Forman at forty: New perspectives on “Weimar culture and quantum mechanics”

Abstract

This volume, timed to appear during the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the so-called ‘‘first Forman thesis,’’ is based on contributions delivered at a workshop held in 2007. The book is divided into three sections. The first contains reprints of five of Paul Forman’s papers, including ‘‘Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment’’ (1971). Part Two includes contemporary papers engaging with topics related to the Forman thesis, focusing in particular on the physical sciences from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Part Three engages with the thesis at a methodological level. The papers examine the life and human sciences, popular science, and philosophy. As a whole, the book is large and varied, spanning well over 500 pages and containing 15 new and almost uniformly high-quality papers. It is not, however, an easy thing with which to work. It contains neither an index nor a bibliography. (A selected bibliography of Forman’s works is to be found on pp. 21–23.) For a volume of such heft and diversity, the editors’