Jan Frercks: Die Forschungspraxis Hippolyte Fizeaus: Eine Charakterisierung ausgehend von derReplikation seines Ätherwindexperiments von 1852Die Forschungspraxis Hippolyte Fizeaus: Eine Charakterisierung ausgehend von der Replikationseines Ätherwindexperiments von 1852 by Jan  FrercksReview by: rev. by Jürgen TeichmannIsis, Vol. 95, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 720-721Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/432324 .

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720 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 95 : 4 (2004)

took place in 1909 near Altenburg, in the easternpart of Austria. This event seems to have im-printed the young Lorenz, who devoted hiswhole life to imprinting. He also married hisfriend Gretl. In 1935 he investigated and de-scribed imprinting in a more scientific way at theUniversity of Vienna. He learned that if a goslingsaw its mother or Lorenz betweeen 15 and 72hours after hatching, the animal would followthe individual it had been exposed to for the restof its life. Before and after this time imprintingdid not occur.

Lorenz’s studies on instinct were not well ap-preciated by the Catholics, and he was not al-lowed to continue at the University of Vienna.So he moved back to Altenburg and continuedhis studies at his own expense for a time beforeapplying for a position in Germany. The Naziofficials who reviewed his case found his politi-cal attitude entirely acceptable. Everything wasalso in order with his Aryan descent. Shortly af-ter theAnschlussin 1938 Lorenz joined the Naziparty. He also became a member of its office ofrace policy and wrote a number of letters prais-ing the Nazis and condemning the Jews.

Lorenz was appointed a professor at Kant’suniversity in Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad.When the Soviet Union occcupied Ko¨ningsberg,Lorenz was captured and imprisoned in Russiafor four years. After the war he continued hisresearch and wrote a number of popular sciencebooks on animal behavior. He strongly believedthat human behavior, too, is largely biologicallydetermined and that humanity should learn tolive more ecologically. He was awarded the No-bel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, to-gether with Nicolaas Tinbergen and Karl vonFrisch.

The question is how such a brilliant scientistcould have become a Nazi. Lorenz’s own answerafter he was liberated was that he was an unpo-litical scientist who was more or less forced tojoin the Nazis to get a job.Die andere Seite desSpiegelsdemonstrates clearly that this is nottrue. Lorenz was an active Nazi. He served as amilitary psychologist in Poland, where he triedto distinguish German from Polish features. Hewrote about “the racial improvement ofVolkandrace” and the “elimination of the ethnically in-ferior.” However, his ambitions seem not to havehad any major impact on his Nazi bosses.

It might be asked whether it is worthwhile towrite an entire book on Lorenz’s political mis-takes during the war, even though he was a No-bel Prize laureate. But similar treatment has beenaccorded Knut Hamsun and Werner Heisenberg,

whose activities have also been dealt with in sev-eral books and articles and one drama.

There are many reasons why Lorenz’s politi-cal views are in fact worth scrutiny. First, ac-cording to a poll taken for the new millenniumby an Austrian magazine, he is regarded as themost important Austrian of the twentiethcentury—rated ahead of Freud, Wittgenstein,Popper, Musil, and Mahler. Second, Lorenz wasand still is an icon of the green movement; oneof his pupils described him as the “Ayatollah ofthe green movement” (p. 10). Third, it is inter-esting to consider whether his biological deter-minism can be related to his political views. Thisbook documents Lorenz’s political views care-fully by quoting letters and other documents. Itwould have been even more interesting if theauthors had discussed the relationship beweenhis biological and political views in more detail.Nevertheless, this is an important book, illus-trating once again that being a brilliant scientistand intellectual is no guarantee that one is a good“Mensch.”

HUGO LAGERCRANTZ

Jan Frercks. Die Forschungspraxis HippolyteFizeaus: Eine Charakterisierung ausgehend vonder Replikation seines A¨ therwindexperimentsvon 1852. 351 pp., illus., figs., tables, apps. Ber-lin: Wissenschaft und Technik Verlag, 2001.

This book discusses much more than the repli-cation of an experiment by Hippolyte Fizeau.The “ether wind experiment” is not one of Fi-zeau’s well-known experiments (the more fa-mous tooth-wheel experiment, for measuring thevelocity of light, was replicated by Jan Frercksfor his diploma thesis). The ether wind experi-ment had considerably less historical effect thansome of Fizeau’s other work, but it stands in abroad tradition of similar experiments for solv-ing problems that resulted from the acceptedwave theory of light in the nineteenth century.Frercks summarizes all of them under the head-ing of “aberration” problems. Other experimentsby Fizeau (and other researchers) relating to themobility of ether are also discussed.

Unfortunately, Fizeau handled the ether windexperiment very carelessly (he published the—negative—result in an unimportant journal). ButFrercks is able to show, on the basis of labora-tory notes, that Fizeau worked very intensivelyon this problem. He also reconceptualized theexperiment more than thirty years later.

In a very original fashion, Frercks commenceshis discussion several times, from differentpoints of view, to come nearer to the historical

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BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 95 : 4 (2004) 721

“truth”: as a replicator and experimenter beforehis study of the written (laboratory) sources; asan interpreter of Fizeau’s experimental actionsafter the study of those sources; as a historian,reflecting on Fizeau’s social context; and as a“historical philosopher,” reflecting on the role ofexperimental knowledge (he compares differentinterpretations by Bruno Latour, Hans-Jo¨rgRheinberger, Peter Galison, Ian Hacking, andAndrew Pickering). For example, he concludesfrom examining Fizeau’s four publications (theether wind experiment and three others) thatthere existed a well-planned research programonthe problem of “aberration” that moved, step bystep, from one question to the next. But from theunpublished sources he comes to the conclusionthat Fizeau’s actual experimental practice wasmuch more complex, moving in nonlinear fash-ion among his various goals and strategies.Frercks discovers that Galison’s suggestion thatsignificant developments of experiment and the-ory may run asynchronously was here realizedin a single person.

Frercks shows that certain “technical ideas”(he has in mind instrumental technology) arecharacteristic of Fizeau’s thinking and action. Inrelation to the replicated ether wind experiment,he finds eight ideas that were adopted from otherexperiments. Frercks emphasizes that the fun-damental knowledge of an experimental scientistis found not in his or her description of experi-ments and their results but, rather, in the han-dling of instruments and the measuring process.Less important than the measuring itself (hereFizeau was measuring a nonexistent effect) is theexperimental process and, before that—and in-tegral to it—the production of the apparatus.This means that the replication of “experimentalpractice” is essential for understanding the de-velopment of science. At several points in hisbook Frercks stresses that he does not look atthis experiment in the context of the prehistoryof relativity theory but as a part of research prac-tice within (French) physics in the nineteenthcentury. I would have expected more details onthis French context, however. For example,Frercks offers no substantial reflections on thealmost uncritical admiration of Fizeau’s contem-poraries for his exceptional experimental ability.

JURGENTEICHMANN

David Gugerli; Daniel Speich.Topografien derNation: Politik, kartografische Ordnung undLandschaften im 19. Jahrhundert. 264 pp., illus.,bibl., index. Zurich: Chronos-Verlag, 2002.€29.90 (cloth).

Using the survey of Switzerland, accomplishedbetween 1832 and 1865 under the direction ofGeneral Guillaume-Henri Dufour, as an organiz-ing motif, David Gugerli and Daniel Speich haveexamined the political landscape of the time.They use the history of cartography to demon-strate wider sociohistorical connections. Thework of surveying Switzerland ran parallel to theestablishment of the Swiss federal state. The ini-tial production of the so-called Dufour map tookplace during the structure-forming phase ofSwiss liberalism, between 1830 and 1848. Du-four experienced the birth pains of the state inmany ways: for a long time he did not even havean office for his activity in national mapping, andhe suffered perpetually from inadequate finan-cial support and had to watch as some of his bestengineers moved away to take on better-paidwork elsewhere.

It was decisive for the success of the surveythat in the first half of the nineteenth centurySwitzerland developed from being a loose con-federation of sovereign cantons to become theSwiss federal state. The high praise this success-ful mapping work received was similarly vitalfor the strengthening of the state in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century, during the flow-ering of nationalism. The topographic map ofSwitzerland (1:100,000), the so-calledDufour-karte, received international prizes and servedboth within Switzerland and abroad as an iden-tification symbol and an advertising medium forthe nation. The controversy over place-nameswas overcome, and a national nomenclature anda uniform topographic language were estab-lished. Thus the regional map became an instru-ment of the power of the state as well.

During the Helvetian civil war, on the thresh-old of the new federal state of 1848, maps playedan important auxiliary role. Unfortunately, Du-four’s maps were available only for certain re-gions at that time. In the Canton of Lucerne,where fierce fighting took place, the actual sur-veying did not begin until some years later, in1853. Gugerli and Speich describe Dufour as aGralshueter—the shepherd of the grail of Swissfederal survey data—because of his disciplinedapproach to the collection and use of data andhis careful minutes and reporting. The use ofshaded hatchings to represent the topographicalfeatures of Switzerland enhanced the sharpnessof the “plastic shape on paper” and particularlycontributed to the success of the work.

The book’s title page, which depicts Dufour’shand pointing to his map, provides an effectivefigurative entrance to the work. Readers who ex-pect a standard history of the Dufour maps will

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