It’s rare that books describe such processes well, I suspect partly because it’s so wildly harder to generate scientific ideas than to understand them, that they tend to strike people as almost blindingly obvious in retrospect.
Completely agreed!
I think this is also what makes great history of science so hard: you need to unlearn most of the modern insights and intuitions that didn’t exist at the time, and see as close as possible to what the historical actors saw.
This makes me think of a great quote from World of Flows, a history of hydrodynamics:
There is, however, a puzzling contrast between the conciseness and ease of the modern treatment of [wave equations], and the long, difficult struggles of nineteenth-century physicists with them. For example, a modern reader of Poisson’s old memoir on waves finds a bewildering accumulation of complex calculations where he would expect some rather elementary analysis. The reason for this difference is not any weakness of early nineteenth-century mathematicians, but our overestimation of the physico-mathematical tools that were available in their times. It would seem, for instance, that all that Poisson needed to solve his particular wave problem was Fourier analysis, which Joseph Fourier had introduced a few years earlier. In reality, Poisson only knew a raw, algebraic version of Fourier analysis, whereas modern physicists have unconsciously assimilated a physically ‘dressed’ Fourier analysis, replete with metaphors and intuitions borrowed from the concrete wave phenomena of optics, acoustics, and hydrodynamics.
(Also, thanks for the recommendations, will look at them! The response to this post makes me want to write a post about my favorite books on epistemology and science beyond Inventing Temperature ^^)
Detailed histories of field development in math or science are case studies in deconfusion. I feel like we have very little of this in our conversation on the site relative to the individual researcher perspective (like Hamming’s You & Your Research) or an institutional focus (like Bell Labs).
Completely agreed!
I think this is also what makes great history of science so hard: you need to unlearn most of the modern insights and intuitions that didn’t exist at the time, and see as close as possible to what the historical actors saw.
This makes me think of a great quote from World of Flows, a history of hydrodynamics:
(Also, thanks for the recommendations, will look at them! The response to this post makes me want to write a post about my favorite books on epistemology and science beyond Inventing Temperature ^^)
I strongly endorse you writing that post!
Detailed histories of field development in math or science are case studies in deconfusion. I feel like we have very little of this in our conversation on the site relative to the individual researcher perspective (like Hamming’s You & Your Research) or an institutional focus (like Bell Labs).