Michael Chayut

This paper explores the emergence of authentic tragedy during two pivotal liminal periods in Western history: Athenian tragedy in the fifth century BC and English tragedy from the late 1580s to the early 1600s, particularly in Shakespeare’s era. It extends and contextualizes previous arguments positing that tragedy arises in times of significant cultural and scientific transformation, reflecting a transition from mythological frameworks to emerging scientific paradigms and reflecting the specific historical crises of the period. Tragic theatre embodies the tension between declining myths and new cultural paradigms, mirroring the conditions that foster scientific progress. It examines tragedy’s role in shaping civic public spheres, as seen in the Great Dionysia of Athens and early seventeenth-century London’s theatres. By offering a historically contextualized analysis of Oedipus Tyrannus and Hamlet, the paper suggests a fresh new reading of these two tragedies demonstrating how these works anticipated modern civic engagement and metaphysical inquiry. It highlights the heterogeneous nature of tragic communities, which critically engaged with Enlightenment ideas and provided a non-dogmatic perspective on human experience.

This article examines the origins and development of J. J. Thomson's chemical thought, and the reception of his theories by chemists. Thomson's interest in chemical combination and atomic theories of matter dates from his formative schooldays at Owens College, Manchester. These themes constituted a persistent leitmotif in the development of Thomson's style of thought, and provided a powerful stimulus which enabled him to enunciate the concept of electrons as fundamental particles. Thomson's influence on chemists during the years 1903 to 1923 reflects the richness and fertility of his chemical thought. He influenced the absorption of the Victorian physical tradition by American chemists, thus adding a mechanistic, picture-embedded style to theoretical chemistry. Thomson's style of thought resonated with the needs of American chemists, but was ignored in Germany.

Tragic theater is a phenomenon both extremely rare and sadly ephemeral. Perusal of Nietzsche will lead to the proposal that tragic theater developed in periods marked by scientific revolutions, related here to sweeping and far-ranging changes in the social fabric and the myths — or world theories — underlying it. Tragic theater expresses an insoluble conflict between a mythology in decline and a new form of culture, epitomized by a new world theory. True tragic theater therefore exhibits the same conditions that give rise to scientific revolutions. This “Tragedy — the Swan Song of Myth” thesis, outlined in Nietzsche's early studies of Greek tragedy, will be generalized and extended to the case of 17th century English tragedy and science, and the origins of the modern myth of Progress and Enlightenment.

Carothers's polymerisation theory, and Flory's enunciation of equal reactivities, were hybrids of ideas, extensions by analogy of the principles and methods of rigorous scientific disciplines into a new field, still in a state of conceptual unclarity. Their hybrid-ideas were radical innovations which contributed towards establishing polymer chemistry as a separate chemical discipline. Joseph Ben-David's theory of hybridisation can cast new light on the social and technological origins of significant innovations in twentieth-century science. Carothers and Flory's enunciations of radically novel ideas were inseperable from their identification with the new role of polymer chemist.Quasi-academic or academically peripheral milieux have had a systematic, indeed historic, role in bringing about innovations in fundamental science, in isolating significant problems and fruitful analogies, and in shaping new types of academic careers. This mechanism at the periphery offsets the pressures for conformity and orthodoxy which otherwise tend to prevail in academic science at the centre.

This paper traces the origins of Eugene Wigner's pioneering application of group theory to quantum physics to his early work in chemistry and crystallography. In the early 1920s, crystallography was the only discipline in which symmetry groups were routinely used. Wigner's early training in chemistry, and his work in crystallography with Herman Mark and Karl Weissenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm institute for fiber research in Berlin exposed him to conceptual tools which were absent from the pedagogy available to physicists for many years to come. This both enabled and pushed him to apply the group theoretic approach to quantum physics. It took many years for the approach first introduced by Wigner in the 1920s – and whose reception by the physicists was initially problematical – to assume the pivotal place it now holds in physical theory and education. This is but one example that attests to the historic contribution made by the periphery in initiating new types of thought-perspectives and scientific careers.