Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society (2018)
Wise, M. Norton (Author)
University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 2018
Language: English
Physical Details: 432 pages
On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small but growing group—which soon included Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, Werner Siemens, and Hermann von Helmholtz—established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of natural science. How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings succeed in seizing the future? In Aesthetics, Industry, and Science M. Norton Wise answers these questions not simply from a technical perspective of theories and practices but with a broader cultural view of what was happening in Berlin at the time. He emphasizes in particular how rapid industrial development, military modernization, and the neoclassical aesthetics of contemporary art informed the ways in which these young men thought. Wise argues that aesthetic sensibility and material aspiration in this period were intimately linked, and he uses these two themes for a final reappraisal of Helmholtz’s early work. Anyone interested in modern German cultural history, or the history of nineteenth-century German science, will be drawn to this landmark book.
...MoreReview John H. Zammito (2023) Review of "Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society". American Historical Review (pp. 1527-1538).
Review Kurt Møller Pedersen (2020) Review of "Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society". Metascience: An International Review Journal for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (pp. 233-235).
Review Iwan Rhys Morus (2021) Review of "Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society". Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (pp. 634-641).
Review Angela N. H. Creager (2021) Review of "Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 202-203).
Essay Review Ursula Klein (2020) Science, Industry, and the German Bildungsbürgertum. Annals of Science: The History of Science and Technology (pp. 366-376).
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