In the extended introduction to this special issue on British nuclear culture, the guest editors outline the main historiographical and conceptual contours of British nuclear scholarship, and explore whether we can begin to define ‘British nuclear culture’ before introducing the contributors to this special issue, whose work we have organized into three broad areas. The first part is devoted to three articles that offer explicit and extended attempts to reconceptualize British nuclear culture, illuminating the complex links between nuclear science, the state and the individual citizen. The second part of this issue is devoted to three articles that concentrate on aspects of the history of nuclear science – focusing particularly on intellectuals, nuclear scientists and enthusiasts – alongside analysis of the popularization of nuclear science as well as the relationship between the state and nuclear science and its practitioners. In the third part, four articles examine the diverse ways in which ‘official’ narratives of the atomic age can be questioned, disrupted or enhanced by analysing the significance of journalistic, anti-nuclear and fictional narratives to the development of nuclear culture in Britain.

There is a story, which historians of modern France often tell, of the ministerial official in Paris who had only to glance at his clock in order to know the exact passage of Vergil being construed and the law of physics being expounded in every school throughout the country. Invariably, the story is told for a purpose. It is used to demonstrate the high degree of centralization and the attendant rigidity of the French educational system, usually with special reference to the nineteenth century. The story, which has its roots in the rich corpus of Napoleonic legend, serves this purpose very well, but unfortunately it is both apocryphal and misleading. For while it is true that most nineteenth-century ministers with responsibility for education aspired to the ideal of total control, not one of them came close to it in reality.

Between 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin's death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid's flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower's pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin's science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

“Whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science”, read the obituary notice in The Morning Post of Monday, 2 December 1872, “there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science.”1 And in a full-length column the death in Naples on the preceding Friday of Mary Somerville was announced. The Times of the same date, in a notice 2 of equal length and somewhat more scientific detail, spoke of the high regard in which her services to science were held both by men of science and by the nation. She had been for almost half a century the most famous of English scientific ladies and in achieving that role had become the first scientific lady of the world.

In 1877 the first issue of the Revue des questions scientifiques, published by the Scientific Society of Brussels, appeared in France and Belgium. The new journal was greeted with disdain and hostility by Emile Littrè and George Wyrouboff, the disciples of Auguste Comte and editors of La philosophie positive. The Scientific Society of Brussels was a Catholic organization, and the positivists' opinion was that ‘If science is spoken of in this assembly, it is in order to organize a veritable crusade against it’. But the highly prejudiced assessment by Littré and Wyrouboff completely misread the goals of the society. At the time, the Catholic Church was en pleine crise both in France and Belgium. Church attendance had declined dramatically in recent years, as had the number of young people entering religious orders. Many Catholic laymen and church officials were becoming convinced that some rapprochment with the modern world and modern science was essential. It was to this difficult task that the Catholics of the Brussels Scientific Society addressed themselves with determination.

Francesco Algarotti's Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), a series of lively dialogues on optics, was a landmark in the popularization of Newtonian philosophy. In this essay I shall explore Algarotti's sociocultural world, his aims and ambitions, and the meaning he attached to his own work. In particular I shall focus on Algarotti's self-promotional strategies, his deployment of gendered images and his use of popular philosophy within the broader cultural and experimental campaign for the success of Newtonianism. Finally, I shall suggest a radical reading of the dialogues, reconstructing the process that brought them to their religious condemnation. What did Newtonianism mean to Algarotti? In opposition to mainstream apologetic interpretations, he seems to have framed the new experimental methodology in a sensationalistic epistemology derived mainly from Locke, pointing at a series of subversive religious and political implications. Due to the intervention of religious authorities Algarotti's radical Newtonianism became gradually less visible in subsequent editions and translations. It is only through the study of the first – clandestine – edition of the dialogues that one can begin reconstructing the meaning of Algarotti's experiments (real and fictional) and his cultural battle for a regenerated Europe.

Published texts, unpublished documents and, to a lesser extent, artefacts are the stuff from which historians of science fashion their interpretations of the past. From these residues we attempt to reconstruct the lost fabric of personalities, activities and institutions that constituted the practice of science, and to comprehend the flow of thought that was its substance. Like the sensory data of the empirical sciences, these raw materials are not pure chunks of reality. They must be interpreted in the light of contemporary discourse and practice of which they were part. Over time, and in the hands of different commentators they acquire new significance, sometimes of mythic proportions; moreover, they are inevitably viewed in the light of present suppositions and fashions, both scientific and historiographical.

From the very day in 1686 when Edmond Halley placed Book I of the Principia before the Royal Society, Robert Hooke's claim to prior discovery has been associated with the law of universal gravitation. If the seventeenth century rejected Hooke's claim summarily, historians of science have not forgotten it, and a steady stream of articles continues the discussion. In our own day particularly, when some of the glitter has worn off, not from the scientific achievement, but from the character of Newton, there has been a tendency vicariously to atone for the treatment Hooke received. The judgement Lohne cites with approval from Vavilov appears to summarize the current estimate of the issue—in the seventeenth century only Newton could have written the Principia; nevertheless Hooke first sketched out its programme. What with all the knocks he has received both alive and dead, one feels guilty (and perhaps superfluous) in assuming the role of “debunker” at this late date. Apologetically draped in sackcloth then, head covered with ashes (and with whatever it is one dons for superfluity) I venture softly to suggest that Hooke has received more than his due. There is no question here of justifying Newton's behaviour toward Hooke. Wholly lacking in generosity as it appears to me, Newton's behaviour neither deserves nor can receive justification. The question turns rather on Hooke's scientific theories. Granting always his lack of demonstrations, historians have been prone to interpret his words in the light of Newton's demonstrations. A close examination of Hooke's writings does not sustain the interpretation. Contrary to what is generally asserted, he did not hold a conception of universal gravitation. And if he announced the inverse square relation, he derived it from such a medley of confusion as will not allow his claim to priority.

This article examines the science of electrophysiology developed by Emil du Bois-Reymond in Berlin in the 1840s. In it I recount his major findings, the most significant being his proof of the electrical nature of nerve signals. Du Bois-Reymond also went on to detect this same ‘negative variation’, or action current, in live human subjects. In 1850 he travelled to Paris to defend this startling claim. The essay concludes with a discussion of why his demonstration failed to convince his hosts at the French Academy of Sciences.

La science ne consiste pas en faits, mais dans les conséquences que l'on en tire.Claude Bernard, Introduction à l'étude de la médicine expérimentale

Good talkers are only found in Paris.François Villon, Des Femmes de Paris

Intellectual and professional reforms in evolutionary studies between 1935 and 1950 included substantial expansion, diversification, and realignment of community infrastructure. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley and Alfred Emerson organized the Society for the Study of Speciation at the 1939 AAAS Columbus meeting as one response (among many coming into place) to concerns about ‘isolation’ and ‘lack of contact’ among speciation workers worried about ‘dispersed’ and ‘scattered’ resources in this newly robust ‘borderline’ domain. Simply constructed, the SSS sought neither the radical reorganization of specialities nor the creation of some new discipline. Instead, it was designed to facilitate: to simplify exchange of information and to provide a minimally invasive avenue for connecting disparate researchers. Emerson served as SSS secretary and was its principal agent. After publishing one block of publications, however, the SSS became ‘quiescent’. Anxious to promote his own agenda, Ernst Mayr tried to manoeuvre around Emerson in an effort to revitalize the project. After meeting impediments, he moved his efforts elsewhere. The SSS was too short-lived to merit a claim for major impact within the community; however, it reveals important features of community activity during the synthesis period and stands in contrast to later efforts by George Simpson, Dobzhansky, and Mayr.

John W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) is commonly regarded as the manifesto of the ‘conflict thesis’. The superficiality of this thesis has been demonstrated in recent studies, but to read Draper's work only as a text on ‘science versus religion’ is to miss half of its significance, as it also involved evaluations of individual religions with respect to their attitudes towards science. Due to Draper's favourable remarks on Islam, the Ottoman author Ahmed Midhat translated his work into Turkish, and published it along with his own comments on Draper's arguments. Midhat interpreted Islam using the cues provided by Draper, and portrayed it as the only religion compatible with science. While his Christian readers condemned Draper for his approach to Islam, Midhat transformed the ‘conflict thesis’ into a proclamation that Islam and science were allies in opposition to Christian encroachment on the Ottoman Empire. This paper analyses Midhat's appropriation of Draper's work and compares it to the reaction of Draper's Christian readers. It discusses the context that made an alliance between Islam and science so desirable for Midhat, and emphasizes the impact of the historico-geographical context on the encounters between and representations of science and religion.

No one will deny the extraordinary interest and importance of this method which showed for the first time and in such minute detail the effects of the passage of ionizing radiations through a gas ... I am personally of the opinion that the researches of Mr Wilson in this field represent one of the most striking and important of the advances in atomic physics made in the last twenty years ... It may be argued that this new method of Mr Wilson's has in the main only confirmed the deductions of the properties of the radiations made by other more indirect methods. While this is of course in some respects true, I would emphasize the importance to science of the gain in confidence of the accuracy of these deductions that followed from the publication of his beautiful photographs. Ernest Rutherford, 1927

Rutherford refers here to the photography of particle tracks made visible as lines of condensation in the supersaturated water vapour of a cloud chamber. C. T. R. Wilson first saw and photographed tracks in March 1911. The cloud chamber had existed since 1895 when Wilson, pursuing his meteorological interests, developed the instrument to determine the process of droplet formation in clouds. Galison and Assmus have examined this early phase of the cloud chamber's existence, rightly concluding that, with the production of tracks and their photographic record, the instrument was radically transformed into a crucial tool of the particle physicist. This transformation was not immediate, however, and a genealogy of the apparatus cannot fully explain how this novel means to apprehend the existence and behaviour of hitherto invisible particles subsequently functioned within and contributed to the project of particle physics. My own focus is on the period immediately following Wilson's first publication of ray-track photographs. The central questions to be addressed are provided by Rutherford's comments above. In precisely what way did Wilson's work increase the confidence of scientists? How was his method more direct than others?

The story of the end of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh (P.S, E.) in 1783, is linked with that of the founding of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (S.A.S.) (1780) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (R.S.E.), both of which were given Royal Charters sealed on 6 May 1783. It is a story which has been admirably told by Steven Shapin. He persuasively argued that the P.S.E. was a casualty of bitter quarrels rooted in local Edinburgh politics, in personal animosities and in disputes about the control of cultural property and intellectual leadership. In all this he was surely correct just as he was in finding the principal actors in this controversy to be: David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan; the Reverend Dr John Walker, Professor of Natural History in Edinburgh University; Dr William Cullen, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice-President of the P.S.E.; Mr William Smellie, Printer to the Society of Antiquaries; Henry Home, Lord Kames, S.C.J. and President of the P.S.E.; Sir George Clerk-Maxwell, Vice-President of the P.S.E.; John Robison, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Secretary to the P.S.E.; Edinburgh University's Principal, William Robertson; the Curators of the Advocates Library: Ilay Campbell, Robert Blair, Alexander Abercromby, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Professor of Public Law; Henry Dundas, Lord Advocate (1775–August 1783) and M.P. for Midlothian. In a peripheral way, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons were probably also involved; so too were Lord Buchan's brothers, Henry and Thomas Erskine, Foxite Whigs who opposed Dundas politically. Henry Erskine displaced Dundas as Lord Advocate in August 1783. After the change of ministry on 18 December 1783 he was ousted, but became Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1785. National as well as burgh politics touched these disputes and gave the parties of the Erskines and Dundas and his friends some leverage in London.

In what follows I use the term ‘academic engineering’ to describe the teaching of engineering within a university or college of higher education: specifically, this differentiates an institutional teaching framework from the broader assimilation of engineering working practices in nineteenth-century Britain by the then standard method of apprenticeship or pupillage, and from the practice of engineering as a profession. The growth of academic engineering, both in terms of student numbers and the variety of courses, profoundly influenced the structure of what we might call ‘practical engineering’, the status of engineering as a profession searching for recognition within society, and the corporate relationship between engineers and places of higher education. These are issues which I will only touch on here.

In the history of thermodynamics, two dates stand out as especially important: 1824, when Sadi Carnot's brilliant memoir Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu appeared in print; and 1850, when Rudolf Clausius published his similarly titled paper ‘Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Wärme’. In this paper Clausius narrowly beat the Scottish physicist William Thomson to the solution of a puzzle which had been highlighted in the latter's recent publications: how could Carnot's theory, with all its intellectual attractions, be reconciled with the newly discovered principle of the inter-convertibility of heat and work? Clausius's solution (as is well known) was to replace Carnot's axiom of heat conservation, with the axiom now known as the second law of thermodynamics.

By the onset of the Second World War, the British scientific periodical Nature – specifically, Nature's ‘Letters to the editor’ column – had become a major publication venue for scientists who wished to publish short communications about their latest experimental findings. This paper argues that the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford was instrumental in establishing this use of the ‘Letters to the editor’ column in the early twentieth century. Rutherford's contributions set Nature apart from its fellow scientific weeklies in Britain and helped construct a defining feature of Nature's influence in the twentieth century. Rutherford's participation in the journal influenced his students and colleagues in the field of radioactivity physics and drew physicists like the German Otto Hahn and the American Bertram Borden Boltwood to submit their work to Nature as well, and Nature came to play a major role in spreading news of the latest research in the science of radioactivity. Rutherford and his colleagues established a pattern of submissions to the ‘Letters to the editor’ that would eventually be adopted by scientists from diverse fields and from laboratories around the world.

In recent years a number of scholars have argued that Faraday's theories of matter and force were founded on concepts which were derived from Boscovich's Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis (1758). The notion that Faraday's ideas display Boscovichean tendencies is not a new one: it was proposed by several of Faraday's immediate successors and has been noted by more recent commentators. Statements of this kind are not implausible as assertions of a general correspondence between Faraday's views on matter, as expressed in the “Speculation touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter” of 1844, and Boscovich's theory of point atomism, but Professor L. Pearce Williams has made much stronger claims for the dependence of Faraday's ideas on Boscovich's theory of matter. Williams' interpretation has been questioned by recent scholarship, and in this paper I wish to advance an alternative interpretation of Faraday's ideas on electricity and the nature of matter.

This paper is about how the motto of the Royal Society has sometimes been misread, but it is also about how such a misreading could arise at all, and why it persists. I argue that the error is intimately associated with a traditional view of scientific language as a medium for descriptive reporting, a view which has been very influential in schools, and is consequently perpetuated in the public understanding of science. Much new scholarship confirms that this ‘straightforward’ view of what scientists do can no longer be accepted at face value, and that the role of language in science is more intimate and subtle in its interpretive and persuasive qualities. A renewed study of the motto is interesting in itself, but it will also serve to introduce these wider matters. Perhaps it may help some more teachers to escape from those received ideas about language which have restricted the range of learning activities in school science, and discouraged a full attention to the words in which scientists choose to express their ideas.