Introduction

Abstract

Progress in science has been always achieved by a diverse community of researchers, working in different countries, under different social, economic, and political conditions, with different traditions, and usually speaking different languages. Despite these profound differences, a common framework of theories and experimental methods has gradually been built up, in which the individual contributions are often partly or totally hidden. Science is an international achievement, and textbooks and monographs are often written without reference to true origins of scientific ideas and without reference to the conditions under which the science was developed. As a result, the reader gets only half the picture. In fact, science has been strongly shaped by the individual researchers. Terminology, symbols, paradigms, and prototypes, i.e., the language of science, are deeply rooted in the thinking of the individual scientists having lived under specific historical conditions. The experimental methods and techniques mirror the individual abilities of the scientists as well as their living and working conditions. Developed by other scientists under different conditions, they would have been different. Between the most ancient inventor and the most recent user exists an evolutionary chain of developments with unpredictable twists and turns, sometimes also revolutionary steps. Similarly, theories are coined by the thoughts and ideas of the people who have developed them; they got the stamp of the time and place of their origin. When I started writing this introduction, the idea that the social environment of a scientist can affect the way in which science is growing, was so plain to me that I did not give it a second thought. I have concluded this from reading original papers written at different times and places and by observing ongoing scientific developments. Later I have seen that sociologists had severe fights about this question, and only in the past decades it became accepted that there are different “Styles of Thought,” as Jonathan Harwood entitles his analysis of the history of genetics in the USA and Germany. Harwood writes: “Since the 1970s, however, a substantial literature on the sociology of scientific knowledge has made the search for styles of science altogether plausible. What this literature demonstrates is that the cognitive processes whereby scientific knowledge is constructed—for example, observation, classification, theory formation, and theory testing—are routinely shaped by the social circumstances of the scientist concerned.” [1].