Omówiona została działalność Komisji Historii Nauki PAU w roku akademickim 2025/2026. Przedstawiono spisy: posiedzeń naukowych, konferencji, sesji i seminariów naukowych oraz nowych publikacji.
This study presents an examination of Albert Einstein’s statements expressing his views on scientific writing. The findings revealed that his views regarding persuasive intent, audience orientation, conciseness, and phrasing largely conformed to the contemporary writing style, but that his expectations regarding the manner of exposition clearly went beyond it. He rejected expositions that were merely presenting completed thought constructs, which at the time were perceived as standard. Instead, he called for expositions enabling readers to follow—or, even better, to experience—the author’s train of thought. Einstein considered this essential for the epistemic accessibility of scientific writings and thus for their persuasive power.
We describe in what follows the development of general relativity in Kraków in the first four decades after the end of the Second World War in 1945. Professor Jan Weyssenhoff was the only theoretical physicist to survive the War. Most of his postwar Phd students started their scientific carreers from doing general relativity. In early 1960’s emerged a group of young talented heoretical physicists that had been actively engaged in investigating modern at that time concepts of the theory. Almost all of them went later into other areas of physics. What was left from this period is the notable discovery of (2+1)- dimensional spacetimes (4-dimensional cosmic strings, in fact) by Andrzej Staruszkiewicz in 1963. Starting from the mid-1960’s, only Staruszkiewicz had been actively researching relativity theory. He had many students and by 1985 we can observe the re-emergence in Kraków of a new generation of young researchers. The most significant result of that time – the uniqueness of the Kerr-Newman black hole – was proven by Paweł Oskar Mazur in 1982.
The contemporary wave of commodification of scientific knowledge and the ongoing trend of rendering the working culture in natural sciences ever more entrepreneurial have taken an immense toll on the popularity of disciplines that explore natural sciences through the prism of arts and humanities. One of such disciplines has been the history of exact sciences, the study of which bears an extraordinary importance for ensuring the harmonious future developments in this sphere of knowledge. In this article I hark back to the history of a principle proposed by the English physicist, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, in 1963, and turn it into a heuristic for directing the growth of scientific knowledge in a previously unexplored and, to most, unforeseen direction. In a Scientific American article from 1963, Dirac, who had been rewarded for his contribution to the atomic theory and success in reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics with the Nobel Prize in physics thirty years earlier, asserted that “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment”. This statement of his came to be known colloquially as Dirac’s beauty principle. To Dirac, however, who had nil inclinations toward art and who openly disparaged parallel studies of poetry and physics, the term “beauty” meant something more prosaic than what it would mean to a person with an aesthetic sensibility, in which sense it can be argued to have represented an ill choice of the word, causing confusion in later attempts to interpret this controversial statement. A more radical aspect of this principle is that it puts more weight on the “beauty” of human models of reality than on their concordance with the empirical findings and facts, which most positivists would find to be absurd. Despite the empirical quixotism of Dirac’s principle, here I propose, after following a line of thought rooted in personal reflection, the thesis that extending this principle to scientific concepts in general, ranging from hypotheses and methods to forms of expression, could lead to a radically new scientific worldview: one in which the beauty of research concepts is perceived as more important than the solidity of their experimental backing. Proliferation of this worldview, where creative ideas and forms and valued more than their proofs, may halt the ongoing progression of the natural sciences culture toward ever more entrepreneurial, industrial and impersonal grounds and restore its romanticist roots that extend deep into the fields of philosophy, sociology, arts and humanities.
The massive violence unleashed by World War II forced many European scholars and scientists to emigrate, with the United States being the most common destination. While émigré scholars often experienced the loss of their familiar surroundings and their professional status as a biographical crisis, exile also created new opportunities for the transcultural circulation of knowledge and scholarly innovation. The article analyzes the trajectories of Aleksander Hertz (1895–1983) and Feliks Gross (1906–2006), two Polish-Jewish sociologists who both found permanent refuge in the United States after fleeing German-occupied Poland and who devoted much of their scholarly attention to the problem of how to organize multiethnic societies peacefully. Drawing on sociological theories that link social marginality to cultural and intellectual innovation, the article argues that Hertz’s and Gross’s own experiences of marginalization as Jews in interwar Poland and as newcomers to American society provided an epistemic resource for the comparative analysis of multiethnic societies, but also set limits on the contemporary reception of their ideas.
