M. Norton Wise. Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society.
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Immanuel Kant claimed a discipline had only so much science in it as it had mathematics, adding that without strict mechanical causality there could be no science at all. But physical sciences of his day lacked precise measurements for this mathematical-mechanical derivation. Only the advent of technically refined instruments enabled physicists to calibrate the world and fulfill the old Baconian promise to give man power over the world through technology, closing the loop that informs our modern technoscience. In Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society, cultural historian of science M. Norton Wise has given the advent of this mighty configuration of modernity a local habitation and a name: the Physical Society of Berlin, 1845–1852. Berlin inspired a “bunch of twenty-somethings, without position or recognition” (ix), to become “the key leaders in the laboratory movement that swept so much of physical science by the 1870s” (235). But Wise is emphatically “focused on where the Physical Society came from rather than where it went” (238). Berlin’s “technical school network provided an ever-present context for Berlin’s striving young scientists” (264). “The technical school network … illuminates the path through which technical-industrial and experimental science entered into university research in a major way” (354). Crucially, these paths arose outside the university system in new institutional configurations linking “the fine arts, modern industry, and the mathematical sciences in a culture obsessed with neohumanist and neoclassical ideals” (167). Through the marvelous metaphor of “Pegasus and the Muses,” Wise links the creation of museums, “incubators for an experimental approach to art and science” (xiv), with the advancement of bourgeois taste, experimental science, and industrial technology.
Source: The American Historical Review
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhad322
Author: John H. Zammito
Institution: Rice University
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,400
OpenAlex ID: W4387080748