History of Modern Science – serie

Petroleum from Coal shows why and how Friedrich Bergius and Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in 1913-26 invented and developed synthetic fuel processes; explains why and how Matthias Pier at BASF- IG Farben and Otto Roelen at Ruhrchemie successfully industrialized the syntheses during the Nazi-World War II years; and analyzes the pre- and post-World War II vicissitudes of the synthetic fuel industry. The research of Germany’s scientists in the 1920s-40s made them world leaders in synthetic fuel studies. Information on the synthetic fuel processes has come from the Allied teams who went to Germany and Japan during World War II’s closing months and from British, American, and Canadian synthetic fuel investigations.

Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge delves into how the Cold War, as a global phenomenon, shaped local conditions and decisions for science in light of US-Europe relationships. The articles in this volume, edited by Jeroen van Dongen, show how the western network in which science was circulated and produced was strongly conditioned by the state and its international relations. The workings of secrecy, the consequences of US hegemony and decolonization, and the ambitions of post-war recovery attempts were all mediated through the interference of the state and through its relative position in the network. At the same time, hubristic expectations prefigured in the state’s relation to science.

In When Historiography Met Epistemology, Stefano Bordoni shows the emergence of sophisticated histories and philosophies of science in French speaking countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. That process involved mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, and was deeply linked to other processes that transformed the cultural and material landscape of Europe. In the literature, the emergence of the history and philosophy of science is chronologically associated with the turn of the twentieth century: the author points out that this meaningful starting point should be moved backwards. Since the 1860s, sophisticated histories of science and critical meta-theoretical remarks on scientific practice began to compete with naïve historical reconstructions and dogmatic views on science.