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In his classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1), Thomas Kuhn suggests that the “normal science” that is practiced under a well-established paradigm is transmitted through textbooks that show students the important problems and methods of solution of the discipline. Because he was trained in physics, Kuhn primarily used examples from that field, but Michael Polanyi, a chemist who turned to philosophy, expressed a similar viewpoint in his book, Personal Knowledge (2), which emphasized the craft-like aspects of scientific knowledge. Those of us who were educated as chemists understand the importance of the apprentice-like training that we received in our graduate research groups. Until recently, however, the role of pedagogy in the history of science has received little attention. This new collection of essays is an important step in filling this void. Pedagogy and the Practice of Science contains 11 essays by prominent historians of science. The editor, David Kaiser, has done important work on the spread of Feynman diagrams as an important tool in theoretical physics, a subject of one of the essays. He has provided a thoughtful introduction and conclusion, the latter co-written with Andrew Warwick. The topics are drawn from the development of physics and chemistry, ranging from the origins of Beilstein’s Handbuch to the development of probe microscopy in the 1980s. As this is a collection, the chapters vary in length and style but they are all well written and thoroughly documented. Many chapters will be interesting to chemists. The first chapter on Beilstein outlines the career of the man who initiated the Handbuch der Organische Chemie (3) and his reasons for starting the project. Although a German, Beilstein spent most of his career in Russia and became increasingly isolated from the Russian chemical community. The Handbuch was originally conceived as a textbook of organic chemistry, but since he was isolated from his peers in Russia, Beilstein defaulted to a reference work with a pedagogical purpose: to provide the basic knowledge on which the student or scientist could build. I was fascinated by Buhm Soon Park’s chapter on theory change in quantum chemistry that describes the spread of molecular orbital theory in organic chemistry with its focus on the roles of Charles Coulson and Michael Dewar in that process. Coulson challenged the formidable Linus Pauling who had developed the intuitive and useful valence bond approach and the idea of resonance, which had provided the dominant models for thinking about the chemical bond. Eventually the molecular orbital perspective proved to be superior, although Pauling continued to argue that it was wrong-headed. Much of the eventual acceptance of the molecular orbital approach is due to Coulson’s perceptive teaching and his excellent book, Valence (4). Several volumes of the Course of Theoretical Physics, by Landau and Lifshitz are on my bookshelf and at least two of them, Statistical Physics (5) and Fluid Mechanics (6), are well worn so I was delighted to read the essay by Karl Hall on the origins of this series. The chapter on the transformation in nuclear weapons science at Los Alamos and Livermore was fascinating, showing how the intuitive knowledge that the Manhattan project scientists and their successors used to obtain data from nuclear tests has been replaced by a reliance on sophisticated computer codes. Kaiser’s essay on the spread of the use of Feynman diagrams shows the importance of apprenticeship. Graduate students and postdocs learned to use the diagrams from those who developed them and spread them through what Kaiser calls a postdoc cascade. I suspect that there are many innovations in science that have spread through a similar mechanism. For those of us interested in chemical education, this volume puts our efforts into a broader context. Not only do innovations in pedagogy affect the students that we teach today, they affect the progress of science. We are providing future scientists with the conceptual, operational, and experimental techniques that they will use for the rest of their lives. We show them the important problems and how to think about them. The essays in this book showed me that even the routine task of selecting a textbook is more significant than I had imagined. This elegantly produced volume deserves to be widely read. I hope it inspires others to take up the study of the history and influence of pedagogy in the development of science. Literature Cited- Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition; University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996; (1st ed., 1962).
- Polanyi, M. Personal Knowledge; Harper Torchbooks: New York, 1964.
- Beilstein, F. Handbuch der Organische Chemie, 2 v.; Leopold Voss: Leipzig, 1883.
- Coulson, C. A. Valence; Clarendon Press: Oxford, UK, 1952.
- Landau, L. D.; Lifshitz, E. M. Statistical Physics, Second Revised and Enlarged Edition; Pergamon Press: Oxford, UK, 1969.
- Landau, L. D.; Lifshitz, E. M. Fluid Mechanics; Pergamon Press: Oxford, UK, 1959.
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