The oxford handbook of the history of physics

Edited by jed z. Buchwald androbert fox

Modern trends in the historiography of science have led to a rethinking of many of the classic areas of the history of physics. A history that might have been cast, in the days of Florian Cajori’s History of Physics (1899) or W. F. Magie’s Source Book in the History of Physics (1935), as a progressive uncovering of the truths of the physical world by a succession of great thinkers has now to be interpreted as a far more complex process. Writing a satisfactory history has come to require a sensitivity both to the content of a physicist’s individual contribution and to the cultural, institutional, and economic context in which the contribution was made. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics seeks to explore this complexity through examples of cutting-edge writing in what has come to be recognized as a particularly vibrant area of historical research. By presenting a wide diversity of studies in a single volume, it gives a flavour of scholarly contributions that have tended to be dispersed in journals and books not easily accessible to the general reader