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homepageThe development of the "old" quantum theory from 1913 to 1925 was a
transition from the classical representation of the electron's behavior
within the atom to the modern one. In that transitory period the
dominion of classical mechanics and electromagnetic theory over the
electron was gradually relaxed: its mechanism of radiation changed
entirely, becoming the outcome of its transitions between different
stationary states; various restrictions of its motion within the atom
were introduced; and it was endowed with an intrinsic magnetic
disposition (spin). Throughout those developments, however, the
persistence of the old regime of classical physics is notable. The laws
of classical mechanics and the predictions of classical electromagnetic
theory were indispensable tools for the construction of a quantum
(modern) representation of the electron's behavior. Furthermore, the
electron's road to modernity was fraught with obstacles. Massive data
from spectroscopy and the periodicities in the chemical properties of
the elements had to be taken into account. More important, for my
purposes, the obstacles came from within the evolving representation of
the electron, which resisted the physicists' attempts to enrich and
manipulate it. Quite often, when they attributed an additional property
to the electron and attempted to incorporate it into its previous
representation the outcome was incoherent. In this paper I will sketch
the twists and turns of the electron's hesitant passage to modernity,
highlighting the continual resistance of its representation to change.
The decades 1880-1930 are a moment of extraordinary productivity and
exploration in the physical sciences, with the development or
refinement of powerful theoretical and experimental technologies
(statistics, kinetic theory, cathode tubes, ultra-microscopy,
spectroscopy..) and the appearance of new scientific objects
(electrons, radioactivity, colloids, photons). But it is also a period
of tension and uncertainty, which saw a multiplicity of sometimes
conflictual scientific and epistemological agendas (energeticists vs.
atomists, inductivists vs. deductivists...), as well as important
social re-organizations, with the institutionalization of new fields
such as physical chemistry; or the progressive differentiation of
physicists into theoreticians and experimentalists; not to speak of the
impact of the First World War. Investigations of Brownian motion in
this period constitute a small but significant body of work in or
around which all these scientific, social and epistemological issues
were played out. The paper pays close attention to French chemist Jean
Perrin’s efforts to formulate these issues in his own terms and to
address them in the laboratory and the lecture room, in his public and
political work. Perrin’s analysis and response to the scientific
context, the resources he drew upon, the evolution of his views over
the decades are used to throw light on what became known as the
emergence of modern physical science.
It goes without saying that the history of prosthesis is intimately linked to military history, but what forms of modernism emerged in this relation during the first half of the twentieth century? The paper approaches this question by investigating research on visual prostheses, primarily in the German context. World War One and Two obviously mark periods of an intensified modernization in the life sciences when war-related R&D generated a plentitude of new technological approaches to biological and physiological questions. The first series-produced visual prosthesis, for example, which was presented in 1920, responded to an enormously increased demand as a consequence of WWI and employed technologies of electronic amplification that were themselves the product of war-related efforts. The multiplication of research in this area during WWII seems, at first glance, to testify to a triumph of unidimensional, instrumental reason. The pursued projects, however, combined surprisingly heterogeneous approaches, ranging from tissue engineering to gestalt psychology, from artisanal skills in the manufacturing of musical instruments to information processing. Not a shift in scale but an epistemological shift characterized these new approaches. This shift points at least as much to the cultural history of the interwar period as to the immediate political context. During the Weimar years, the artistic avant-garde, from Dada to Bauhaus, engaged in a radical modernization of perception that questioned taken-for-granted distinctions between natural and artificial, the human and the technological. Responding to and resonating with the ongoing modernization of society, the transgressive playfulness of the artistic experimentalism during the 1920s explored visionary epistemologies before the modernism of totalitarian technoscience.
Modernism in the arts or in literature has been
defined variously in terms of its characteristic features and periods
of time covered. One might illuminatingly take any of these definitions
and ask to what extent it fits the kind of mathematics that was done at
the relevant period of time. In my talk, I would like to go beyond
this, and ask for the historical reasons that led into the development
of such Modernist mathematics, in a way that also led to Modernism in
art or in literature. An answer like "Zeitgeist" or "common cultural
values" is useful, but perhaps not fully satisfactory.
A useful perspective on Modernism in art that I would like to
extend to Modernism in mathematics is the one appearing in the work of
the
celebrated and highly controversial art critic Clement Greenberg.
Consider, for instance, the following passage taken from "Modernist
Painting" (1960) which in many respects seems to be applicable to
mathematics:
"The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. ... The self-criticism of Modernism grows out of, but is not the same thing as, the criticism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment criticized from the outside, the way criticism in its accepted sense does; Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized. ... Having been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they could take seriously, [the arts] looked as though they were going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple ... The arts could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity. ... Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. ... It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium."
Based on the contributions to this conference concerning the history of physics and mathematics, this commentary will attempt to compare and to classify the approaches to discussing issues related to "modernist" trends or processes of "modernization" in these two scientific fields. In particular, the tension between these two perspectives both in their empirical scope and in their historiographical implications will be explored.
In a lecture in 1925, the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer boldly claimed that the measurability of sensations had been proven by Fechner's psycho-physical law. Wertheimer thereby ignored long-standing debates over whether the law in question really represented sensation. Two essential features of his discussion were an emphasis of the epistemic authority of the experiencing subject, and a rejection of a model of a scientific method that overrides this authority. My paper explicates these points and situate them vis-à-vis Gestalt-psychological research practice and some aspects of the wider institutional and cultural contexts in which this practice took shape. I approach these issues by way of the analytical category of modernism. While this notion is sometimes characterized in terms of a recognition of human subjectivity (in response to positivism), I show that is not fine-grained enough, since (1) both positivists and anti-positivists had been concerned with subjectivity throughout good parts of the 19th century, and (2) it doesn't explain why the retrospective appropriation of Fechner's work would become pertinent as late as 1926. I argue that we need to take into account Wertheimer's wartime research, major institutional changes in German psychology, and cultural concerns about the alienating effects of modern science.
From the beginning of the 20th century, set theory became a
quintessential element of so-called modern mathematics. Göttingen
mathematicians, Hilbert in particular, promoted forcefully the new,
daring theoretical framework elaborated by Cantor and Dedekind as a
central element of the 'new mathematics'. Set theory helped to
establish the new mathematical developments on foundations that
guaranteed not only methodological rigor, but especially a freedom of
thought that was particularly emphasized by Cantor, Dedekind and
Hilbert. This is the ultimate referent for the latter's famous, defiant
cry (in 1925) that nobody shall expel "us" from the "paradise" that
Cantor created. Both the Prometheic connotations of such rhetoric, and
the abstractness of the ensuing mathematical style and developments,
suggest the possibility of finding links between this 'new math' and
cultural modernism. Indeed, our discussion will suggest ways in which
the work and styles of Cantor, Dedekind and Hilbert can profitably be
compared with contemporary developments in the arts. Our conclusion
will explore the possibility of finding elements for an explanation in
similarities of working conditions (e.g., specialization) and perhaps
some shared ingredients in the historical backgrounds.
Modernism in mathematics can be defined as an autonomous body of
ideas, having little or no outward reference, placing considerable
emphasis on formal aspects of the work and maintaining a complicated -
indeed, anxious - rather than a naive relationship with the day-to-day
world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group of people, such
as a professional or discipline-based group who have a high sense of
the seriousness and value of what they are trying to achieve. It was
introduced into mathematics in the decades around 1900, and came to
co-exist with classical mathematics. I shall look at three contrasting
figures, Riemann, Hilbert, and Hardy, to delineate the boundaries and
the issues involved in historical analyses of the mathematics of the
period, and attempt to assess the impact of Modernist thinking in
mathematics.
Although it became a commonplace in the mid-20th century to
associate the radical innovations of modernism, such as Cubism, with
Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity (1905, 1916), the
science that dominated the imagination of the public in the first
twenty years of the century had not yet been transformed by these
developments. Instead, the scientific discoveries that stimulated many
of the innovations of early modern art and literature in the first two
decades of the century were those made in the context of late classical
ether physics, which centered on the luminiferous ether as the medium
through which electromagnetic waves were transmitted. Two decades
before laypersons learned of Einstein’s theories, a series of widely
popularized scientific discoveries in the 1890s and the early years of
the century—X-rays, radioactivity, the electron, and the Hertzian waves
that led to the development of wireless telegraphy—had challenged
conventional notions of space and of matter. The X-ray, in particular,
demonstrated dramatically the limited nature of human perception and
thus also supported continued public fascination with the popular
“Fourth Dimension” of space, which was itself often linked to the
mysterious ether.
If the ether held sway far longer than has previously been recognized,
after the eclipse expedition of 1919 that catapulted Einstein to
celebrity, he quickly came to stand as the single embodiment of
20th-century science. Beginning in the 1920s, artists responded to the
space-time world of Relativity in a variety of ways, initially focusing
on time, the new fourth dimension of Relativity, to produce works of
kinetic art. Noting several other of the artistic responses to
Relativity Theory before 1940, the talk will center on the contrast
between two different Cubisms—that of Picasso before World War I and
that of American painter Stuart Davis in the 1930s-1940s. Davis, not
Picasso, was the Cubist who responded to Einstein. Indeed, Davis’s
notebooks and paintings such as Hot Stillscape for Six Colors (1940)
document his eager reading of popularizations of Relativity Theory and
his quest for an abstracted form language with which to render the
landscape of space-time.
From legal science's perspective, the Viennese legal theorist Hans
Kelsen represents the epitome of legal modernism. His approach to the
theory of law demonstrates a radical quest for consistency that is very
untypical for legal theories - theories often seeking to circumvent
problems by pragmatic means.
Consistency drove Kelsen to a distinction between form and content of
laws and to only acknowledge the 'norm' - the operative idea of all
normative sciences - as the relevant form. For Kelsen, the 'norm' was
an ideal idea. According to Kelsen, the distinction between form and
content finds its highest expression in the dichotomy of Is and Ought,
of prescription and description. It was this dichotomy which
necessitated Kelsen's programme of a legal science, including a relativism of
values, and an end to the search for the
foundation of law. Kelsen thus transcended the dualism of natural law
and traditional positivism.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the notion of "field" not only plays a major role in physics, it enters research in the empirical social sciences as well. Anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski used the notion in all its semantical polyvalence in order to underline the scientific ambitions of their new methodologies of anthropology and ethnography, but also in order to emphasize romantic aspects of their activities with "primitive people" (Naturvölker). As a matter of fact, without the use of new audio-visual media it would have been impossible to apply the new and innovative research techniques conceived by these anthropologists. Photography, film, and the phonograph thus contributed more to revolutionize ethnography than the method of "participant observation", announced with a lot of emotionalism.
Physics and cosmology changed greatly in the decades between the two world wars. With quantum mechanics and the expanding universe the physical sciences entered a new era, which some scientists saw as an opportunity to establishment "theories of everything" on a rationalistic basis. This kind of rationalistic-idealistic "cosmophysics" was cultivated and discussed in England in particular, where E.A. Milne and A.S. Eddington developed world-systems founded on a priori principles. Their attempts to reconstruct the physical world view and introduce a new theoretical style caused heated discussions between "traditionalists" and self-appointed "modernists." The debate, concerned with the very standards of science, was part of a larger cultural struggle and illustrates important features of the zeitgeist of the 1930s.
"Conservatism" is often regarded as the antithesis of Modernism in the 20th century, but more recent work suggests that this is a false dichotomy. Starting with the work of Jeffrey Herf, there has been an appreciation of the outlines of a "reactionary modernism" which he primarily documents in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. I will seek to take that insight further, by tracing the history of reactionary modernism as it escaped its German confines and grew into a transnational project now commonly referred to as "Neoliberalism". This project was instantiated in such postwar institutions as the Mont Pelerin Society and the Chicago School of Economics. Based upon archival sources, we retell this story, and relate it for the first time to prewar attempts to construct a different sort of reactionary modernism which would differ from its National Socialist predecessor in its elevation of "the market" to a central theoretical category.
Electron optics and its application in electron microscopy developed in the late 1920s and 1930s into a new branch of physics and physical technology. While some researchers like Ernst Ruska began their exploration of the new field in a university context, further developments soon concentrated in the research laboratories of the two major electro-technical companies in Germany, Siemens and AEG. Industrial research required new forms of cooperation of scientists, engineers and technicians, emphasised applied science and - due to a stronger financial background - allowed a much easier access to large and expensive pieces of apparatus. An industrial research laboratory in Weimar Germany can therefore serve as an appropriate place to investigate the complex relationship of modernisation and modernism in experimental physics. The talk will focus on developments in AEG's research institute which was founded in 1928. Carl Ramsauer, a former pupil of Philipp Lenard and professor of experimental physics in Danzig, was employed as its first director. Under his guidance, the institute explored a broad field of subjects, extending from the use of cinematic techniques to rationalise operation processes to the study of northern lights. Ramsauer's student Ernst Brüche, the head of the institute's general physics group, established the exploration of free electrons in electronic devices and the new field of electron optics as an important focus of the new laboratory. Electronics, however, was perceived as a domain of a limited and controllable modernisation, as a means of an a organic co-evolution of physical research and technical application.
In 1912 Wilhelm Johannsen codified the distinction of genotype and phenotype to distinguish a space of heredity with an independent logic and metrics from another, physiological and developmental space represented by the cytoplasm and standing for the organism. In addition, for the elements of the genotype, he proposed the notion of the gene. This terminology was gradually taken up by the genetics community. Johannsen’s codification, which was based on breeders’ practices of separating ‘pure lines’, has profoundly marked all of twentieth century genetics. What has largely escaped the attention of historians of science, however, is the polemical context in which Johannsen made these distinctions. In introducing his neologisms, Johannsen explicitly turned against ‘historical’ notions of inheritance prevalent in eugenics and breeding. Yes, he even denounced the terms ‘heredity’ and ‘inheritance’, taken in their everyday sense, as inadequate to capture the ‘modern view of heredity.’ ‘Ancestry by itself is irrelevant; dispositions are decisive’, as he put it in his 1905 textbook Arvelighedslærens elementer. In making such statements, Johannsen was far from denouncing eugenics and breeding as ‘unscientific’ as such. He rather wanted to put these applied sciences on a scientific, and that meant for him: thoroughly instrumental and constructive basis, with synthetic chemistry as a guiding paradigm. In my contribution I will discuss how Johannsen achieved this goal through the construction of ‘pure lines’ and how his view of science resonated with certain political ideals. Science, for Johannsen, was a modernizing force in as much as it was able to cut ties with tradition.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, discoveries of the "modern" natural sciences, especially those of physics, undermined the conventional basis of intellectual orientation. This led to a crisis concerning the religious and philosophical meaning of life which involved all areas of individual and social existence. In the German-speaking world, many scientists, literary writers, philosophers and also frauds were searching for ways to fulfil, on the one hand, the demands of modern science and, on the other, "die Bedürfnisse des Gemütes", hence ways to combine "Wissenschaft, Poesie, Religion und Lebensführung zu einem Ganzen" (Bruno Wille), to a new philosophy of life. Around 1900, keywords like "Chaos", "Kosmos", and "Allnatur" were united into a literary programme, advocated for example by the 'Giordano-Bruno-Bund' (established by Bruno Wille and Rudolf Steiner) or the periodical Monismus. According to this programme, monistic natural poetry and life mysticism had to be enriched with scientific termini in order to fulfil the demands of a modern world view ("Weltanschauung"). While towards the end of the 19th century, Wilhelm Bölsche strove to reconcile natural sciences and belles-lettres, later on it became increasingly doubtful whether literature would actually be able to achieve a meaningful interpretation of scientific knowledge. During the first decades of the 20th century, this doubt turned into certainty: the contemporary procedures of a poetical reading of knowledge – reacting both upon literature and the modern sciences – would be unsuccessful.
One of the main transformations in chemistry between 1900 and 1940 was the rise and fall of colloid chemistry, and the subsequent emergence, in its place, of the field of macromolecular chemistry. Both disciplines provided insights into materials of enormous industrial and biological importance, such as rubber, cellulose, proteins, artificial silk, and later also plastics. Looking back, chemists and historians have often typified the colloid period as something of a setback: a relapse into romantic beliefs about 'mysterious forces' that were beyond ordinary chemical explanation, and the period has literally been called a 'Dark Age'. But contemporary accounts were very different. Like its parent discipline physical chemistry, colloid chemistry was considered an important modernization, introducing exactness, physical theory, and law-like explanation where confusion had ruled before. Macromolecular chemistry’s approaches, by contrast, were called 'merely descriptive', qualitative, traditional, and not even scientific in the Kantian sense. This paper aims to explain how this shift of fortunes and characterizations has taken place. It will look at the confrontations and collaborations between colloid and macromolecular chemistry and trace the roots of the historiography that produced their current reputations. It will turn out that 'modernists' and 'traditionalists' are hard to distinguish, and that the epithets are better understood as rhetorical weapons in disciplinary politics than as detached historical judgments.
In his afterword to Time and Western Man, Paul Edward points out that this book is better known than Wyndham Lewis’s other works because of its notorious attacks on James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, while the more general critique of modern culture is overlooked. In my paper I want to focus on the more general aspects in the text and Lewis’s occasionally ferocious resistance against precisely those developments which became paradigmatic for the modernist era. It is not my intention to hail Lewis as an undeservedly forgotten naysayer. Instead, I want to use his book as a lens on the interconnectedness of the sciences, philosophy, literature and culture in general as perceived by a contemporary critic. Being closer to the subject of his observations this critic may well miss or misrepresent developments that we consider significant because they gained in importance later, but then he may also recognize interdependencies – or antagonisms – that we fail to take into account.
In post-revolutionary Russia, life became an experiment. The Russian Avantgarde took the new communist society as a quasi-artistic attempt and followed the formalist idea of "Art as a method" for visualization, trying to free the automated perception of the suppressed worker by way of artistic alienation in order to produce an "enlightened Proletarian". But within this experimental set-up, the Fine Arts were assisted by the life-sciences of the time: psychology, physiology, psychophysics and in the 1920s predominantly - psychotechnics. All these disciplines could be synchronized in one major vision: to build a new world for the new, revolutionized human being – which first of all meant to produce new preconditions for visual perception. My talk will introduce the "Psychotechnical Laboratory" of Nikolai Ladovski, an architect at the VChUTEMAS (Higher Artistic-Technical Laboratories) in Moscow. In order to study the visual perception of architecture via lines, angles, volume and space, Ladovski in 1926 installed a series of instruments in a room painted completely black, the so-called "Glasometry" (eye-meter). The reports on his experiments carried the measurement factors "attention", "memory", "perception measurements" and "spatial and motorical abilities" - thus physiological as well as psychological criteria. I will compare Ladovski's experiments on human perception to contemporary experimental practices and thereby contextualize them within the Russian Avantgarde and the Applied Sciences. In doing so, I question anew both the objects and agents of the arts and sciences in Soviet Russia and their disciplinary borders. Furthermore, the complicity of psychotechnics with the arts will shed a new light on the latter's role in what is known as the radical Soviet modernism.
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