Phases of physics: Building the discipline during the long nineteenth century

Almost forty years ago, Robert Kohler introduced his From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline with this definition: “Disciplines are political institutions that demarcate areas of academic territory, allocate the privileges and responsibilities of expertise, and structure claims on resources. They are the infrastructure of science, embodied in university departments, professional societies, and informal market relationships between the producers and consumers of knowledge.” ¹ Although readers of Michel Foucault have directed our attention more fundamentally toward regarding disciplines as mechanisms of power, many historians of science seem simply to accept the history of science’s division into a range of more compact disciplinary categories as a commonsensical way to help organize it as a field of study. Note, for example, how many of the organizational headings in the Isis Cumulative Bibliography refer to specific scientific disciplines.

In 2016, Daniel Jon Mitchell organized a workshop (sponsored by the British Society for the History of Science and the Leverhulme Trust) that revisited the place of disciplinary history in the history of science. Focused on physics, the three articles that follow stem from that workshop. Although a more detailed exposition of the workshop’s guiding premises and outcomes awaits, a few words are in order to introduce this special section. ² The workshop was framed by a definitional distinction between “discipline” and “field,” which separated out questions of epistemological and methodological development as relevant to the study of scientific fields and pointed the study of disciplines toward two historiographical principles. First, physics (and other disciplines) should be understood “as constituted by a multitude of actors’ versions and visions of ‘physics’ that they frequently sought to extend beyond their local surroundings.” Second, “discipline” should “refer to a particular pattern of socioinstitutional knowledge and production that involved specialist periodicals, societies, institutions, positions, qualifications, and pedagogies.” ³ This distinction warranted a shift in chronological orientation. In a groundbreaking essay, Thomas Kuhn drew our attention to what he described as physics’ initial formation as a modern discipline between 1780 and 1850. ⁴ The orientation adopted by workshop participants and the three articles that follow focuses instead on the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that saw key developments in physics because of the growth of academic physics courses, the establishment of both the British and French physics societies, and a laboratory revolution. As the following three articles illustrate, this shift expands the disciplinary history of physics to include a broader range of institutions, instruments, and processes as crucial to its ongoing disciplinary development, including those with roots in other scientific disciplines and the world beyond academia.

Lissa L. RobertsEditor-in-Chief, History of Science