2018/10/14 by Isobel Falconer, Falconer, Isobel
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #FOS: Physical sciences #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies #Historical and Literary Analyses #Historical and Literary Studies #History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1810.06063
openalex publication_date 2018/10/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper takes James David Forbes' Encyclopaedia Britannica entry,\nDissertation Sixth, as a lens to examine physics as a cognitive, practical, and\nsocial, enterprise. Forbes wrote this survey of eighteenth- and\nnineteenth-century mathematical and physical sciences, in 1852-6, when British\n"physics" was at a pivotal point in its history, situated between a discipline\nidentified by its mathematical methods - originating in France - and one\nidentified by its university laboratory institutions. Contemporary\nencyclopaedias provided a nexus for publishers, the book trade, readers, and\nmen of science, in the formation of physics as a field. Forbes was both a\nwitness, whose account of the progress of physics or natural philosophy can be\nexplored at face value, and an agent, who exploited the opportunity offered by\nthe Encyclopaedia Britannica in the mid nineteenth-century to enrol the broadly\neducated public, and scientific collective, illuminating the connection between\nthe definition of physics and its forms of social practice. Forbes used the\nterms "physics" and "natural philosophy" interchangeably. He portrayed the\nfield as progressed by the natural genius of great men, who curated the\ndiscipline within an associational culture that engendered true intellectual\nspirit. Although this societal mechanism was becoming ineffective, Forbes did\nnot see university institutions as the way forward. Instead, running counter to\nhis friend William Whewell, he advocated inclusion of the mechanical arts\n(engineering), and a strictly limited role for mathematics. He revealed\ntensions when the widely accepted discovery-based historiography conflicted\nwith intellectual and moral worth, reflecting a nineteenth-century concern with\nspirit that cuts across twentieth-century questions about discipline and field.\n