History of History of Physics

Abstract

The twelve decades of modern academic history of physics have
provided enough material for the study of the history of history of physics, the focus of which is the development of the opinions and methods of historians of physics. The achievements of historians of physics are compared with the achievements of their objects of research, the physicists. Some correlations are expected. The group of historians-researchers and the group of their objects interacted. In several cases, the same person started out as a researcher and later moved on to the field of researcher of research achievements. There are also some competence-related quarrels between the two groups, the historians and the physicists. The new science called history of history of physics could be useful in a special case study of Jesuits. Jesuit professors formed a special group of physicists
and historians studying the physicists, who were very influential in their time. Jesuits, except the very best of them such as Rudjer Bošković, Athanasius Kircher, or Christopher Clavius, were later omitted from historical surveys by their Enlightenment opponents. In the second half of the 19th century, Jesuit historians produced a considerable amount of useful biographies and bibliographies of their fellows. This makes them an interesting research subject for the history of history of physics as one of the best researched scientific-oriented networks worldwide, especially the Jesuits who were active in China.

Full text

5
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
History of History of Physics
Stanislav Južnič
Dunajska 83,
Ljubljana 1000, Slovenia
E-mail: juznic@hotmail.com
Abstract: The twelve decades of modern academic history of physics have
provided enough material for the study of the history of history of physics,
the focus of which is the development of the opinions and methods of
historians of physics. The achievements of historians of physics are compared
with the achievements of their objects of research, the physicists. Some
correlations are expected. The group of historians-researchers and the
group of their objects interacted. In several cases, the same person started
out as a researcher and later moved on to the eld of researcher of research
achievements. There are also some competence-related quarrels between
the two groups, the historians and the physicists.
The new science called history of history of physics could be useful in a special
case study of Jesuits. Jesuit professors formed a special group of physicists
and historians studying the physicists, who were very inuential in their time.
Jesuits, except the very best of them such as Rudjer Bošković, Athanasius
Kircher, or Christopher Clavius, were later omitted from historical surveys
by their Enlightenment opponents. In the second half of the 19th century,
Jesuit historians produced a considerable amount of useful biographies and
bibliographies of their fellows. This makes them an interesting research
subject for the history of history of physics as one of the best researched
scientic-oriented networks worldwide, especially the Jesuits who were
active in China.
Keywords: history of history of physics, Jesuits, physics in the Far East, Rudjer
Bošković, Thomas Kuhn
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
DOI : 10.11590/abhps.2016.2.01

6
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
Introduction
e main aim of this study is very ambitious as it tries no less than to establish
a brand new science called the history of history of physics. e twelve decades
of modern academic history of physics have provided enough material for the
history of history of physics. e need for such a new branch of historical
studies inside the humanities is obvious. History of history of physics will guide
researchers and redene their goals towards the focuses of worldwide research
interests.
History of history of physics is a branch of history of history of sciences. e
Chinese did not have a proper word for mechanics before the translations of
Wang Zheng (王徵, 1571 –1644) and Johann Schreck Terrentius (1576–1630),
and the Chinese word for physics as a whole was introduced even much later,
as physics was the fundamental part of (Western) exact sciences up until the
3rd millennium when the genome research probably surpassed it. Besides the
history of mathematics and astronomy, history of physics was the most widely
researched part of histories of sciences until recently. For those reasons, the new
science of the history of history of physics should be introduced in the rst place
before other branches of histories of histories of sciences.
Methodology
History of history of physics is an interdisciplinary eld that dees classication,
just like history of physics as its subject of research. It is a meta-science of history
of physics. e proposed new discipline should explain how the views on the
history of physics have evolved historically, with an aim to explain the changes
and the dynamics of changing in times and spaces of particular academic
institutions. Its areas of study are historians of physics as well as their work
and networks. e method it uses is historical narrative, as well as comparison
between the approaches of historians of physics as the function of their times,
geography of their Alma Maters, academic ancestors, institutions they belong to,
and eventual changes in their approaches towards their history of physics during
their research.

7
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
e history of history of physics could help resolve the main apple of discord
between Whig-oriented researching physicists and historians of physics, which
is Konrad Lorentz’s pecking order. Who is cleverer of both groups, who could
better predict the future physics, and consequently, who should receive a greater
salary? e dream of every historian of physics is to predict the future of physics.
It could be upgraded to a dream of a historian of the history of physics to predict
the future of the discipline he researches.
A researching physicist may feel like an experimental rabbit in the eyes of a
historian of physics and it is far from obvious which of the two sciences is
subordinated to another. Certainly we need the history of history of physics
in which the role of experimental rabbits will pass on to historians of physics.
ere is no need for the history of history of history of physics as far as we could
guess. One of the aims of the new eld of the history of history of physics is to
verify the hypotheses of sharing the social-professional-political environment
between the two groups—the physicists and the historians of (modern) physics.
eir sharing the same environment could force both groups to exchange their
fundamental ideas in similar ways in similar spaces of time. Historians of physics
may have a considerable delay because they need time to discuss newly emerging
ideas of physics from a historical perspective. Historians of quantum mechanics
were certainly inuenced by the new approaches of physicists in 1900–1930,
which at least in its German part were inuenced by Paul Forman’s idea of
the questionable legacy of the Weimar Republic. e question is, did those
changes also inuence the historians of physics dealing with earlier periods?
Historians usually have to wait some time to get the historical perspectives of
the events they are going to examine. Is that delay a constant space of time?
Does the delayed research of the histories of quantum relativity cause a delay in
research of contemporary not-subatomic and much-slower-than-light physics
in the years after the quantum mechanics and theory of relativity won the day?
If the discoveries of contemporary physics inuence all kinds of its historians,
do the discoveries of the contemporary history of physics give feedback on
researching physicists, for example with the data about Newton’s alchemical
research, Popper’s falsications rule, or Kuhn’s paradigms? Most historians of
physics before Rupert Hall received at least graduate training in sciences, but
almost no physicist bother to get a degree in history of physics for his physics
research. Anyway, the most important concepts of history of physics could not
pass completely unnoticed in the physicists’ community. Last but not least, we
all read the same public journals and the web, share the same world.

8
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
The authorship of histories of physics
History of physics was part of ordinary textbooks and curricula before the
journal communication and wireless revolution of Fin de Siècle. e producers
and authors were researching physicists and even more often teaching physicists,
in many cases both in the same person. e situation changed with the rapid
development in the area of communications in the 20th century. It soon opposed
the profession of historian of physics to the Whig histories of physics, which
were narrated in a logical order to help the pedagogical process in which most
researching physicists were involved. e relation changed again in the 3rd
millennium when non-teaching researchers in institutes and industrial jobs
outnumbered professors, and the Logic-Whig approach was proved to be almost
false or at least bending the truth. e (honorable) ends no longer justify the
(false) means. e history of physics is part of the humanities which is on the other
side of the eternal war of two separate worlds which keeps the Whig approach
alive. e professionalization of a historian of physics makes him equivalent to
physicists, so might he also polish the truth to facilitate the teaching process?
Could he also modify the historical reality to t better his proposed theories?
ere were often historians of physics and historians of particular branches of
physics who were connected or were even identical with their researching fellows.
e history of physics is in decit to the related histories of mathematics or
astronomy because there is no relevant web list of historians of physics thus far,
and academic trees of mathematicians are far more elaborate.
e history of history of physics should beware of Eurocentrism and of praising
the theoretical or experimental contributions of physicists over the industrial-
technological ones. In fact, historians of (physical) engineering are aware
of their dierent method of research of the past, and of engineers’ dierent
research tools. In 1999, the peripheral historians of physics (of sciences) already
established their own organization called STEP (Science and Technology in the
European Periphery) in Barcelona with huge support from the Iberian Peninsula
and Greece. Later also Japanese and other Non-European researchers joined the
group.

9
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
Denition of objects and their research limitations
for a historian of history of physics
e theories, experiments or technological improvements of history of physics
deal with concrete facts in the research of physicists, although the technological
history of physics could be associated with management in the sense that James
Bryant Conant’s helped the academic careers of omas Kuhn or Willard Van
Orman Quine (1908–2000) in Harvard (Collins, 1998, p. 1017). at way, the
experimental history of physics would equal its historiography with the included
biographical and bibliographical work, and theoretical history of physics should
include Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, or Feyrabend. e latter would therefore nearly
equal philosophy of physics. at promising approach would bring Eudemus of
Rhodes or even Erastosthenes to the early camp of theoretical history of physics
with their rare descendants before Ernst Mach.
e technological and managing of the history of physics could involve powerful
patrons focused on modern research of scientic patronage of rulers and important
politicians, such as Guericke, as well as Kircher, and Francis Bacon translator’s
patron Prince Johann Weikhard of Auersperg (1615–1677). e wealthy
patrons always nanced-managed physics research and switched to patronizing
history of physics only recently, with Maxwell’s Cavendish Cambridge program
of publishing Henry Cavendish’s (1731–1810) papers in 1879, or Conant’s
popularizing of science through history of science. e present research of the
history of history of physics does not cover patronage of history of physics to that
extent. It mostly covers the historiography of physics and to a limited extent the
philosophy of physics in the sense of Kuhn-Popper-Feyerabend which was very
close to the history of physics. e history of history of patronage of research in
physics is an interesting eld for some future research.
Which works should a historian of history of physics examine? e historian
studying the work of physicists is dened as dealing mostly with the old
achievements and only to the lesser degree with the probable research of the
author himself or his contemporaries. In that scope, Joseph Priestley still
wrote the history of science even though he included his own and his fellows’
achievements. e old-fashioned textbooks with long historical introductions or
the modern textbooks with short historical anecdotes do not meet the criteria
for the history of scientic work in physics. Philosophy of physics include some
historical aspects, as seen in the works of Popper, Lakatos, Ziman, or Kuhn, but
purely logical-philosophical reconstructions of the physics of the past do not

10
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
meet the criteria of a work of the history of physics. A reprint of historical sources
is not automatically a work of history of science, for example Charles Babbage
and Baron Francis Maseres’s publication of Gregory, Descartes, Huygens and
I. Barrow’s tracts on optics in Scriptores Optici, printed in 1823. Surprisingly,
the early English histories of optics were connected with photography in the
1850s, such as the photographic instrument maker of London William Henry
ornthwaite’s (1819–1894) A Guide to Photography containing concise history
of the science and its connection with Optics in London in 1851 or surgeon
Jabez Hogh’s (1817–1899) similarly entitled A Practical Manual of Photography
containing concise history of the science and its connection with Optics in London in
1854. e pure histories of optics followed later, also with Edmund Whittaker’s
history of ether in 1910.
e popularizing works do not automatically belong to the achievements of
the history of science. Voltaire’s semibiographical description of Newton’s work
as well as his lover Émile de Châtelet’s translation of the Principia contributed
to the history of physics, while their friend Francesco Algarotti’s (1712–1764)
popular work on optics Newtonianismo per le dame (1737) or the popular updated
additions of Newton’s achievements to Jacques Rohault’s (1618–1672) textbook
Traité de Physique (1671) were not important achievements in the eld of
history of physics, although they made important contribution to physics itself.
According to that criterion, Newton quickly found his biographers, historians of
science, who included Newton’s niece’s famous falling apple story. Among those
were the Frenchman Fontanelle, the British Colin MacLaurin, or the Italian
Paulo Frisi. Newton’s earliest biographers were Fontanelle and Voltaire, whose
works were translated into English almost immediately. Galileo’s works were
worldwide bestsellers, but papal condemnation of Galileo delayed some of his
Italian biographers until the Barnabite monk Paolo Frisi published on Galileo in
Saggio sul Galileo (1765) and in Milano journal Il Café in 1775. Giovan Battista
Clemente Nèlli (1725–1793) published the voluminous Galileo’s biography only
in 1793 in more liberal Swiss Losanna to popularize Viviani’s Vita-memoires
printed in Galileo’s Opere in Florence in 1717. Viviani acted as a monopolist on
his teacher Galileo’s biographies when he tried to prevent the Jesuit Athanasius
Kircher’s (positive) Galileo’s eulogy from being published in what became the
later lost Etruria Illustrata of 1678, or in an attempt to prevent the publishing of
his former student Lorenzo Magalotti’s (1632–1717) Amsterdam correspondence
between Galileo and Paolo Scarpi in 1673. Voltaire included Galileo into his
Dictionnaire Philosophique in 1754, but in the same year Diderot and Frisi’s
patron D’Alembert dared only to mention Galileo in their encyclopedia’s entry

11
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
on Copernicus (Segre, 1998, pp. 394–395, 422, 424, 452). While Newton’s
biographers started their work six decades after his publications, Galileo’s
biographies by Vivani and Nèlli took eight- or even seventeen decades. Besides
Galileo, Tesla held the record because his experimental technology of energy
transfer became extremely popular dozen decades after his initial proposal, which
was crowned with his fruitless tower near New York City. Even Tesla’s theories,
including the almighty ether, are being reconsidered by his modern fans in spite
of Einstein’s dislike of ether.
Newton’s great discoveries were followed by nearly three quarters of a century
of intellectual stagnation, especially in England. Already John Fredrick William
Hershel junior and his friend William Whewell knew that very well. About half
that long was the crisis during the declination and suppression of Jesuits when the
European political energy was focused on preparing for the French revolution.
It was the era of technical innovations of the craftsmen of the English Industrial
Revolution, but the experimental and theoretical physics stagnated, and so did
their histories. For a while, the classical education lost its values especially among
the British and Dutch sailors and craftsmen like Richard Arkwright, and, again,
in the era of Faraday-Edison-Tesla’s electronics, early computers, or modern web-
Figure 1. Physicists and their historians

12
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
oriented smartphones. Another three quarters of a century passed before the
realistic historical valuation of the building of quantum mechanics and theory
of relativity was provided between the years 1905 and 1975, although tons of
textbooks and propaganda texts emerged in the meantime. e new bishop
omas Birch (1705–1766) will probably save the day in the 3rd millennium
with the commented notes on Tesla-Einstein-Bohr’s quarrels on Tesla’s idea of
wireless distribution of energy.
WorldCat is not the best tool for research into history of history of physics
because its keywords also yield the physics works of the tagged period, not only
the histories of it. e old biographical encyclopedias such as those by Asimov
(1978), Bogolyubov (1983), Khramov (1977), Grigoryan and Fradlin (1982, pp.
216–257), and Brush (1976), or personal communication and reading of such
materials oer better insight.
It is even more dicult to properly approach the early histories of technologies
in an attempt to develop the history of history of industrial physics. Louis XIV le
Soleil’s military architect Bernard Forest de Bélidor (1697–1761) wrote his nicely
illustrated survey of water-powered machines including steam engines as early
as in 1727–1790, and Christian Wolf (1679–1754) provided the early German
translation of it in 1743–1771. In 1729, Bélidor published on engineering
science, including Galileo, Mariotte, and his own work. e Habsburg director
of hydraulic works, appointed in 1783 to replace Gabriel Gruber, Colonel-
Lieutenant Sebastian de Maillard (1746–1822) won St. Petersburg Academy’s
award in 1783 with a discussion of Watt’s innovations, among other things.
He published his ideas in Vienna and Strasbourg in 1784. William Blakey’s
(1712–1792) Observations sur les pompes à feu, published in French in 1777, and
his A Historical Account, printed in London posthumously in 1793, were the
earliest books on the history of steam engine. Bélidor, Maillard, and Blakey were
true historians and insiders. Blakey personally developed Savary’s type of steam
engines and competed with Newcomb’s machine. Professor of the prestigious
Paris Polytechnic from 1795 to 1815 Gaspard Clair Francois Maria Riche de
Prony (1755–1839) of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, became famous
for the hydraulic brake named after him. He organized the calculating and
printing of decimal trigonometric tables and managed great hydraulic enterprises
to publish the rst course in mechanics with the coordinate system including
steam engines in 1790 and 1796 in the German translation Neue Architectura
Hidraulika, printed in Frankfurt in 1795 and 1801. After Napoleon’s exile,
Prony kept his position at the Academy, unlike Lazare Carnot, and was familiar

13
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
with the report by Lazare’s son Sadi Carnot, but he did not give any feedback
to it. e unfortunate pioneering engineer and architect of steamers on the
ames George Dodd (1783–1827) and Irish topographer and traveler Isaac
Weld (1774–1856) provided one of the earliest accounts of steamboats on the
London ames, Glasgow, and the surroundings of Dublin in their A Historical
and Explanatory Dissertation in 1818. ey discussed the advanced use of steam
engines. David Brewster’s compilation of John Robison’s work with comments
by James Watt, entitled A System of Mechanical Philosophy, published in 1822 in
Glasgow, was another insider’s story. An early non-engineer in the eld of history
of steam engines was Charles Frederick Partington, who died around 1857. He
earned his livelihood as a librarian at the Royal Institution and successfully
lectured with his An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Steam Engine, which
his printer Taylor published in 1822 in London. Aegidius de Wit (1800–1826)
was promoted with his Latin dissertation on steam engines, Dissertatio physico-
mathematica de machina atmica, in Utrecht University in 1823, but he died
soon afterwards. Robert Stuart (*1782?) was the pseudonym of an engineer and
author of A Descriptive History of the Steam Engine. He copied Partington’s style
with patents and suggestions of boiling improvements, included in 1824, and
T. G. Cummings published his work on the history of steam engines also in
1824. e Scottish engineer Robert Scott Burns (1825–1901) published his
e Steam Engine in 1854. erefore, Sadi Carnot was not late at all with his
booklet in 1824. e majority of discussions on steam engines were produced
by working engineers and therefore Carnot’s booklet was viewed as outsider of
mainstream engineering of his day before Clapeyron’s intervention. Clapeyron
had just returned from his splendid lecturing isolation in St. Petersburg, which
enabled him to take a broader view from a dierent perspective.
e dating of the work of historians of physics has proved problematic because
many works on history of science as well as physics, including by Viviani and
Châtelet, were published posthumously. erefore, the author’s year of death
was considered more relevant in the history of history of physics, as the series of
posthumous reprints could be endless.
Aristotle dened physics for the future generations, although its scope changed
often in later centuries. e Early Modern physics emerged with Galileo but
there were no histories of it up to his time. In fact, the English term Natural
History and Faraday’s self-identication as a philosopher provoked the (wrong)
feelings that there is something historical-philosophical in fundamental physics
or biology research. Modern astrophysics, in fact, entail big-bang-philosophical

14
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
and theological aspects of seeing the light from remote stars which has been
radiated at some distant historical moment. Modern astrophysics is a history,
but on the cosmic level. It is not interested in particular personal or network
histories. It is more in style of Marx’s statement that all science is history because
all that we did yesterday belongs to history.
Previous researches in history of history of physics
Randall Collins (*1941) provided some insight into the networks of Mach and
Schlick in Vienna and Einstein and Reichenbach in the Berlin philosophical
circle, whose members were the direct academic descendants or at least students
of students of the leading physicists of the era. Moritz Schlick, head of Mach-
Boltzmann’s Viennese philosophical chair, was Planck’s student who switched to
Mach’s side (Collins, 1998, pp. 722–723, 726, 730), where Planck also gured
before his quantum theory and quarrels with Mach. Collins drew huge networks
of intellectuals from all over the continents and millennia, and connected them
in time and space, so that Neurath, a US immigrant from the Vienna Circle,
even inuenced omas Kuhn. He gave no preference to the Westerners which
enabled Collins to avoid Eurocentrism (Collins, 1998, pp.894–943, 944–946).
Modern network theorists expanded Collins’s ideas with the use of sophisticated
computer network programs which is also a path followed in this study. Marc
Rothenberg published the encyclopedia of history of science and historians of
science, medicine, and technology of the USA in 2001 (Rothenberg, 2001). In
the area of history of science, Christina Chimisso from e Open University in
the United Kingdom recently added the history of French philosophy of science
(Chimisso, 2016).

15
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
History of history: humble beginnings
with Jesuits’ intermezzo
e Chinese used to produce the histories of their scientic and observational
achievements for the court all the time. Researchers in India did the same, while
the Maya or the Incas produced no relevant memories to provide us the names
of their agricultural innovators because they did not use writing and recording
in the sense of the Old World. ey were dierent, but that does not mean that
they could not be better in some aspects of history of physics, for example in
their uses of compass.
Eudemus of Rhodes and after him the Alexandrian librarian Erastosthenes
of Cyrene are sometimes cited as the pioneers of history of science owning
to Eudemus’s clever remarks on past sciences which went beyond pure fact-
collecting. e astrolabe maker Al-Saghani, Al-Biruni (Abu Reihan Muhammed
ibn Ahmed, *973), Avicenna, Averroës, or their Muslim or Far East fellows
probably rarely made such evaluated comments even when they were discussing
the older achievements as historiographers. e pioneering modern European
historian of electricity (in 1775), light (in 1772) and pneumatic was Priestley,
the rst modern historian of astronomic observatories was Jean Bernoulli in
his letters dated to 1768–1769, and the rst modern historian of mathematics
with many applications in physics (1799–1802) was Jean-Étienne Montucla.
Certainly, all of them were researching physicists. Priestley and Bernoulli, in
fact, described the work of the people they personally collaborated with. It is
remarkable that Priestley provided the histories of particular branches of physics
and chemistry research before the general ones became available, which was
the consequence of the quick growth in both elds that Priestley covered. No
textbook of his time covered such quickly developing material, and Priestley,
in fact, published a textbook with updated ongoing research, mentioning also
history. Everybody used Priestley’s work in the decades to come the same way as
everybody later used Faraday’s diaries.
In 1837, William Whewell dedicated to J. F. W. Herschel his histories of
inductive sciences to cover Whewell’s and Herschel’s awareness of the decline of
physics in England after Newton. e Habsburg astronomer Joseph Johan von
Littrow (1781–1840) translated it for a posthumous publication in 1840–1841.
Whewell’s and Herschel’s work was a kind of history of broader physics with
political ambitions. Belgian Jesuits Augustin de Backer and Carlos Sommervogel
(1890–1900), Hungarian Jesuit Ladislaus Lukács (1988), and Austrian Jesuit

16
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
Johann Nepomuk Stoeger (1855) provided bibliographical studies of their fellow
brothers which were not concentrated on exact sciences, but are very helpful
for a historian of physics. e Jesuit professors of physics and mathematics
developed a special kind of network of physicists. ey were very powerful
in their time, but after Jesuit suppression the Jesuits were excluded from the
historical surveys of the winners except the very best of them such as Bošković,
Athanasius Kircher, or Clavius. After their quarrels with Galileo, Jesuit networks
in the form of philosophical societies developed their physics and its history
in opposition to the mainstream. e Modern American Jesuits and their fans
contributed signicantly to the history of Jesuits’ physics in the nal decades of
the 2nd millennium, and such case studies became extremely popular again after
the inauguration of Pope Francis and the 200th anniversary of the restoration of
Jesuits. In fact, there are several histories of physics that a historian of history of
physics should take into consideration, roughly speaking the history of physics
of the winners, and the networks on the losing sides among the white Western
Christians, as well as among non-whites.
For the German-speaking world, Ernst Mach provided philosophically oriented
histories of all branches of physics (in 1883–1912 on mechanics, in 1894 on the
Doppler eect of acoustics and colors, in 1909 on the rst law of thermodynamics,
in 1919 on heat, in 1921 on optics, see Mach, 1894; 1909; 1912; 1919) and,
to a lesser degree, of electromagnetism, possibly because electromagnetism was
not directly connected with any of the ve human senses (vision, hearing, taste,
touch, heat, and balance, which was added later). e antagonist of Friedrich
Engels, deaf physicist Eugen Dühring published the history of mechanics in
1873, Seyfert provided Geschichte des Galvanismus, and Wilhelm Weber’s student
Edmund Hoppe discussed electricity in 1884. e Danish daughter of Niels
Bohr’s teacher Bjerrum, Kristine Meyer, wrote the history of temperatures in
1913, Emil Wilde provided history of optics in 1838, Rudolf Clausius fought
for his priority in 1852, and Ignaz Weiner discussed research of heat in 1863.
Wilhelm Weber introduced the development of electric measurement without
the history mentioned in 1864, Felix Klein published his history of nineteenth-
century research, and Maurice Cantor with collaborators provided the histories
of mathematics together with applied physics in 1901–1913. e histories of
all physics were published by J. C. Poggendor in 1879, A. Heller in 1882–
1884, and E. A. W. Gerland and Traumüller in 1892 and 1899. Ferdinand
Rosenberger focused on the history of physics in 1882–1890, and the Real
School professor Adolph Kistner in 1906. Ostwald organized the publication of
the classical texts of exact sciences. Sir Edmund Whittaker published the history

17
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
of ether in 1910. Nearly all relevant authors were physicists—for example, the
Parisian industrial engineer turned science-ction author Pierre Devaux wrote
his Histoire de l’électricité in 1941 and 1954. e researchers merging in the
mid-20th century include the physicist Vasco Ronchi’s Luce, published in 1952.
New professional positions for historians of sciences developed after Henry
Guerlac of Cornell University taught Marie Boas Hall in 1977–1979 and the
French-born Roger Hahn in 1957–1960. Robert Kargon also nished his studies
of history in Cornell University. In 2007, the Japanese historian of astronomy
Shigeru Nakayama (1928–2014) published in Historia scientiarum of Japan
his reminiscences on omas Kuhn from the Harvard University. e other
historians of physics include Geber, Scheele, Erastosthenes, Pliny the Elder,
Agricola, J. F.Montucla, Jean Bernoulli with his letters in 1768–1769, Priestley,
Percy Dunsheath’s electric engineering history, A. P. Usher, Maurice Goldsmith,
and Andreas Kleinert in Germany in 2005.
Figure 2. Comparison of Central-European Jesuit physicists and their fellow
researchers worldwide

18
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
History of science as an academic discipline
Nikola Tesla appeared at his famous show in Paris in March 1892. In the same
year, with the support of Auguste Compte’s (1898–1957) followers, the very rst
Chair of General History of science was created at Collège de France in Paris.
Compte himself did not succeed in his lifetime, despite the fact that the traditions
of the French history of science date back to Voltaire and Condorcet. Although
the Paris Chair was closed in 1913 and had very limited impact compared to the
philosophy of science (Chimisso, 2016, p.85), it opened the eld to academic
approach. Twelve decades of modern academic history of science, and history
of physics as part of it, provided enough material for the history of history of
physics.
e history of physics was recognized as a research eld inside the history of
science. e historians of science with George Sarton established Isis, one of its
most renowned journals in 1912 in Belgium. e early congresses of historians
of science were held after the First World War in parallel to Solvay’s Conferences,
although nobody attended both. It was never safe to be a historian of science—for
example, the Soviet delegation led by Bukharin and Edinburgh-educated Hessen
at the 2nd History of Science London congress of 1931 faced the deadly Stalinist
squads ve years later. After the Second World War, the American diplomat
and chemist James Bryant Conant from Harvard, who served in Germany,
propagated his subordinate Kuhn’s history of science to strengthen the force
of scientic ideology against Paul Feyerabend’s anarchistic kicking of scientic
arguments and ideology out of (state) schools (Conant, 1955, p. 55; Jammer,
1957, p. 16). During the turbulent ower-power anti-Vietnam war protests, of
the post-McCartney’s cold war period, Kuhn’s incommensurability paradigms,
his antagonist Popper’s falsication criteria, and Feyerabend’s epistemological
anarchy opposed to both entered the front pages of public opinion for the rst
time. eir argumentation of history of physics was shaped on philosophical
premises. is stage, called the Popper-Kuhn-Needham’s third revolution of
history of physics’ paradigm, brought the academic discussions into public
awareness and soon fullled Conant’s dream of establishing history of science as
an academic discipline with dozens of chairs in Middle-East or US universities.
However, much fewer of these were founded in Europe, where the histories
of Whig research physicists still dominate despite the fact that organizing
European History of Science congresses were started in the 3rd millennia. e
fourth paradigm of history of physics follows Needham’s extra-European and

19
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
female physicists contributions with Feyerabend’s ideas included. Feyerabend as
a Wehrmacht-Luftwae soldier was on the losing side in the Second World War.
He fought against Kuhn’s radar work in England that was hostile to Feyerabend,
but Feyerabend proved to be victorious in the aftermath.
e historian of history of physics should compare the achievements of
historians of physics with the achievements of his objects of research, the
network of physicists. Some correlations are expected. e group of researchers
and the group of their objects interact. In many cases the same person acted as
a researcher and later as a researcher of the research achievement. ere are also
some competence-related quarrels between both groups. e historians of physics
have many women in their group while female physicists are still comparatively
rare. Also, historians of physics from the developing countries are much more
frequent compared to their fellow countrymen physicists, also because research
into history of physics is less expensive compared to that of experimental physics.
Let us try to build a ve-stage paradigmatic development (growth–disintegration–
universality–crisis–revolution) for the branches of physics (mechanics, optics,
electromagnetism, heat). e same could be done for the history of physics as
its fth branch, although at least in the US it belongs to the humanities. In this
case there is no dilemma between the chicken and the egg: certainly physics was
created before its history could be narrated. But the delay was eventually not a
long one, and both were invented during the Antiquities. e Herodotus-style
history of physics (science) which was paradigmatic before developed in the Greek
Mediterranean almost immediately after Aristotle coined his world physics. e
genesis of the rst paradigm (G1) of history of physics took place in Pax Romana.
e new paradigm grew (R1) through the peripatetic Plutarch-style collection of
histories of great (antique) scientists in medieval Christianity, and in the notes of
the Chinese astronomical bureau. e disintegration (Z1) followed the Byzantine
Platonists’ free-speaking challenge of Western Peripateticism of Agyropolus, the
son of his student’s student Francesco Maurolico and other Byzantines on their
ight from Turkish assaults to safer Italy. eir contemporaries witnessed the new
Gutenberg’s printing press and Columbus’s sailings over the oceans. e universal
paradigm (U1) used the encyclopedic works on Diderot and D’Alembert’s model
and modern journals to accumulate the growing knowledge more quickly in a
world of the rst Industrial Revolution when time was becoming money. e
crisis (K1) introduced the new science of electricity (magnetism) with insider
Priestley’s narratives. e rst revolution (P1) forced phlogiston to fall under
the attack of the caloric theory with the French King going under the guillotine

20
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
of the Republic. Was the phlogiston royal and was the caloric republican? In
any case, the revolutionary republicans beheaded them both, the King and
Lavoisier, the chief supporter of the caloric. If Stahl, the inventor of phlogiston,
had survived long enough, it is fair to suppose that he would have shared no
better destiny. In that case, the French Revolution and the revolution in the
history of physics (and chemistry) were almost simultaneous. Which caused
which? e most surprising of all actors was Priestley. He commended the crisis
with his histories of electricity, light, colors, and airs, but denied the existence of
revolutionary caloric as the replacement of his beloved phlogiston up to his last
days in the USA. Jesuit Bošković vehemently disliked Priestley’s materialism, but
he died too soon to deal with the new Lavoisier’s caloric and left Paris and our
world before he could share Lavoisier’s destiny.
e following period of growth of the second paradigm of history of physics
(R2) witnessed the French sciences’ triumph over Napoleon’s bayonets. e
Napoleonic minister Laplace’s triumph was based on Englishman Newton’s
ideas, while Napoleon was the most bitter enemy of England, which was one
of the historical jokes. e historians of science Delambre and Arago were
not completely on Laplace’s side, especially Arago as the writer of obituaries
of academicians. But they were still all Newtonians. e second Emil Wilde’s
disintegration of the paradigm of history of optics inside the history of physics
(Z2) followed the English-French (Young and Fresnel) cooperative development
of anti-Newton wave optics again in the middle of the war. Wilde was too
cautious to discuss Fresnel’s wave novelties. e history of physics proted from
Whewell’s analysis of post-Newton’s English stagnation in sciences in spite of
the spread of railways as the output of the Industrial Revolution. e second
disintegration of the history of optics paradigm also reacted to the development
of steam engines as their late echo. It was simultaneous with Sadi Carnot’s
more recent explanation of the working process of steam engines. Poggendor’s
universal paradigm (U2) used the new electro-technic telegraph in the space of
time between the Spring of Nations and the Paris Commune, and during the
crisis (K2) authors already wrote under electric light. Just after the fall of the
Paris Commune, the second revolution (P2) used Mach’s methodological doubts
in invisibles before the quantum relativity, and Hoppe still tried to promote the
research of electromagnetism of his teacher Weber against the victorious, but
mortally ill, Maxwell.
e third growth of history of physics (R3) developed with the focus of
Rosenberger, Cantor, Felix Klein, Kristine Meyer on the case study of

21
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
temperature, and the historian of Wasan mathematics Yoshio Mikami (1875–
1950) who was probably the most prolic researcher of the R3 era. In the
overoptimistic style of Kelvin’s clouds, it looked like physics would grow forever
as nearly nished science, but quantum relativity simultaneously with the
February Russian Revolution shook its foundations. Soon afterwards, Bohr’s
hydrogen atom, the general relativity, the First World War, and the October
Revolution disintegrated (Z3) with Marxist environment, and the industry of
automobiles involved among other novelties. Merton, Koyré, Ronchi’s history
of optics, Drake’s Galileo, contribution by Jammer, Einstein’s Jewish friend, and
similar case studies enabled the universalization (U3) of the history of physics
during the Cold War. Cohen, Lakatos, Yates’s Renaissance, and Sivin’s China of
crisis (K3) enabled the early computer-based revolution (p3) of Kuhn’s cold war
of incommensurable paradigms, including Popper’s falsication criteria. Joseph
Needham’s Chinese were competing with Europeans like his Chinese assistant
Figure 3. Jesuit’s research publications in Central Europe through decades

22
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
competed with his English rst wife. Brush, Truesdell, Fox, Shapin, Hahn, Xi
Zezong, Pais, Darrigol, Kuhn’s student Heilbron, and many others, built the
new growth of history of physics (R4) which seems to be the greatest of them
all.WIn the era of globalizing networks it will meet its disintegration destiny
(Z4) with Feyerabend’s anarchism, Kuhn’s student Foreman’s anti-causality in
the supposedly illegal and questionable Weimar Republic for anti-Newtonian
quantum mechanics, Ogilvie’s studies of female physicists, or non-European
studies in Shuntarō Itō’s translation of Euclid, El-Bizri’s discussion of Alhazen,
and Al-Hassani’s study of mechanical tools. Other novelties include the modern
technical tools with the developed web and smartphones. e universalization
of history of physics (U4) could be expected with women and non-Europeans
slowly prevailing in the eld of history of physics but not in the eld of physics
itself. e Needham’s puzzle of supposed Christianity needed for industrial
revolutions is questioned also because early Christianity disliked science, and
probably the humanity and the positive role of industrial revolutions will soon
become questionable. e new generations could accuse European colonialists
for genocide, supported by the fact that colonialists’ religion only needs belief
and not benevolence to get to paradise. e God who forgives a sinful believer
was a disaster formula for the Catholic crusades, Montezuma, Incas, colonies,
and neo-colonies. e modern Chinese economic success questions the white
Christian supremacy, as well as the history of physics based on its dictate.
Table 1. Five stages in the search for valuable history of physics
Antiquities-
Middle Ages
16th–18th
century
French
Revolution-Fin
De Siècle
20th century Future
Name Four substances
and re/ether
variants
Part of
research
Textbooks
Appendixes
History of physics
research discipline
opposed to the
Whig approach
Advanced
relativistic
quantum
mechanics
Measure-
ments
Anthropo-
morphic
Heroic
stories
State-nationalistic
competitions
Scientiometrics,
later computerized
Computer-web-
smartphone
related
Main case
study /
Topics rese-
arched
Socrates’
afliates, Roman
techniques
New
branches of
electricity
and pneu-
matics
Steam engines
and Electro-
technique
Copernicus/Galileo/
Newton/
Maxwell/Einstein/
Quantum
mechanics
Extra-European
and female
scientic
pursuits

23
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
Means of
transport
Horseback riding
and carriages
with some
galleys or sailing
boats on lakes
and nearby seas
Sailing boats
on rivers,
canals, and
oceans
Steam engines
pioneering
attempts:
railways,
steamers, and
balloons
Internal combustion
cars, railways,
boats, planes
Electrical
railways and
cars
Relativity Anti-barbaric
self-awareness
Geogra-
phical-
religious
self-aware-
ness,
religion
separated
from state
schools
Self-awareness,
Einstein’s
relativity
Einstein’s “all
is relative”,
Feyerabend’s
“anything goes”
Teleportation
possibilities,
Feyerabend’s
scientic’
ideology globally
separated from
state schools
(Feyerabend,
1987, pp.
287–301)
Funda-
mental-
smallest-
substance
Schools
(Pythagoras,
Plato’s
Academia,
Peripatetic, Han)
Geogra-
phical
regions
National (French,
Japanese) or
mixed (Habsburg,
Ottoman,
Russian, Indian,
Chinese) states
Civilizations/races Networks
Funda-
mental-
greatest-
object
Greek
Mediterranean,
Pax Romana,
Chinese
dynasties
Religions Religions,
Shiisms
(Christian-Muslim
of Protestant-
Orthodox-Catholic
Sunni-Shiite)
Earth-Gaea Solar system
Dimensions
of space
and means
of measure-
ment
0,05 mm–1,000
km against
Eratosthenes’
circumference of
the Earth; steps,
feet
0,0001 mm–
3*6,400 km
microscope,
telescope,
triangulation
0,00001 mm–106
km; electric
10-15 m
(nanometric) –1010
light-years, electron
microscopes,
space travel
10-17 m
(nanometric
–1012 light-
years, electron
microscopes,
space travel
Dimen-
sions of
time and
means of
measure-
ment
0,1 s–6,300
years; gnomons,
water clock,
dynasties of Near
and Far East,
Greek tribes,
Roman rulers
0,001 s–106
years;
pendulums,
spring-clock
0,00001 s–108
years; electric
clocks
10-9 s–1010 years;
electronic clocks
10-11 s–1012
years; quantum
electronics
Tools/
measure-
ment
devices
Dialectics
versus Euclid’s
postulations
narrations/
summing the
number of
convinced
Devices
fabricated/
summing
their number
Industrial
enterprises
supported/
summing their
number
Computer-web
scientiometrics/
citation indexes
Networks
interferences
analysis/web-
connection
and genome-
memory
comparisons

24
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
Involved
number of
physicists/
schools
considered
100/12 200/12 1,000/20 10,000/30 100,000/6
Information
transfer
Classical letters Journals,
optic
telegraphy
Electromagnetic
telegraphy
Marconi’s wireless;
web
Smart phones,
Space worms
Energy
used/
energy
transfer
Wood-
accumulated
solar energy/
mechanical
Thermic coal
powered
steam
engines/
steam
Thermic-
chemical oil
powered internal
combustions/
Edison’s direct-
electric current
wires
Hydro-electric &
steam & nuclear
power plants-
stations/Tesla’s
alternative-electric
current wires
Solar-Gaea/
Tesla’s wireless
e history of history of physics with its views from the bird’s-eye perspective
to the outlook of additional dimensions brings some new light to the possible
directions of development of the history of physics, as well as to physics itself.
e development of the paradigms of history of physics mirror the development
of paradigms of physics research mostly with small delays in time and bigger
dierences in space when the novelties were extrapolated into non-European
settings before the First World War. In the future, the domains of non-European
and women researchers will certainly take the leading roles, and there is some
remote possibility that the relation might turn into history of physics becoming
the teacher of the physics in how to orient its future research. Such an anti-
Whig future could help to end the force of scientic ideology which Feyerabend
despised as false prophecy. at could be a signicant turn in the rivalry between
physicists and their historians because some past paradigms of history of physics
directly changed with only a dozen years of delay after the development of physics,
which they study. For example, Priestley’s history of electrostatics provided the
revolutionary crisis (K1-P1) of the rst paradigm of personalized history of
physics in the style of Herodotus and Plutarch during the antiquities. Priestley
enabled the Far-East Rangaku research of Sokichi Hashimoto, histories of steam
engines, and Arago’s biographies of the new growth (R2). Emil Wilde published
carefully his neutral history of light research (Z2) after the (temporary) victory
of waves, simultaneously with the more courageous Whewell, to enable the
universalization of history of science (U2) for the other histories of steam engines
and their more successful electronic descendants. Engels’s antagonist Dühring,
as well as Lenin’s and Boltzmann’s antagonist Mach’s doubts (K2,P2) ended

25
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
the seemingly endless Poggendor’s style collections of facts. Pierre Duhem’s
(R3) philosophical approach and Whittaker’s discussions of ether on its probable
deathbed witnessed the historically extremely doubtful success of the majority-
voted Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics after Einstein’s and
Schrödinger’s more liberal short intermezzos based on their mutual sexual liberty
compared to the monogamous Bohr, Heisenberg, or Dirac. Ernst Mach’s godson,
the divorced café frequenter Wolfgang Pauli was the enfant terrible of the
Copenhagen quantum mainstream. Once upon a time, Galileo’s mathematical
sciences ceased to serve theology in the world created by God-Mathematician
who could enter Plato’s Academy should he wished so. Similarly, four centuries
later, history of physics ceased to act as the maiden-propagandist-servant for
physicists in spite of the recent Conant’s supporting of historians of sciences.
e medieval hierarchy of sciences with grammar as its basis ceased to apply and
no one wanted to serve for less money if he could play a boss. If Galileo’s God
was a Mathematician, Marx’s one was a Historian to make historians of physics
proud of their values after Hessen’s and Barnal’s third disintegration (Z3) of the
Figure 4. Central-European Jesuits’ research compared to the others

26
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
growth of Ferdinand Rosenberger’s (R3) stamp-collection style of the history of
physics. At the 1931 London meeting, Hessen’s history of physics was upgraded
by Merton’s and Vavilov’s similar Marxist approach.
Conclusions
One of the most striking discoveries of the history of history of physics describes
conicts of war as disastrous for historians of physics because no ghting side
has much use for the historians of physics, except for propaganda. e same
wars prove to be fruitful for the researchers of physics, certainly mostly to
those physicists who were involved in technologies of weapons’ production, or
the extremely humiliating psychiatric-physiological research of the Holocaust
victims. But the sobering comes too soon for the Übermensch and too late for
their victims, because the aftermath years after the ocial peace do not produce
much of valuable physics. Rutherford’s best coworker Henry Moseley (1887–
1915) and many others got killed in the First World War. e rule of post-war
stagnation in physics applied to the irty Years’ War (1618–1648), the War
of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Napoleonic Wars ending in 1813/14,
French-Prussian War with the Paris Commune, the First and the Second World
Wars. e War for the Spanish Succession and both twentieth-century world
wars also coincided with immense scientic eorts of pioneering Newtonians
against their antagonistic Leibniz’s followers, or the quantum-relativistic
researchers. e tremendous war eorts exhausted or even handicapped the next
generations, and science was forced into stagnation. In all these cases, (applied)
physics prospered during the ghting and declined in the aftermath, while
history of physics disappeared in war battles and prospered in the aftermath in
Conant-like propaganda eorts for the rise of public opinions about science.
e applied-technological-industrial physics follow similar ups and downs, as
do experimental or theoretical physics, because the physics of warfare does not
match our criteria of physics technology proper. e history of history of physics
follows dierent paths and there is also a huge dierence between the history
of physics technology and the history of experimental or theoretical physics.
Partington, Cummings, or Chinese Yuan Ruan in the 1820s and again Jones or
Burns in the 1850s provided the peaks with their histories of steam engines and
with Brewster’s biography of Newton. eir contemporary physics or history of
physical theories and experiments did not prosper that much in spite of Brewster’s
biography of Newton. ose achievements of the historians of technologies were

27
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
clearly the echo of past events in the advances of technology, on which they
reacted with the expected delay, and in the case of steam engines probably also
with respect to the patent rights of the inventors involved. e inventors did not
like their innovations to become public too soon.
Gevorkyan and Fradlin completed the list of all contributions in the mechanics
of solid bodies with 1,003 items published before the 1904 Japanese-Russian
war, and followed a similar path as all scientists except for the irty Years’ War
when the mechanics of solid bodies was in its pioneering stage without enough
publications to enable any relevant judgement upon their dynamics. Another
exception was the single broadened peak a dozen years after the peak of total
contributions following the War of the Spanish Succession, and twice as much
space of time before the peak during the French Revolution in total contributions,
which had no signicant output in the eld of mechanics of solid bodies (see
Fig. 1 on p.11). e peak of the post-Napoleonic period, the stagnation during
the Spring of Nations, and the following peak seems to be the same. e total
output of research of the motion we call heat with 674 items published before
the 20th century rapidly grew after the Spring of Nations, but no other dynamic
particularities are evident. e output of Jesuit physics in Central Europe
behaved very similarly to the total output of the Jesuits. e Central-European
Jesuits Erasmus, Frölich and Halloy supported Musschenbroek’s peak after the
Spanish War of Succession, and Scherer corresponded to Euler, with Scherer’s
friend Bošković lling the gap in-between. e research of mechanics by Central-
European Jesuits or their total input provides relatively good correspondence
to the total output of mechanics of their day. e physics of Jesuits was later
viewed as in opposition to its contemporary mainsteam physics, but they both
certainly provided the same output dynamics with the Graz Jesuit Kepler’s
friend Paul Guldin’s peak during the irty Years’ War, the post-Newtonian and
post-Spanish-Succession-War gap, and the Bošković and Scherer peak before
the French Revolution, which remained unnished because the suppression of
Jesuits ended their great successes in sciences.
Social revolutions like the Spring of Nations with sudden mass involvement in
politics stopped people from researching both physics and history of physics.
Even Arago felt obliged to get his ministers’ chair during the Spring of Nations,
and Galois fell victim to the turmoil after the French July Revolution of 1830. On
the contrary, the French Revolution of 1789 seems to have brought a quarter of a
century of prosperity in the research of physics, especially in applied chemistry,
while the history of physics also progressed regardless of the fact that no period in

28
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
history had seen so many physicists and mathematicians involved in high politics
like Lazare Carnot, Laplace, Monge, Count Berthollet of Arcueil, or the Paris
Mayor and astronomer Jean Sylvian Bailly. No one makes relevant science with
a gun in his hand, except for producers of weapons, and every military conict
ruins the local economies in the following times of peace.
It is much more dicult to estimate how many new ideas popped up in physics
and its history as a result of the war conicts and mixing of dierent cultures,
for example during the great marches of Alexander the Great in Persia, Egypt,
and India, or the Napoleonic expeditions in Egypt or Russia. e Hellenic
Post-Alexandrian period was certainly fruitful. e Napoleonic Egypt enabled
Champollion’s Rosetta Stone and Champollion’s Grenoble benefactor and the
ancient member of Napoleonic Egyptian expedition, Joseph Fourier, to become
instrumental in the future histories of Egyptian sciences. Even Napoleon’s
disastrous Moscow winter may have given some additional insights to the
captured ocer Jean Victor Poncelet in 1812–1814, or later to the St. Petersburg
professor of engineering Clapeyron in 1820–1830.
References
Asimov, I. (1978), Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, London: Pan
Books, Ltd.
Bogolyubov, A. N. (1983), Matematiki, Mekhaniki: Biogracheskii spravochnik, Kiev:
Naukova dumka.
Brush, S. S. (1976), e Kind of Motion We Call Heat, Amsterdam, New York & Oxford:
North-Holland.
Chimisso, C. (2016), Writing the History of the Mind: Philosophy and Science in France,
1900 to 1960s, Abingdon: Routledge.
Collins, R. (1998), e Sociology of Philosophies; e Global eory of Intellectual Change,
Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Conant, J. B. (1955), ‘e Citadel of Learning,’ e Yale Review, vol.45, pp.48–61.
Feyerabend, P. (1987), Protiv metode, Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša. [Original: Feyerabend,
P. (1975), Against Method, London: New Left Books.]
Grigoryan, A. T. & Fradlin, B. N. (1982), Istoria mekhaniki tverdoga tela, Moskva:
Nauka, pp. 216-257;
Jammer, M. (1957), Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Dynamics, Harvard:
Harvard University Press.

29
History of History of Physics
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
Khramov, Yu. A. (1977), Fiziki: Biogracheskii spravochnik, Kiev: Naukova dumka.
Lukács, L. (1988), Catalogus generalis seu Nomenclator biographicus personarum Provinciae
Austriae Societatis Jesu (1555-1773), Rome: Institutum Historicum S. I.
Mach, E. (1894), Beiträge zur eorie der Ton- und Farbeänderungen durch Bewegung,
Leipzig: Barth.
—— (1909), Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes on der Erhaltung der Arbeit,
Leipzig: Barth.
—— (1919), Die Principien der Wärmelehre, 3rd ed., Leipzig: Barth.
—— (1912), Die Mechanik und ihre Entwicklungen, 7th ed., Leipzig: Barth.
Rothenberg, M. (2001), e History of Science in the United States, New York & London:
Garland.
Segre, M. (1998), ‘e never-ending Galileo story,’ in P. Machamer (ed.) Cambridge
Companion to Galileo, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 388–416.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521581788.012
Sommervogel, C. (1890–1900), Bibliothèque de le Compagnie de Jésus, Bruxelles-Paris:
Province de Belgique.
Stoeger, J. N. (1855), Scriptores Provinciae Austriacae Societatis Jesu, Wien.
Stanislav Južnič was born in San Francisco and obtained US and Slovenian
citizenship. During his studies he worked at the University of Minsk in Belarus,
which enabled him to understand better Augustin Hallerstein’s relation with
the Russian Academy and Gabriel Gruber’s work in Russia. He graduated
from the Physics Department and studied the history of eighteenth-century
physics with academician Vasilij Melik at the Department of History of the
University of Ljubljana. After obtaining his PhD, he returned to USA, where he
worked in the Film Library of the Jesuit University Saint Louis, MO, and at the
Science Department, University of Oklahoma, researching simultaneously
also at the Institute for Mathematics, Physics, and Mechanics in Ljubljana, at
the Scientic Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts,
and as the head of Slovenian Jesuit Archives. He has published about one
thousand research works (articles, books) in Chinese, and almost all European
languages in China, Japan, USA, Australia, Russia and many European
countries. His contemporary research is connected with Rudjer Bošković
and Nikola Tesla networks, showing how Tesla’s electronics emerged from
the ideas of the Jesuit teachers of his teachers.
For decades, he collaborated with Ljubljana Jesuits, trying to put in the
limelight the achievements of the Ljubljana Jesuit physicists. Among his
recent monographs are the one on Hallerstein, a Chinese astronomer from

30
Stanislav Južnič
Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2016)
Mengeš (2003, English translations 2014, Chinese translations 2015 and 2016),
and the three-volume History of the Vacuum Research and Vacuum Techniques
(2004, 2009, 2016). For the International Year of Astronomy 2009 he nished
his trilogy about the history of exact sciences in Slovenia. He prepared the
history of Franciscan physics and related sciences for the 800t h anniversary
of the Franciscan order in 2009.