MICHAEL POLANYI AND HIS GENERATION
By Mary Jo Nye
University of Chicago Press, 2011, 405 pages
Review by Michael Beach
Through the personal history of Michael Polanyi, Mary Jo Nye helps readers through the growth of ideas around how science is influenced by society. The subtitle helps to understand this; ‘Origins of the Social Construction of Science.’
The idea of community relates to groups of people, and how people within the group influence each other. Nye, through Polanyi, makes the case for ‘social construction’. Social implies community. Construction implies group influence. Before reviewing Polanyi’s theoretical loss to Langmuir on the Nernst heat problem, Nye paraphrases Polanyi’s views on the outcomes. She depicts his views as a “controversial description of science as a community of dogmatic traditions and social practices rather than a march of revolutionary ideas and individual genius” (Nye 85).
The word community shares the word root of communication, which implies interaction. In the scientific world, individuals or groups of scientists communicate ideas through formal and informal methods. The community reflects back acceptance or non-acceptance (sometimes both) equally through formal and informal methods.
Chapter 3 in particular shows some of the downs in the up-and-down scientific career of Polanyi. It is probably fair to say he was surrounded by, and was part of, a community of some of the leading minds in chemistry and physics of his day, and of all time. The comment and reflection of that community not only influenced success or failure of his career personally, but also determined future directions of the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
A key example Nye gives is acceptance of Langmuir’s ideas of covalent and electrovalent polar and non-polar bonds over Polanyi’s adsorption theory. Several times she quotes Polanyi as he points to comments by Einstein, Nernst and others indicating that adsorption did not fit with new electron theories (Nye 109). This difficulty held true even given later “consistency of evidence with his new theory” (ibid). The community put more stock in ideas that supported the more recently accepted electron theories almost exclusively. Such was the power of scientific community.
Michael Polanyi’s work with Henry Eyring regarding a temporary transition state of chemical reactions might be seen as a foreshadow of his own transition state as he changed focus from chemistry, to economics and politics, finally settling on the philosophy of science.
The position taken by Polanyi and Erying defines the semi-empirical method in which experience is considered along with mathematical formulaic calculation. An element of probability is included in defining chemical interaction. Based on empirical experimentation, they posited when joining one chemical to a compound of two, the result is a different compound and chemical. They also asserted that during the transition process there is a temporary state in which a single compound composed of all three chemicals exists.
During his time in Budapest and Berlin, Polanyi was focused primarily on chemistry, but there was always some smaller amount of his time in which he considered, and wrote about, economics and politics. After moving to Manchester, the balance of his attention shifted the other way. Others in the chemistry department complained about this attention shift. He put less and less time into the daily lab effort. He even used a concocted chemical apparatus of a vacuum-containing glass to make a graphic explanation of his ideas on Keynesian economics (Nye 159).
Nye argues that Polanyi’s economic preoccupation was a “bridge to his sociologically inflected philosophy of science” (Nye 176). If this ‘bridge’ idea is true, then the original state might be thought of as science, since chemistry is a branch of science. It could be argued that both economics and politics have sociological and philosophical foundations. The mix of all of these areas of contemplation led to the final state of his new ‘intellectual compound’ within the discipline of the philosophy of science. During his 'transitory state', Polanyi was not fully based in science nor the social sciences, but some shifting level of each. The resultant ‘compound’ of the philosophy of science was not the same as the beginning ‘substance’ of science nor the transitory ‘compound’ of science, economics and politics.
By Mary Jo Nye
University of Chicago Press, 2011, 405 pages
Review by Michael Beach
Through the personal history of Michael Polanyi, Mary Jo Nye helps readers through the growth of ideas around how science is influenced by society. The subtitle helps to understand this; ‘Origins of the Social Construction of Science.’
The idea of community relates to groups of people, and how people within the group influence each other. Nye, through Polanyi, makes the case for ‘social construction’. Social implies community. Construction implies group influence. Before reviewing Polanyi’s theoretical loss to Langmuir on the Nernst heat problem, Nye paraphrases Polanyi’s views on the outcomes. She depicts his views as a “controversial description of science as a community of dogmatic traditions and social practices rather than a march of revolutionary ideas and individual genius” (Nye 85).
The word community shares the word root of communication, which implies interaction. In the scientific world, individuals or groups of scientists communicate ideas through formal and informal methods. The community reflects back acceptance or non-acceptance (sometimes both) equally through formal and informal methods.
Chapter 3 in particular shows some of the downs in the up-and-down scientific career of Polanyi. It is probably fair to say he was surrounded by, and was part of, a community of some of the leading minds in chemistry and physics of his day, and of all time. The comment and reflection of that community not only influenced success or failure of his career personally, but also determined future directions of the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
A key example Nye gives is acceptance of Langmuir’s ideas of covalent and electrovalent polar and non-polar bonds over Polanyi’s adsorption theory. Several times she quotes Polanyi as he points to comments by Einstein, Nernst and others indicating that adsorption did not fit with new electron theories (Nye 109). This difficulty held true even given later “consistency of evidence with his new theory” (ibid). The community put more stock in ideas that supported the more recently accepted electron theories almost exclusively. Such was the power of scientific community.
Michael Polanyi’s work with Henry Eyring regarding a temporary transition state of chemical reactions might be seen as a foreshadow of his own transition state as he changed focus from chemistry, to economics and politics, finally settling on the philosophy of science.
The position taken by Polanyi and Erying defines the semi-empirical method in which experience is considered along with mathematical formulaic calculation. An element of probability is included in defining chemical interaction. Based on empirical experimentation, they posited when joining one chemical to a compound of two, the result is a different compound and chemical. They also asserted that during the transition process there is a temporary state in which a single compound composed of all three chemicals exists.
During his time in Budapest and Berlin, Polanyi was focused primarily on chemistry, but there was always some smaller amount of his time in which he considered, and wrote about, economics and politics. After moving to Manchester, the balance of his attention shifted the other way. Others in the chemistry department complained about this attention shift. He put less and less time into the daily lab effort. He even used a concocted chemical apparatus of a vacuum-containing glass to make a graphic explanation of his ideas on Keynesian economics (Nye 159).
Nye argues that Polanyi’s economic preoccupation was a “bridge to his sociologically inflected philosophy of science” (Nye 176). If this ‘bridge’ idea is true, then the original state might be thought of as science, since chemistry is a branch of science. It could be argued that both economics and politics have sociological and philosophical foundations. The mix of all of these areas of contemplation led to the final state of his new ‘intellectual compound’ within the discipline of the philosophy of science. During his 'transitory state', Polanyi was not fully based in science nor the social sciences, but some shifting level of each. The resultant ‘compound’ of the philosophy of science was not the same as the beginning ‘substance’ of science nor the transitory ‘compound’ of science, economics and politics.
RSS Feed