Friedrich Steinle: Explorative Experimente: Ampère, Faraday und die Ursprünge der Elektrodynamik,Explorative Experimente: Ampère, Faraday und die Ursprünge der Elektrodynamik byFriedrich  SteinleReview by: rev. by Massimiliano BadinoIsis, Vol. 98, No. 4 (December 2007), pp. 857-858Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/529319 .

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BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 98 : 4 (2007) 857

these topics merit further development and at-tention to a fuller range of historiography. More-over, problematic relationships between therhetoric ofKultur and its institutional contextssometimes remain unexplored. For example,Sonnert quotes a 1930 address by the theologianAdolf von Harnack expounding the characteris-tics of humanisticBildung(p. 136) but leaves forthe footnote the telling fact that Harnack wasspeaking in his role as president of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, arguably then the world’smost successful institutionalization of integratedgovernmental and private funding of scientificresearch. But limitations of some kind are com-pelled by the scope of the book, and Sonnertsuccessfully illuminates both consensus and de-bates within the discourse ofKultur up to theearly 1900s.

The payoff lies in Chapters 6–9, which showhow Einstein’s family background, education,and approach to science relate to this prior his-tory. In short, he was strongly indebted to a clas-sical liberal tradition within the history ofKul-tur, which took the attainment of a rational,unifiedWeltbildas its supreme goal—in contrastor indeed in opposition to irrationalist, relativistvariants. For Sonnert, a deep commitment to thenotion of universal laws and symmetries under-lying diverse physical phenomena was the com-mon theme in practically all of Einstein’s sci-entific work and, indeed, something akin to areligious conviction. This commitment in turnarose (in some fashion) out of the specifics ofEinstein’s schooling, reading, family history,and so forth. Sonnert relies here on Gerald Hol-ton’s concept of “themata” as formative in thedevelopment of scientific theories. Sonnert’s ac-count also demonstrates that, for all of Einstein’sfree-spiritedness, these commitments to unifica-tion and symmetry were tied to a cultural tradi-tion with a rich and complex history. This shouldnot come as a surprise to historians of science,butEinstein and Culturemay inspire those whoare new to the mysteries of German cultural his-tory to explore these cultural ties further.

RICHARD H. BEYLER

Friedrich Steinle.Explorative Experimente: Am-pere, Faraday und die Urspru¨nge der Elektro-dynamik. (Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Boethius,50.) 450 pp., apps., tables, bibl., index. Stuttgart:Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005.€80 (cloth).

From more than one point of view, last centurywas the century of theoretical physics. A numberof increasingly abstract theories—which werealso increasingly general and fundamental—

marked the physical sciences, from quantum me-chanics and relativity to string theory, throughQED, QCD, supersymmetry, and so on. No won-der, then, that in light of these astonishing de-velopments, the efforts of historians and philos-ophers of science have been particularly focusedon understanding the logical and conceptual re-lations between the theories, often confining ex-periments to the role of “handmaid” to the greatcreations of thought. But, fortunately, this situ-ation started to change in the 1980s and 1990s,when new views of the philosophical and sci-entific status of experiments made their appear-ence.

Ian Hacking, Andrew Pickering, and PeterGalison, to mention only a few, claimed the au-tonomy of experiment and argued for its activerole in framing theories, not only in testing them.Friedrich Steinle’s book can surely be includedin this promising line of work, often called “NewExperimentalism.” That this is the case becomesapparent when comparing Steinle’s book withother major contributions on the same topic, thebirth of modern electrodynamics. For example,in neither John Heilbron’sElectricity in the Sev-enteenth and Eighteenth Centuries(California,1979) nor Olivier Darrigol’sElectrodynamicsfrom Ampe`re to Einstein(Oxford, 2000)—twoexcellent studies on the subject—are the exper-imental aspects so systematically analyzed as inExplorative Experimente.

Before examining Steinle’s main claims, letus look at the structure of the book. Steinle’swork is divided into seven chapters. The first twodeal with the general experimental culture in thestudy of electricity in the early nineteenth cen-tury and with Hans Christian Oersted’s funda-mental empirical discovery: the mutual actionbetween electric and magnetic force. Steinle isvery careful in stressing that the immediate im-pact of Oersted’s results on the scientific com-munity of Europe was due to the fact that theywere obtained with widely accepted experimen-tal procedures.

The third and fourth chapters are completelydedicated to an analysis of Andre Marie Am-pere’s contribution in the years 1820 and 1821.This is probably the most relevant and interest-ing section from a historical standpoint. The his-torical interest arises from the fact that Steinlehas made use of many unpublished original doc-uments and sources. These sources have beentranscribed at the end of the book and are sup-plemented with some philological notes. Thus,Steinle is successful in presenting a fascinatingpicture of Ampere’s style in experimental praxisand in contextualizing his research program

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858 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 98 : 4 (2007)

within the highly mathematized tradition of La-placian physics.

The fifth and sixth chapters focus on MichaelFaraday’s work, pointing out in particular hisdifferent and more qualitative approach to ex-perimental problems. This part of the work isalso a meaningful extension of traditional anal-yses of the issue, because Steinle discusses a partof Faraday’s work that has received scant atten-tion—his work after the discovery of electro-magnetic rotation.

Finally, in the seventh chapter some philo-sophical and sociological remarks are presented.Between the extremes of being theory laden andnaively neutral, the concept of “explorative ex-periment” (pp. 313–316) emerges. There areparticular periods in the history of science—what Steinle calls “formative periods” (pp. 19–21)—in which scientists have to build newconceptual frameworks to deal with new sets ofempirical phenomena. In these periods the ex-periments areexplorative: they are not com-pletely neutral with respect to nature, but neitherdo they depend on a formal theory (which usu-ally does not yet exist). These explorative ex-periments are not meant to test anything in par-ticular but, rather, to guide the scientist in findinga conceptual way out of the difficulties. Thisexplains the title of the book, which can be con-sidered an interesting tool for a historically,philosophically, or sociologically oriented read-ership.

MASSIMILIANO BADINO

Peter Thorsheim. Inventing Pollution: Coal,Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800. (Se-ries in Ecology and History.) xii� 307 pp.,figs., bibl., index. Athens: Ohio University Press,2006. $55 (cloth).

Inventing Pollutionis an ambitious book that as-pires to chart the history of “coal, smoke, andculture in Britain since 1800.” On the whole, Pe-ter Thorsheim does an admirable job by engag-ing with existing scholarship on the history ofpublic health, poverty and the poor, degenera-tion, and urban environments. He integrates thisscholarship with archival research from theSouth, Midlands, and North of England anddemonstrates an excellent command of a respect-able and varied range of primary publishedsources. Thorsheim has a talent for distillingideas and concepts in accessible prose, and hehas a good eye for the slightly quirky, whichenlivens his narrative with interesting anecdotaltangents: Gladstone on environmental steward-

ship, melanism in Lepidoptera, and the ironicallynamed “Oxygen Street.”

Pesticides and pollution occupied a centralplace in the post-1960s rise of modern environ-mentalism. Thorsheim provides a self-definedcultural history of the most visible manifestationof air pollution in the century and a half prior tothis. One of the great merits of this book is itsrecognition of the multifarious strands of reformand cultural criticism that lay behind emergentenvironmentalist concerns and associations.Thorsheim charts the changing meanings ofsmoke and pollution in the context of urban re-form (e.g., public health and crime), heritagepreservation, and nature conservation. In broadreductionist terms, he is thereby able to addressrural and urban environmental history. More-over, he contends that the changing definition ofpollution demonstrated the malleability of thenature/culture dichotomy. After about 1870, thetraditional belief that civilization cleaned andtamed a dirty and unruly nature was displacedby the belief that inherently good and pure naturewas tainted by the technological processes ofcivilization.

Clearly, Thorsheim considers the late nine-teenth century a significant turning point in thehistory of coal smoke pollution in Britain. Themajority of the book gravitates toward this pe-riod, with most chapters assuming thematic ap-proaches to the subject rather than following aclear chronological history. Consequently, atleast 75 percent of the book is an examinationof late nineteenth-century history, with occa-sional glances into twentieth-century develop-ments. Extended examination of the twentiethcentury is restricted largely to World War II andto the London smog disaster of 1952 and theresultant Clean Air Act of 1956.

John Ruskin’s “The Storm Cloud of the Nine-teenth Century” (1884) is widely acknowledgedas a significant work of cultural criticism.Thorsheim suggests that we should appreciate itstitle as more than metaphor: increasing coalcombustion and the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883had resulted in a deterioration of air quality inBritain. Thorsheim’s explanation is indicative ofhis approach to environmental history. Com-mendably, he strives to unite the tangible realityof coal smoke with cultural representations of thephenomenon through time. The book coalescesaround this methodological commitment ratherthan an overarching analytical point. Conse-quently, it examines an array of cultural perspec-tives on coal smoke: from beneficial combatantof miasma to harmful purveyor of economic de-cline, social disorder, and environmental degra-

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