Rosenberger, Johann Karl Ferdinand

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ROSENBERGER, JOHANN KARL FERDINAND

(b. Lobeda, Germany, 29 August 1845; d. Oberstdorf, Germany, 11 September 1899)

history of physics.

Rosenberger had already begun work as an elementary school teacher when he belatedly decided to pursue mathematics and physics at the University of Jena. After completing his Ph.D. in 1870, he taught mathematics and natural history at a series of private schools in Hamburg while preparing for the Staatsexamen, which he passed in 1876. In 1877 he moved to the Musterschule in Frankfurt am Main, where he taught until his death from a stroke. (From 1893 he was professor of mathematics and physics.) In 1892 he was elected a member of the Leopold-Carolinische Akademie der deutschen Naturforscher.

Except for his first work, an algebraic study of the basic laws of arithmetic (1876), Rosenberger’s scholarly career was devoted entirely to the history of the physical sciences. In the course of that career he produced two major studies and had embarked on a third when he died. The first study, a history of physics from Greek antiquity to 1880, appeared in three parts over the period 1882–1890. Meant to “present the historical development of physics so that one can easily discern both the momentary state of the science at any point in time and the tendency of its path of development” (Die Geschichte der Physik, pt. 1, v), the work focused thematically on the emergence and articulation of the modern scientific method.

For Rosenberger, that method consisted of “hypo-thetico-deductive” reasoning grounded in a delicate balance and interplay of experiment, mathematics, and philosophy of nature. Only in his own century had the full ideal been achieved. The philosophical and mathematical genius of the Greeks could not compensate for their lack of experimental data and procedures. During the Middle Ages, speculative philosophy so dominated scientific thought that it became “corrective of experience” when not avoiding experience altogether. If seventeenth-century scientists introduced the experimental method, they were for a time (1650–1690) so overwhelmed by it as to equate science with crude empiricism. Under the impact of Newton’s Principia, the pendulum swung toward mathematics, until the electrical research of the eighteenth century revived the prestige of experimental physics while retaining its mathematical articulation.

Rosenberger argued, however, that if mathematics and experiment had found their point of methodological equilibrium, a more lasting victim of Newton’s success and influence was philosophy, to which the scientists’ aversion was only strengthened by the futility of early nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie. One aim of Rosenberger’s Geschichte was to remind scientists of the role of philosophy in scientific thought and of the dangers in ignoring it. He stated:

An independent philosophy of nature without experimental and mathematical basis is impossible as real science, history teaches us that; but a pure empiricism without philosophical schooling, without a general philosophical science to set goals, yields at best a conglomerate of knowledge or otherwise, if it cannot do without hypothesis, slips as easily into cloudland as does pure philosophy of nature [Die Geschichte der Physik, pt. 2, p. 219].

Growing interest in the creative scientific process, which Rosenberger discussed in his pamphlet of 1885, and in the confrontation of opposing scientific theories ostensibly grounded in the same “correct” method reinforced Rosenberger’s attitude toward philosophy and lent new importance in his mind to the history of science as a discipline. In his work on Newton (1895), and especially on the clash between Newtonianism and (Leibnizian) Cartesianism, he shifted his focus from scientific method to the function of authority within the scientific community and sought the personal and cultural factors that give scientists their authority and ability to attract followers. Because Rosenberger could compare the authority of Newton’s “right” (but, by 1895, beleaguered) system only to that of Aristotle’s “wrong” system, he was led to view scientific “truth” in more relative terms than before.

All our fundamental scientific concepts have only a certain temporal truth, which in time changes to falsehood (the earlier truth of which can nevertheless not be ignored).… It is, for example, certain that, for his time, Aristotle created a correct, comprehensive system of natural explanation, the temporal truth of which one cannot properly deny [Newton, 528].

But the once healthy authority and model of Aristotle degenerated into rigid scholasticism, as Newtonianism threatened to do in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was not authority per se but, rather, rigid authority that posed a danger to the progress of science. For Rosenberger, as he set forth in his last article (1899), the antidote to such rigidity lay in a critical history of science that, by demonstrating the temporal truth of contemporary science, undercut those claims to final insight that supported modern scientific scholasticism.

In the introduction to part three of his Geschichte, Rosenberger concluded that “we stand [in 1887] not at the end of a period of physics, but in the midst of one …, the duration of which cannot yet be seen” (Die Geschichte der Physik, pt. 3, p. 12). He was referring to electromagnetic theory; and his last research on the history of electricity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, published as a series of lectures (1898), aimed at elucidating an ongoing scientific issue through historical perspective.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Rosenberger’s books are Die Buchstabenrechnung. Eine Entwicklung der Gesetze der Grundrechnung-Arten (Jena, 1876); Die Geschichte der Physik in Grundzügen mit synchronistischen Tabellen der Mathematik, der Chemie und beschreibenden Naturwissenschaften sowie der allgemeinen Geschichte, 3 pts.—pt. 1, Altertum, and Mittelalter (Brunswick, 1882); pt. 2, 16001780 (Brunswick, 1884); pt. 3, 1780–1880 (Brunswick, 1887–1890); Die Genesis wissenschafilicher Entdeckungen und Erfindungen (Brunswick, 1885); Isaac Newton and seine physikalischen Principien (Leipzig, 1895); and Die moderne Entwicklung der elektrischen Principien (Leipzig, 1898).

His articles include “Übergang von metaphysischen Anfangsgründen der Naturwissenschaften zur Physik,” in Berichte des Freien Deutschen Hochstiftes, 2 (1886); “Zum Gedächtnis Otto v. Guericke,” ibid., 3 (1887), 110–131. “Über Irrlichter,” ibid., 5 (1889), 2–12; “Geschichtliche Entwicklung der Theorie der Gewitter,” ibid., 7 (1891), 10–27. “Orientierung des Menschen im Raume,” ibid., 8 (1892), 89–109; “Fortschreitende Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechtes,” in WissenschaftlichPhilosophische Viertel-Jahres-Schriften (1892). “Über die erste Entwicklung der Elektrisiermaschinen,” in Verhandlungen der 68. Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte, pt. 2, 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1896), 66 ff; “Die erste Entwicklung der Elektrisiermaschinen,” in Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik, 8 (1898), 69–88; “Die ersten Beobachtungen über elektrische Entladungen,” ibid., 89–112; and “Die Geschichte der exakten Wissenschaften und der Nutzen ihres Studiums,” ibid., 9 (1899), 361–381.