Reworking the Bench

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. The Hanging Chain: A Forgotten “Discovery” Buried in Galileo’s Notes on Mition

   • Jürgen Renn, Peter Damerow

   Pages 1-24

3. The Chymical Laboratory Notebooks of George Starkey

   • William R. Newman, Lawrence M. Principe

   Pages 25-41

4. Newton’s Optical Notebooks: Public Versus Private Data

   • Alan E. Shapiro

   Pages 43-65

5. At Play with Nature: Luigi Galvani’s Experimental Approach to Muscular Physiology

   • Marco Bresadola

   Pages 67-92

6. The Practice of Studying Practice: Analyzing Research Records of Ampère and Faraday

   • Friedrich Steinle

   Pages 93-118

7. From Agents to Cells: Theodor Schwann’s Research Notes of the Years 1835–1838

   • Ohad Parnes

   Pages 119-140

8. Narrating by Numbers: Keeping an Account of Early 19th Century Laboratory Experiences

   • H. Otto Sibum

   Pages 141-158

9. Exploring Contents and Boundaries of Experimental Practice in Laboratory Notebooks: Samuel Pierpont Langley and the Mapping of the Infra-Red Region of the Solar Spectrum

   • Andrea Loettgers

   Pages 159-182

10. The Pocket Schedule

    • Christoph Hoffmann

    Pages 183-202

11. From Lone Investigator to Laboratory Chief: Ivan Pavlov’s Research Notebooks as a Reflection of His Managerial and Interpretive Style

    • Daniel P. Todes

    Pages 203-220

12. Carl Correns’ Experiments with Pisum, 1896–1899

    • Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

    Pages 221-252

13. Errors and Insights: Reconstructing the Genesis of General Relativity from Einstein’s Zurich Notebook

    • Jürgen Renn, Tilman Sauer

    Pages 253-268

14. Hans Krebs’ and Kurt Henseleit’s Laboratory Notebooks and Their Discovery of the Urea Cycle-Reconstructed with Computer Models

    • Gerd Graßhoff, Michael May

    Pages 269-294

15. Laboratory Notebooks and Investigative Pathways

    • Frederic L. Holmes

    Pages 295-308

16. The Scholar’s Seeing Eye

    Pages 309-325

Research records composed of notes and protocols have long played a role in the efforts to understand the origins of what have come to be seen as the established milestones in the development of modern science. The use of research records to probe the nature of scientific investigation itself however is a recent development in the history of science.
With Eduard Dijksterhuis, we could address them as a veritable "epistemologiCal laboratory". The purpose of a workshop entitled "Reworking the Bench: Laboratory Notebooks in the History of Science", held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin was to bring together historians who have been exploiting such resources, to compare the similarities and differences in the materials they had used and and to measure the potential and scope for future explorations of "science in the making" based on such forms of documentation. The contributions which form this volume are based on papers presented at this workshop or written afterward by participants in the discussions.
This is the first book that addresses the issue of research notes for writing history of science in a comprehensive manner. Its case studies range from the early modern period to present and cover a broad range of different disciplines.

• Berlin
• Case Studies
• Zurich
• computer
• early modern period
• experience
• history
• history of literature
• history of science
• interpret
• issue
• nature
• present
• science
• writing

From the reviews:

"Reworking the Bench provides a splendid survey of the work of 15 historians of science, experts in different areas and periods of modern age, with many years of experience in this kind of historical investigation. … the essays also contain interesting general epistemological results. … research notes prove to be indispensable for disclosing the underlying aspects of research that are kept secret by the official accounts like published articles or autobiographical records." (Ariane Dröscher, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Vol. 27, 2005)

• Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, USA

  Frederic L. Holmes

• Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

  Jürgen Renn, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Policies and ethics