Despite the alarming drop in numbers of students studying science throughout the Western world today there is no more important subject in our time than science broadly construed, and these three books provide some of the reasons. Their diversity indicates the shape of the debates occurring about the scientist in Western culture, science's tortured philosophical realism and representation as troubled categories, and, most predictably, life on the screen in the age of the Internet.

The present interest of Englishmen in education is partly due to the fact that they are impressed by German thoroughness. Now let there be no mistake. The war has shown the effectiveness of German education in certain departments of life, but it has shown not only its ineffectiveness, but its grotesque absurdity in regard to other departments of life, and those the departments which are, even in a political sense, the most important. In the organization of material resources Germany has won well-merited admiration, but in regard to moral conduct, and in regard to all that art of dealing with other men and other nations which is closely allied to moral conduct, she has won for herself the horror of the civilized world. If you take the whole result, and ask whether we prefer German or English education, I at any rate should not hesitate in my reply.

Thus William Temple, future archbishop, addressing the Educational Section at the 1916 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Newcastle. Temple's statement introduced his contribution to the ‘neglect-of-science’ debate, a public dispute over the place of science in English secondary education. Originally, the debate had been started by prominent scientists convinced that England's military and industrial fortunes were suffering as a result of the country's continuing scientific illiteracy. The contrasts Temple drew between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between England and Germany, between ‘conduct’ and ‘efficiency’, cropped up throughout the debate.

The store of scientific knowledge is a general treasure-house from which all men may draw. And yet – perhaps because of the wide spread of scientific ideas – we seldom remind ourselves that the development of the stock of scientific ideas, the heritage of all men, has always been the work of a very small band. Men capable of great scientific effort are rare and, for their effectual working, an intellectual environment is needed that is well nigh as rare as themselves. Surely the contemplation of the conditions under which such men have laboured and lived, the examination of their training and mental history, of their ways of life, and of the human setting must be of some value to those who would follow in their footsteps or prepare others to do so. Nor is the reverse side of the picture without its lesson. The study of those social, economic and philosophical conditions that fail to produce effective scientific fruits, or that yield only bizarre or deformed products, can at least explain for us certain phases in the mental history of mankind. Thus the study of the scientific mood in its historical development needs little justification.

... and signs and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things.

Brother William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Recreating, as part of doing history, can be a way of reflecting what creating is as part of science. Discussions revolving around historical understanding of the scientific enterprise have recently included strong commitments to turn scientific practice into one of the main objectives of historical study. One specific methodological approach to face up to this assignment is integrating the reconstruction and reperformance of past experiments into the historical analysis of the doing-part in science. This paper deals with the doing-part in history, that is, with the historiographical consequences that might stem from this reconstruction and reperformance of past experimentation. In the course of a four-month period of research I worked with a replica of the so-called ‘actinometer’, an instrument to measure the intensity of solar radiation, which was invented by John Herschel in 1824. On the basis of this example, I try to trace how recent performances of experimental activities can contribute to historical understanding of human agency in scientific practice.

No one will deny the extraordinary interest and importance of this method which showed for the first time and in such minute detail the effects of the passage of ionizing radiations through a gas ... I am personally of the opinion that the researches of Mr Wilson in this field represent one of the most striking and important of the advances in atomic physics made in the last twenty years ... It may be argued that this new method of Mr Wilson's has in the main only confirmed the deductions of the properties of the radiations made by other more indirect methods. While this is of course in some respects true, I would emphasize the importance to science of the gain in confidence of the accuracy of these deductions that followed from the publication of his beautiful photographs. Ernest Rutherford, 1927

Rutherford refers here to the photography of particle tracks made visible as lines of condensation in the supersaturated water vapour of a cloud chamber. C. T. R. Wilson first saw and photographed tracks in March 1911. The cloud chamber had existed since 1895 when Wilson, pursuing his meteorological interests, developed the instrument to determine the process of droplet formation in clouds. Galison and Assmus have examined this early phase of the cloud chamber's existence, rightly concluding that, with the production of tracks and their photographic record, the instrument was radically transformed into a crucial tool of the particle physicist. This transformation was not immediate, however, and a genealogy of the apparatus cannot fully explain how this novel means to apprehend the existence and behaviour of hitherto invisible particles subsequently functioned within and contributed to the project of particle physics. My own focus is on the period immediately following Wilson's first publication of ray-track photographs. The central questions to be addressed are provided by Rutherford's comments above. In precisely what way did Wilson's work increase the confidence of scientists? How was his method more direct than others?

It is perhaps ironic that a society of historians such as the British Society for the History of Science should have been in existence for some thirty-six years before any attempt was made to create a formal archive of its history. Such an oversight is doubtless attributable to the undue modesty of those involved in the earlier history of the Society, possibly tinged with a distrust of what historians can do with archival records, but it is none the less regrettable that there are not more early records of our Society's activities. The official Council Minutes from 1947 onwards, however, are more detailed than one might expect, and a very useful source of information.

As has become evident from historical studies, science does not proceed in the coherent and predictable way that basic science texts would have us believe. I will argue that an excellent counter-example is an episode from the historical development of quantum mechanics in which the incompatibility of the particle and the wave representations of the electron and light were destined to be encompassed by two mathematically equivalent, but conceptually quite different theories.

I shall argue that the appearance of two such different, yet equivalent, quantum theories was not surprising at all and I claim even predictable. As Einstein himself wrote in 1909: ‘It is my opinion that the next phase in the development of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be interpreted as a kind of fusion of the wave and the [particle] theory.’ Certainly, the interpretative content of Werner Heisenberg's and Erwin Schrödinger's theories could not have been more different. By mid-1926, the theoretical foundations had been laid for a scientific and emotional battleground between the particle and the wave. I suggest that an important element in the debate was not the incompatibility itself but actually coming to terms with ambiguity in science. For, in the end, ambiguous and vague interpretations of the same phenomena became part of science, where science was supposed to give a clear and unambiguous description of nature.

As described elsewhere in this issue of BJHS, preliminary steps towards founding a society for the history of science in Britain were taken in 1946. A meeting was held at the Science Museum, London, on 22 November 1946, chaired by Herbert Dingle, at which Gavin de Beer formally proposed the foundation of a history of science society, seconded by Michael Roberts. A provisional committee was appointed to draw up rules and a constitution.

With the death of Joseph Needham on 24 March 1995 the world of learning lost one of the greatest scholars in this or any country, of this or any century. For more than thirty years Needham had been the greatest sinologist in the West, having previously achieved an international status as a research biochemist and as a historian. Intellectually a bridge-builder between science, religion and Marxist socialism, and supremely so between East and West, he has been called the Erasmus of the twentieth century. A sober assessment suggests that with the passage of time he will be recognized as a greater figure than the scholar from Rotterdam.