1. This paper is based on an invited lecture delivered in November 2011 at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society and in December 2011 on the occasion of Paul Forman’s retirement at the Smithsonian Institution. It was a privilege to have been asked to deliver the lecture honoring Forman. We have been close friends for the past thirty years. We both come out of physics and have a special relationship to physics and physicists. I admire Paul Forman and his works greatly, and he has influenced me deeply. His integrity, his comportment, and his writings made, and continue to make, clear to me the responsibilities we have as historians. This paper is dedicated to him as a token of my admiration, affection and respect. When considering what Paul Forman has accomplished as a historian of science and as a curator, and keeps on accomplishing as a historian, many commendations can be made. John Heilbron, who has known Forman since his student’s days at Berkeley did so when commenting on Forman’s oeuvre as a historian at a conference in Vancouver in 2005 honoring Forman: John L. Heilbron, “Cold War Culture, History of Science and Postmodernity: Engagement of an Intellectual in a Hostile Academic Environment.” in Cathryn Carson, Alexei Kojevnikov, and Helmuth Trischler, eds., Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics (Singapore: World Scientific, 2011), 2–20. The editors’ introduction to the proceedings of the conference and Heilbron’s article therein detail the magnitude of Forman’s accomplishments as a historian of science and the respect he is held in as an outstanding scholar.
2. He had joined the department in the spring semester 1967 and completed his PhD dissertation that summer in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley; Hunter Dupree had been his thesis adviser. Paul Forman, “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971), 1–115; “The Reception of an Acausal Quantum Mechanics in Germany and Britain,” in Seymor Mauskopf, ed., The Reception of Unconventional Science, Seymor Mauskopf, ed., [AAAS] Selected Symposium 25 ([Boulder Colo]: Westview Press, 1979), 11–50; “Kausalität, Anschaulichkeit, and Individualität; or how Cultural Values Prescribed the Character and the Lessons Ascribed to Quantum Mechanics,” in Nico Stehr and Volker Meja, eds., Society and Knowledge: Contemporary Perspectives in the Sociology of Knowledge & Science, ([New Brunswick NJ]: Transaction Books, 1984), 333–48; reprinted, 2nd revised edition (Transaction Books: New Brunswick NJ, 2005), 357–371.
3. For the argument that Darwin had been influenced by the intellectual and political views and cultural values of powerful circles in England and Scotland, see Robert M. Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory,” Past and Present 43 (1969), 109–45; “The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man’s Place in Nature,” in M. Teich and R.M. Young, eds., Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (London: Heinemann, 1973), 344–438; Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also A. La Vergata, “Images of Darwin: A Historiographic Overview,” in D. Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 901–929, and Ingemar Bohlin, “Robert M. Young and Darwin Historiography,” Social Studies of Science 21 (1991), 597–648.
4. Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 18 (1987), 149–229.
5. Heilbron, “Cold War Culture” (ref. 1), 17.