The Genesis of Atomic Physics and the Biography of Ideas

Abstract

I have been exploring the connection of creative scientific thinking with the origins of scientific concepts, and the ways in which this connection may provide a better understanding of scientific progress. A clue to deeper insights into these problems is an observation made by scientists such as Albert Einstein and Henri Poincare, whose research led them to probe the process of thinking itself — namely, that “scientific thought is a development of pre-scientific thought” (Einstein, 1934). Some psychologists, particularly Jean Piaget, reached a similar conclusion. A fundamental thesis of Piaget’s genetic epistemology is that the evolving structures in scientific thought exhibit parallelisms in structures in the formative psychological processes in children. Inspired in large part by Piaget’s writings, I have approached these fundamental problems by using results from case studies in the history of science as data for theories of cognitive psychology. Conversely, this method tests the claims of the cognitive theories themselves concerning the construction of knowledge and creativity (1). This essay I shall focuses on the part of my research in which results of historical analysis of atomic physics during 1913–1927 are taken as data for genetic epistemology.