Jargonium asks … Kostas Gavroglu

For this instalment of Jargonium Asks, we are delighted to interview Kostas Gavroglu (gavroglu.gr), Professor Emeritus at the Department of History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Athens. He is an expert historian of chemistry, being among the few who have illuminated the social, historical and philosophical aspects of early quantum chemistry.

1. How did you get into the history and/or philosophy of chemistry?

After about 12 years of research in theoretical physics (specialising in elementary particle physics), I realised that it was not something that excited me nor did I want to do calculations for the rest of my life. In 1987, I went for a sabbatical to the Department of History of Science at Harvard and for two years I attended various courses and seminars that were offered in history of science as well as in STS, both at Harvard and at MIT. Those years were a decisive period for my research interests and after a short stint in philosophy of science, I worked almost exclusively in history of science ever since.

Together with my colleague Yorgos Goudaroulis, we had already started thinking about issues in the history of science, and had decided that we will examine the history of low temperature physics, which was a little studied area. The study of this area involves a lot of problems related to the liquefaction of gases and, especially, of hydrogen and, of course, helium, and at temperatures near absolute zero totally new phenomena come into being (eg., superconductivity and superfluidity). This led us to study the work of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926) at the University of Leiden as well as the work of Johannes DiderikVan der Waals (1837-1923). One of the very first explanations of superconductivity was proposed by Fritz and Heinz London (1907-1970), and when I started looking at Fritz London’s (1900-1954) work more closely I came across the epoch making paper he wrote together with Walter Heitler (1904-1981) on the homopolar bond of hydrogen. In 1927, they were able to propose a quantum mechanical explanation of a phenomenon which was rather paradoxical in the classical picture of the world. Eventually I wrote a biography of Fritz London (Fritz London, A Scientific Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2005) and while writing it I came across the insurmountable difficulties they and others had when they attempted to generalise their method to molecules beyond helium. This led me to study the early history of quantum chemistry and together with my colleague from the University of Lisbon Ana Simoes, we embarked on a long program about the history of quantum chemistry which culminated in the book we co-authored (Neither Physics nor Chemistry: the history of quantum chemistry, MIT Press, 2011).

2. What is your favourite question in the history and/or philosophy of chemistry?

I think everyone who works in the history and/or philosophy of chemistry had to face the question of reductionism. Notwithstanding the immense number of papers being written in the philosophy of science, this remains a particularly intriguing question and in the work we did in the history of quantum chemistry we had repeatedly to deal with this issue. 

Another issue which interests me is the formation of new sub-disciplines and the ways they are legitimised within the community of chemists (or physicists). Physical chemistry is one such case. How did it come to establish itself and create a rather respectable niche at the end of the 19th century? How did those who played a decisive role in its establishment achieve the necessary consensus among the members of their community? How did the sub-discipline achieve a relative autonomy with respect to chemistry as well as and physics? How does the historiographic category of “contingency” helps us to examine the process of the establishment of, say, physical chemistry?

The mathematization of chemistry is always a very interesting topic, for it involves a number of issues that chemists had serious difficulties to come to terms with. Especially during the second half of the 19th century, the violent invasion of mathematics into chemistry gave rise to intense disagreements among chemists and many thought that mathematization undermined the very character of chemistry as a laboratory science.

The developments in quantum chemistry after the 1980s have been phenomenal, and this happened because of the developments in computer technology together with the involvement of some chemists in devising a number of software programs that made possible complicated calculations. The crucial step was when the refinement of these calculational techniques became so reliable that chemists started talking of being able to do ab initio calculations. That meant that once the Hamiltonian in the Schrodinger equation was set-up, then it was possible to derive results which agreed remarkable well with experimental measurements. And in a short while, these calculations gained a legitimacy over experiments. The results of calculations replaced the experiments. What is the epistemological status of experiments? So what can one say about results of calculations that need not be tested by experiments? What kind of metamorphoses did the sites of experiments go through? Have computers “become” laboratories?

It has been the case that there have been periods in the history of science when competing theories to explain the same phenomena were used interchangeably. One such case is the Valence Bond theory of Linus Pauling (1901-1994) and the Molecular Orbital theory of Robert Mullikan (1896-1986), both developed in the interwar years. These two theories co-existed even though they implied different ontologies. How can one discuss issues about reality in such a situation? Might it be the case that the differences are differences in (a la Hacking) styles of reasoning?

3. What is the value of history and/or philosophy of chemistry?

It is very similar to the values of history and philosophy for all the other sciences. It is to show that the development of the sciences is an exceedingly complicated process, that there are many questions that need to be clarified about issues that most practitioners take for granted, and that at every juncture of these developments scientists make decisions which give a particular field its characteristics. In other words, the developments in the sciences are contingent and individuals are active participants in determining the directions along which their science will move. Yet, despite all the work in the history and philosophy of science, the overwhelming majority of scientists are still strongly attached to positivism. And even though some subscribe to Popper’s falsificationism and fewer to Kuhn’s change of paradigm, the majority of scientists strongly believe that science develops in a cumulative manner and experimental results are absolutely objective. Apart from their strong attachment to empiricism, a number of scientists have a rather patronizing attitude towards history and philosophy of science. Their attitude is one of “benign neglect”. A small number of scientists acknowledge that some external factors may have influenced specific developments, but they argue that once something is discovered or has been successfully tested experimentally, it has a dynamic of its own, and all other considerations (should) wither away. Nevertheless, during the last years we do witness an increased interest on questions of, especially, philosophy of science among theoretical physicists, perhaps as a result of the many dead ends that they are facing.

4. What are you currently working on?

The natural philosophers of the 17th century is something that interests me greatly. The breaks with the past and, at the same time, the continuities provide a richness that is unique in the history of the sciences. For sometime now I got very interested about a little discussed incident: in April 1624 Galileo went to Rome to congratulate his friend Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, upon the latter’s election as Pope Urban VIII. Galileo spend a couple of months in Rome, and during his stay he had –in his own words-- “six long meetings” with the Pope. We know nothing about what they discussed, there is nothing in the archives and nothing about it has been mentioned by Galileo in any of his extensive correspondence during the rest of his life. My hypothesis is that the Pope being worried about the enmity between the newly emerging natural philosophers and the philosophers and theologians, suggested to Galileo to write a book that will contribute towards their conciliation Such a hypothesis seems to be consistent with a number of issues that took place after the meetings of the two and before the Trial of 1633.

Another area that I study is what happened at the end of the 19th century when a number of scientists later on, claimed that the end of physics was imminent. Though there is scant evidence for this, there is something else that has not been fully studied: the extreme antagonism between chemists and physicists at the end of the 19th century. Implicitly one issue at stake was ontological: whose was the atom? Perhaps, put in this way, the question sounds rather weird, but the atom was an entity which at the beginning of the 19th century “belonged” to the chemists and by the end of the century it “belonged” to the physicists, the latter appeared to have an almost exclusive jurisdiction over it. So the antagonisms were all about the character of the chemistry at a very fundamental level.

5. How do you envision the future of the field? What are the areas/topics that you believe deserve more attention?

Unfortunately, the future of the field is closely tied to the bleak future of the humanities, and the prospects are not very hopeful. New University positions are declining, young scholars are under increasing pressures to secure grants, publishing has become an end in itself where often quality is sacrificed to quantity, and, all this, because of a dictum that is projected by policy makers as a self-evident truth: that governments cannot increase their funding of the universities and research centers for the humanities. But this dictum is far from self-evident and needs strong qualification. Where governments spend money and what they consider worth spending money for, is a matter of political priorities. Neoliberal governments consider spending money to support the humanities as something which will not bring back the envisaged returns and at the same time they believe that spending money for the humanities is something dangerous for the status quo. It appears that policy makers – despite what they publicly declare when pressed for answers – believe that “innovation” is what is to be financially supported, and though in some branches of the sciences, health and engineering funding has increased, we witness that the neoliberal view that everything will be regulated by the market, inflicts the humanities as well.   

As to the second half of your question, surely areas like the history of quantum biology and the history of pharmaceuticals deserve to be examined more closely.

6. A recently published paper or book that you would recommend reading?

Vanessa Seifert, Chemistry’s Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Peter J. Ramberg (editor), A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023).

Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master, a social history of artificial intelligence (Verso, 2023)