Writing the discipline: Ganot's textbook science and the invention of physics

The historiography of physics has reached a great degree of maturity and sophistication, providing many avenues to consider the making of science from a historical perspective. However, the big picture of the making of physics is characterized by a predominant narrative focused on a conception of disciplinary formation through leadership transfers in research among France, Germany, and Britain. This focus has provided the history of physics with a periodization, a geography, and a fundamental goal commonly considered to be conceptual and theoretical unification. In this paper, I suggest the interest of reassessing this picture by analyzing the temporal, national, and epistemological viewpoint from which it is written. I use for this purpose an exemplary case study: Adolphe Ganot's physics textbooks in France and their translation by Edmund Atkinson in England. In this context, I suggest future avenues for the study of the making of physics as a discipline, which consider the canonical role of textbooks in disciplinary formation beyond the Kuhnian paradigm. © 2016 by the Regents of the University of California.

• Fecha de publicación: 2016
• Institución: Universidad del Rosario
• Repositorio: Repositorio EdocUR - U. Rosario
• Idioma: eng
• OAI Identifier: oai:repository.urosario.edu.co:10336/24210
• Acceso en línea: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2016.46.3.392; https://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/24210
• Palabra clave: Discipline; England; France; Nineteenth century; Pedagogy; Physics; Textbooks; Unification
• License: Abierto (Texto Completo)