The Forman Thesis: 40 Years After

Abstract

Forty years ago, in 1971, Paul Forman published Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment. His landmark study (too long, too thorough and too fundamental to be called simply an article) became immediately famous, and famously controversial. It has remained at the heart of debates about the historical relationship between science and culture ever since. The controversy surrounding the Forman Thesis was practically unavoidable, for Forman’s work put forward and placed at the centre of a broader discussion the argument that the cultural values prevalent in a given place and time could influence the results of discipline-bound research, i.e. the very content of scientific knowledge. This idea, if still controversial, has since become commonly used in cultural studies of science, but at the time of its introduction it created uproar as it explicitly contradicted generally accepted and cherished beliefs about science. Yet tectonic shifts were already underway, if not always visible, that would eventually put those very beliefs into question. The Forman study both reflected and forwarded these shifts in our general perspectives on the nature and practice of science. Despite some heated objections to its findings, Forman’s work has fundamentally changed directions of research in the history, sociology and philosophy of science and established itself as a classic in this group of fields, sometimes collectively called science studies. In subsequent decades it has been read and discussed in practically every graduate program that trains students in those fields, circulating in numerous copies and translated into many languages, while the original publication in the journal Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences has long become a bibliographic rarity. Forman’s seminal paper is reprinted in full in the first part of this volume, along with his related articles of the same period, so that the reader may gain a comprehensive introduction to the Forman Thesis. Here, a short summary of its main argument suffices to present the issues at stake. Forman described the FA