, in: Revue d'Histoire des Sciences 38 (1985), p. 195–230.
2 John Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man. Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science, Harvard University Press 2000.
3 John Heilbron / Finn Aaserud, Love, Literature, and the Quantum Atom: Niels Bohr's 1913 Trilogy Revisited, Oxford University Press 2013.
4 John Heilbron, The Sun in the Church. Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, Harvard University Press 2001.
5 John Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Century. A Study of Early Modern Physics, University of California Press 1979.
6 John Heilbron, Lawrence and His Laboratory. A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California Press 1990.
7 John Heilbron, The History of Physics. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press 2018.
8 John Heilbron, History of Science or History of Learning, in: Berichte zur Wissenschaftgeschichte 42 (2019), p. 200–219.