Carsten Reinhardt: Shifting and Rearranging – Physical Methods and the Transformation of Modern Chemistry

摘要

This large monograph by historian of science Carsten Reinhardt (now Uni-versity of Bielefeld) is his Habilitation thesis (at the University of Regens-burg), which is still a prerequisite to gain the venia legendi at several German universities. Shifting and Rearranging consists mainly of six case studies refer-ring to the works of Klaus Biemann, Carl Djerassi, Richard Ernst, Herbert Gutowsky, Fred McLafferty, and John Roberts. Biemann, Djerassi, and McLafferty are chosen because of the tremendous impact they had (mainly) on mass spectrometry, whereas Ernst, Gutowsky, and Roberts are well-chosen examples from the field of nuclear mag-netic resonance spectrometry. The au-thor presents his case studies in an in-terwoven manner rather than putting together some more or less similar biog-raphies. In five main chapters he tells the detailed stories of how these scien-tists accommodated and assimilated the new physical instrumental methods and, at the same time, contributed to chang-ing the whole enterprise called chemis-try. Already in the preface the author observes: Chemistry's "object of exami-nation, the chemical substance, was transmuted into abstract structure; its most important method, the chemical reaction, was supplemented by physical methods; and its practitioner, the chem-ist, was partially displaced by technical instruments" (p. vii). The first thesis of this sentence, however, is not really surprising. We can find this kind of ab-straction much earlier than the author claims, already before the mid-20thcen-tury, for example, in the acceptance of atomism in chemistry which began in the early 19thcentury. Also text-book characterizations of chemistry indicate a dramatic change: Starting from the sci-ence of substances and their changes at least in the 18thcentury, there is a rea-sonable tendency to shift the chemical core to the 'abstract' microphysical realm already well before 1950. Hence, the mentioned abstraction, which can be considered chemistry's conceptual shift from substances to molecules, is a movement which is obviously inde-pendent from what some historians call 'instrumental revolution'. Although he mentions it and quotes the relevant sources, Carsten Reinhardt is obviously professionally reluctant to use the latter concept throughout his book