Evolutionary Transformation of the Journal. Part 9

The article outlines the ninth phase of the development of the journal “Studia Historiae Scientiarum” (previous name “Prace Komisji Historii Nauki PAU” / “Proceedings of the PAU Commission on the History of Science”).

Two basic ways of developing scientific journals have been distinguished: as a purely scientific enterprise or a purely business enterprise – the journal “Studia Historiae Scientiarum” follows the former model.

Information is provided on the following matters: the journal’s evaluation by the “ICI Master Journal List 2020” (released at the end of 2021), the evaluation by the Ministry of Education and Science of Poland (released on December 1 / 21, 2021), the evaluation by Scopus (released on 5 May 2022), and the evaluation by the SCImago Journal Rankings 2021 (based on the data from Scopus released on April 2022).

Additionally, the number of foreign authors and reviewers of the current volume of the journal is quoted.

From volume 21 (2022), the journal “Studia Historiae Scientiarum” has implemented additional organizational solutions: a CC BY license for the texts of articles (retaining the possibility of other licenses for illustrations), the CrossMark service and the publishing option, the so-called FirstView Articles.

The interregnum between the death of Galileo and the publication of Newton’s Principia produced great advances in military science and technology. Particularly noteworthy are Kazimierz Siemienowicz’s contributions to artillery and to the field of rocketry. The dominating nature of these weapon systems remain as relevant today as it did in 1650 with the publication of his opus, The Great Art of Artillery. Rocket technology defines power relations, whether fired indiscriminately across a national border or positioned menacingly in a silo as an intercontinental ballistic missile. Siemienowicz’s designs, namely his multi-stage rockets with delta-wing stabilizers and ejection nozzles, became instruments of state power. The standardization of the caliber scale, the writing of the science of artillery, the optimization of gunpowder quality, and the pioneering work in rocketry, which became his legacy, qualify him as principal in the culmination of the military revolution.

The Danzig Academic Gymnasium (1558–1817) was one of the first Protestant schools at the college level in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It became one of the most famous educational institutions in Europe of the 16–18th centuries. For almost 260 years, it attracted one of the best professors and students of the era. We concentrate on the achievements in science, the role of the City Council Library in the academic life in and outside of the Gymnasium, and highlight the activities of the Danzig Naturalist Society. In this survey, we feature important representatives of the scientific disciplines present in the Gymnasium, both faculty and their students, as well as Gdańsk scientists in general. We outline the lasting impact of the Danzig Academic Gymnasium on the intellectual life in Gdańsk, the Pomerania region, and some intellectual circles in Europe.

The aim of the article is to illustrate the discussions in Poland on the ancestry of humanity, which were inspired by Charles Darwin and his followers. The theory of evolution has changed the way of thinking about humans, who were previously treated as the ‘crown of creation’. The core of this text is the analysis of the reception of Darwin’s theses through the prism of the disputes over human’s lineage, and thus the development of science in the nineteenth-century Poland. Those issues were reflected in Polish journals in science and popular science during the partitions. The breakthrough in thinking about humanity consisted in departing from the creationist concept recognizing the will of the Creator in the creation of the world, and in questioning the dogma of the permanence of species. Under the influence of Darwin’s theory, and not without controversy, a conclusion was drawn about the crucial role of natural factors in the creation of human world and its diversity. The most controversial thesis was the acknowledgement of humans’ kinship with the ape. It aroused opposition in conservative spheres. Darwin himself did not introduce such a direct lineage. However, his followers were often tempted to put forward often controversial concepts, which were also reflected in Polish journalism through the reception of western science.

It should be noted that popular science magazines were an important source of information from the world of science and had a significant impact on the perception of the theory of evolution by the mass audience. They often simplified the information about Darwin’s theory and presented the stage of the research in a competent way. Recognized Polish scholars were among authors of these journals. As a result, all the different information sources greatly contributed to popularizing Darwin’s theory in the Polish society.

The 19th century was a groundbreaking period in the history of Polish medical terminology. It was then that the most important dictionary, Słownik terminologii lekarskiej polskiej [Dictionary of Polish Medical Terminology], was published in Kraków in 1881 as a result of numerous discussions, mainly within the medical community. Although its terminology represents the Kraków school, the influence of other Polish scientific centers is also evident, because at the final stage of preparing the lexicon the Kraków dictionary authors consulted with medical doctors from Warsaw, Poznań and Lviv. The material in this translation dictionary is diverse and often crosses the boundaries of medicine of the time. It is a rich source for a Polish language historian to study not only the state of Polish medical terminology of the 19th century, e.g. the number and origin of terms, or the terminology which was then arranged and supplemented in an organized and deliberate manner, but also its characteristic phenomena, e.g. synonymy and polysemy, against the background of other periods in the history of Polish medical terminology. The aim of the article is not only to report on the state of historical linguistic research to date, but also to show the opportunities that this research offers for next researchers of the Polish language

The Polish philosophy of mathematics in the 19th century had its origins in the Romantic period under the influence of the then-predominant idealist philosophies. The decline of Romantic philosophy precipitated changes in general philosophy, but what is less well known is how it triggered changes in the philosophy of mathematics. In this paper, we discuss how the Polish philosophy of mathematics evolved from the metaphysical approach that had been formed during the Romantic era to the more modern positivistic paradigm. These evolutionary changes are attributed to the philosophers Henryk Struve, Antoni Molicki and Julian Ochorowicz, and mathematicians Karol Hertz and Samuel Dickstein. We also show how implicit ideas (i.e., those not declared openly) from the area between the philosophy of science and general philosophy played a crucial role in the paradigm shift in the Polish philosophy of mathematics.

The foundations of mathematics cover mathematical as well as philosophical problems. At the turn of the 20th century logicism, formalism and intuitionism, main foundational schools were developed. A natural problem arose, namely of how much the foundations of mathematics influence the real practice of mathematicians. Although mathematics was and still is declared to be independent of philosophy, various foundational controversies concerned some mathematical axioms, e.g. the axiom of choice, or methods of proof (particularly, non-constructive ones) and sometimes qualified them as admissible (or not) in mathematical practice, relatively to their philosophical (and foundational) content. Polish Mathematical School was established in the years 1915–1920. Its research program was outlined by Zygmunt Janiszewski (the Janiszewski program) and suggested that Polish mathematicians should concentrate on special branches of studies, including set theory, topology and mathematical logic. In this way, the foundations of mathematics became a legitimate part of mathematics. In particular, the foundational investigations should be conducted independently of philosophical assumptions and apply all mathematically accepted methods, finitary or not, and the same concerns other branches of mathematics. This scientific ideology contributed essentially to the remarkable development of logic, set theory and topology in Poland.

Until now, academic literature has not considered Polish-Canadian relations in the context of the history of science. This paper presents a preliminary research into the matter. The study was conducted on the basis of Roczniki (Annals) of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the most important Polish scientific institutions. The analysis of the source material showed that the first contacts were established in the 1880s. In the following years, the Academy further developed the exchange of scientific publications with Canadian universities, museums and scientific societies.

This article discusses the advent of theoretical chemistry in Poland and the biography of its founding father, professor Kazimierz Gumiński. The presentation follows chronological order of the discoveries that gave rise to the onset of quantum chemistry, and the political history of that time, namely World War II and the Stalinist period. These general circumstances indirectly triggered the foundation of the Chair of Theoretical Chemistry at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków on September 1, 1952, which is viewed as the beginning of Polish theoretical chemistry.

Most information herein is based on Gumiński’s report concerning the first ten years of the institution’s activity; the report is appended as an annex. The original and demanding training Gumiński imposed on his disciples is described from the author’s personal experience.

This article examines the history of archaeology in Latvia during the Soviet occupation (1940–1941; 1944–1991), trying to understand the consequences brought in the field of archaeology by the single-party led experiment of communism. The research is based on archival studies and uses the historical method, source criticism and historiography. Author explains the nature of the prescribed theoretical and methodological guidelines as well as actual implications of the ‘communist way’ in archaeology. The article challenges the common belief that archaeology and prehistory were ideologically freer than other branches of history during the Soviet era.

We present a detailed biographical account and analysis of works of Juda Kreisler (1904–1940s?), a theoretical physicist from Lviv. He was born in Tlumach (Ukrainian: Тлумач, Polish: Tłumacz, Yiddish: טאלמיטש ), nowadays a town in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast in the western part of Ukraine. In 1923, Juda Kreisler finished a gymnasium in Stanislaviv and entered the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Lviv (Wydział Filozoficzny Uniwersytetu Jana Kazimierza [UJK] we Lwowie) in order to study physics. In 1932, he was promoted to the doctoral degree in physics under the supervision of Professor Stanisław Loria. For a short period in the 1930s, Juda Kreisler worked at the Department for Theoretical Physics of the University of Lviv, and returned to the University in 1940, after the Soviets had reorganized it upon taking over Lviv in September 1939. His fate remains unknown: he is listed among murdered by Nazis Jewish employees of the University of Lviv in 1941–43.

Dr. Kreisler authored four scientific papers and four abstracts of conference presentations delivered at the Congresses of Polish Physicists in 1932–36. There is, however, another field, where he was extremely prolific in the late 1930s. We have discovered 122 of his popular articles in “Chwila” (English: “Moment”), a local daily newspaper published by the Jewish community in Lviv during 1919–39. These articles covered various subjects, that can be tentatively divided into the following major topics: chronicles and personalia; history of science; discoveries, new studies and inventions; the applied value of science (for medicine and economy in particular); interconnection between science and war; organization of scientific life; Hitler’s Germany and the problem of so-called ‘Aryan science’. While various branches of physics formed the largest part within disciplines reflected in Juda Kreisler’s articles, he also discussed biology, chemistry, meteorology, and geology. The latter field is closely related to his professional career at Lviv’s Geophysical Institute of “Pionier”, a joint-stock company for the exploration and exploitation of bituminous materials, where he spent nine months in 1936.

The article discusses the scientific and pedagogical activity of the outstanding Ukrainian radiophysicist Abram Slutskin in the context of the development of world radiophysical research. It is substantiated that the theoretical works of the scientist defined a new direction of research in Ukraine, namely the radar, and were important for the development of ultrahigh frequency physics. Innovative research initiated by Abram Slutskin found application in new defense technologies, military equipment, and special devices for medicine, biology, navigation, communications, household television and the radio industry. The article proves that Abram Slutskin had priority in launching research in the field of biophysics in Ukraine. The research on the use of ultrahigh frequencies for treatment of oncological patients carried out by scientists were unique for that time. Abram Slutskin᾽s graduate students became well-known specialists, who further developed the scientist’s ideas by initiating innovative areas of research and creating new institutions. We have grounds to consider Abram Slutskin as one of the founders of the Ukrainian scientific radio-physical school.

The article discusses the first four volumes of the Encyclopaedia of Shevchenko Scientific Society. It traces the genesis of the idea of this publication in Ukrainian science of the 20th and early 21st century. The article also clarifies the concepts and methodological principles of the encyclopaedia and outlines its structure and content. We conclude that the Encyclopaedia … is a highly informative publication dedicated to one institution with a unique nature and scope.

The article outlines the development of a new network assembled by the chair of urban planning at the Lviv Polytechnic institute after the collapse of the USSR. It focuses on the actions of individual people who contributed to institutional changes and used various resources to create and maintain a set of connections.

The tradition of urban planning education in Lviv begins with a Chair of Urban Planning created in 1913 at Lviv Polytechnic. However, after WWII and the incorporation of the city into the Soviet state, Lviv Polytechnic went through radical changes. Urban planning was restored as an architectural sub-specialization only in 1966, while a separate department of architecture was organized only in 1971.

After perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union (1985‒1991), the Chair of Urban Planning relatively quickly reoriented its activities from Moscow’s to Kraków’s, Wrocław’s, Vienna’s or Berlin’s perspective. This was primarily due to personal contacts, which step by step became institutionalized, and due to the “imaginary continuity” between contemporary urban planners and the pre-war Lviv architectural school.

Professors who left the city right after WWII gained symbolic importance and helped to establish a common ground between the milieu of Lviv Polytechnic and Polish technical schools in the 1990s. During the time of social and political changes, looking into the past became a quite successful strategy, which helped the institution to gain symbolic capital and survive. The history of Lviv Polytechnic, stripped from all potential conflicts and sharp divisions, helped to build new connections after the old ones no longer provided stable positions. Knowing foreign languages became one of the basic means or resources that people needed to feel connected and to participate in scientific exchanges.

The sources of the article include oral history interviews with academics in the field of architecture, memoirs, and other published materials related to the history of the Chair of Urban Planning at Lviv Polytechnic.

In 1999, four editorials in the journal Biological Chemistry commemorate how, since the 1980s, Vienna has transformed from a “[peripheral] outpost near the Iron Curtain” to a “central hub” for life science research.

A closer look at these texts reveals the explicit and implicit role of drawing maps for and within science, depicting centers, peripheries and ‒ in this case ‒ geopolitically real and allegorical “iron curtains”.

Based on this observation and the issues it raises, I re-examine the pertinent empirical material covering relevant times, places, (sub-) disciplines and institutions, as well as the period after 2000. I deal with “molecularization” in biology, (sub)disciplinary differentiation, internationalization, as well as changes in public-private relations and a pair of complementary concepts of innovation and tradition. Thus, I retrace the establishment of a techno-epistemic culture in a local, disciplinary context.

I conclude that guiding principles such as excellence and internationality are understood and implemented in academia in locally and historically bounded ways, and I argue that a critical re-examination of empirical material can substantially enrich our approach to such topics.

The article comments on the famous paper by Boris Hessen “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” presented at the Second International Congress on the History of Science and Technology in London in 1931.

The comments are made in the light of considerations on the methodology of the historiography of science, including the author’s ideas of research hermeneutics and the research hermeneutics of the historiography of science, the biography of Boris Hessen, the history of scientific historiography, the history of science and the history of science-of-science.

The article synthetically presents Hessen’s research hermeneutics and points to its fundamental disadvantages. It describes the reception of Hessen’s paper in the West: both the more widely known positive reception (of Bernalists and their successors, including supporters of Marxist studies of science and the social history of science), and the much less known negative reception (members of the (British) Society for Freedom in Science, members of the Harvard group of J. B. Conant of General Education in Science).

The article also presents the changing fate of the reception of Hessen’s thoughts in the USSR and Russia in the years 1930–2020.

Additionally, it indicates various historiographic myths related to “Boris Hessen”, including the myth that the Polish science-of-science (Polish: naukoznawstwo) emerged later or at the same time as Russian science-of-science (Russian: науковедение, naukovedenie).

The defectiveness of Hessen’s research hermeneutics on the one hand, and on the other hand the reception of his views in the West and in the USSR and Russia from the 1930s to the 2020s, including the various historiographic myths related to Hessen, show how paradoxical the history of the historiography of science can be, and demonstrate the need to cultivate the skills of critical thinking among researchers interpreting science (i.e. historians of science, philosophers of science, sociologists of scientific knowledge, etc.).

The article presents the results of the research on the technical and bibliometric achievements of Polish journals in the field of history and archives, the discipline of history, and compared them with the scores on the official list of scientific journals and reviewed materials from international conferences of the Polish Ministry of Education and Science published on December 21, 2021.

The aim of such research is to perform an technical and bibliometric assessment of historical journals that will be both integrated and transparent, and to create a new list of historical journals prepared by the Science-of-Science and Science Studies Research Unit of the Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

All the rules of the New List will be clearly defined and will allow editorial offices / scientific institutions to set scores independently. It will also aim to improve the editorial and reviewing process, and to create a transparent website containing all necessary data for both authors and readers.

The article describes the types of journals from the history of science, the criterion for selecting journals from the history of science, the transparent evaluation criteria of scientific journals adopted in the “List of journals of the Unit for Science of Science and Science Studies at the Institute for History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences” (2022) and the scorings of journals from the history of science on the Lists of journals of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland (January 25, 2017), the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Poland (December 21, 2021) and the Unit for Science of Science and Science Studies at the Institute for History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2022).

Solvay’s Centre de Recherches d’Aubervilliers (CRA) is one of the oldest active private-sector research centers in industrial chemistry in France. During the seventy years of its existence it collaborated with some of the most significant French and European chemical companies. Established in 1953, the center’s research and development organization around huge discipline-oriented laboratories proved itself remarkably resilient. Not merely reflecting the R&D policy of the company that owned it at a given moment, the evolution of the center’s research organization followed its own particular path. The research priorities in any given moment were always a place of encounter between top-down requirements of the company’s directorship, and bottom-up thematic trajectories. The CRA’s organizational history gives us unique insights into broader tendencies in chemical research in the second half of the 20th century, such as specialization of laboratories, introduction of market-driven research as well as decentralization and multiplication of hierarchies. The case study can be of interest to historians of science, due to the fact that the history of private research centers remains largely understudied, and to science policy scholars who want to understand the interconnectedness of factors that influence the organization of R&D structures in an institution.

The activity of the PAU Commission on the History of Science in 2021/2022 was discussed.

It presents: a report on the elections of the Board of the Commission and the members of the Commission for the 2021–2024 term of office; the composition of the Board of the Commission and the list of members of the Commission; lists of: scientific meetings, conferences, scientific sessions and seminars as well as new publications.