Educating Physicists in Germany circa 1900

In this paper we offer some preliminary results of a demographical approach that sheds new light on the practitioners of physical sciences in Germany around 1900. We analyze the social and educational backgrounds of PhD recipients in the philosophical faculties at German universities in the decades before the First World War. We are also concerned with the process of obtaining a PhD. Some expected patterns and several striking contrasts emerge from a study of student origins and migration patterns from university to university, as well as of those professors who exerted great influence in determining the institutional configurations of physical sciences in Germany, both immediately before the war and during the Weimar period. This study should be seen as a preliminary attempt to describe young members of the physics discipline in relation to young members of other academic disciplines in the period around 1900. For the most part we are concerned with broad disciplinary areas (physics, chemistry, and the like), and we do not systematically explore many more subtle disciplinary variants (such as experimental physics, geophysics, and electrochemistry). The most important sources of

Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Sociology · Engineering · History of Science and Natural History · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History

• Jewish Scientists in Imperial Germany (Parts I and II)

  Shulamit Volkov•Aleph•2001

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