The newest annual volume of "Osiris," "Intelligentsia Science" explores the transformations in science in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, from serfdom to Sputnik, as a series of developments in Russian culture.
The contributors argue that it was the generation of the 1860s that transformed intelligentsia into a central notion of Russian popular discourse, cementing its association with revolutionary politics and with science. Science became the cornerstone of the intelligentsia s ideological and political projects, either as an alternative to socialism, or more often as its...

This volume reprints Paul Forman's classic papers on the history of physics in post-World War I Germany and the invention of quantum mechanics. The Forman thesis has become famous as the first argument in favor of the cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge, in particular for its demonstration of the historical connection between the culture of Weimar Germany known for its irrationality and antiscientism and the emerging concept of quantum acausality. At the 2007 international conference in Vancouver, Canada, leading historians of physics discussed the implications of the Forman thesis...