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History of Science

Last update: 13 Feb 2026 10:01
First version: Before 13 March 1995

Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder

Somewhat arbitrarily, I'll include history of mathematics here, except for such references as I leave under math. Also, there are history-of-science references scattered throughout these notebooks under particular topics...

Stray thoughts, December 2025

Many --- maybe all --- scientific disciplines propagate a version of their disciplines history as part of their pedagogy: eponyms, for instance, or citations to (supposedly) classic works, or just sheer lore that gets passed down to neophytes. (Often these accounts serve a more or less mythic function: how the Culture Heroes brought order to chaos.) Many disciplines will even produce volumes of classic papers (or excerpts from classic books), which practitioners interested in their own antiquities will read. So what does history of science, as a field, add to someone like me following a chain of citations to read original works? Some possibilities, which I am sure are historiographically naive, and mostly written down to get them out of my head.

  1. "I read this so you don't have to": Simply summarizing the contents of past work can be a real service, especially when accompanied by item #2,
  2. Translation, literal or figurative: Important original works may be in languages obscure to modern practitioners, and/or jargon may have shifted, sometimes quite radically. The naive modern scientist can thus find older works impenetrable or even misleading. Re-stating what original works said, in modern language and modern terminology, is thus a contribution to understanding.
  3. Correction of the record: Disciplines' folk histories are often inaccurate, even when (supposedly) back up by citations. (I have written, before, about my experiences, as a peer reviewer, with finding my own papers cited in support of opinions they quite explicitly attack.) Showing that while everyone thinks idea X came from paper Y, but actually Y says Z (which is not-X) is a contribution; showing that X came from W instead is a bonus.
  4. Synthesis: The historian can look over more than individual works, to tease out either a line of development, or a cross-section, or indeed both.
  5. The paths not taken: Disciplines' accounts of their own histories tend to neglect ideas that did not win out; at first, perhaps, they appear as stylized forms of Error, which were Bad and Wrong and Lost, but eventually they just disappear. Rescuing works from "the enormous condescension of posterity" can be valuable, even if it results in nothing more than a better appreciation of why the path taken was superior to those passed by. (And maybe it wasn't, or there were still valuable elements in what was neglected.)
  6. Explanation of why scientists did what they did, when they did. This is actually a very ambitious venture --- much more ambitious I think, than many historians who attempt it realize.

As I said, I am sure this is incomplete, naive, and ill-formulated. But I feel better for getting it down in writing.

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