Conference "The Cultural Alchemy of the Exact Sciences : Revisiting the Forman Thesis"

This volume reprints Paul Forman's classic papers on the history of physics in post-World War I Germany and the invention of quantum mechanics. The Forman thesis has become famous as the first argument in favor of the cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge, in particular for its demonstration of the historical connection between the culture of Weimar Germany - known for its irrationality and antiscientism - and the emerging concept of quantum acausality.This volume reprints Paul Forman's classic papers on the history of physics in post-World War I Germany and the invention of quantum mechanics. The Forman thesis has become famous as the first argument in favor of the cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge, in particular for its demonstration of the historical connection between the culture of Weimar Germany - known for its irrationality and antiscientism - and the emerging concept of quantum acausality. At the 2007 international conference in Vancouver, Canada, leading historians of physics discussed the implications of the Forman thesis in the historiography of modern science. Their papers collected in this volume represent a cutting-edge research on the history of quantum revolution.