This book is an attempt to reconstitute the tacit knowledge the shared, unwritten assumptions, values, and understandings that shapes the work of science. Jed Z. Buchwald uses as his focus the social and intellectual world of nineteenth-century German physics.
Drawing on the lab notes, published papers, and unpublished manuscripts of Heinrich Hertz, Buchwald recreates Hertz's 1887 invention of a device that produced electromagnetic waves in wires. The invention itself was serendipitous and the device was quickly transformed, but Hertz's early experiments led to major innovations in...