Michael Polanyi and the History of Science.pdfVIP

Michael Polanyi and the History of Science Gerald Holton © 1992 Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of History of Science Jefferson Physical Laboratory, Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02l38 Editor’s Note : The following article was developed from Professor Holton’s invited keynote address at the Polanyi centennial conference at Harvard Divinity School, February 28, l992. ABSTRACT This essay is a study of Polanyi’s career as scientist and philosopher from the point of view of the history of science, starting with the first step in his academic career helped by an intervention of Albert Einstein. Polanyi’s ideas are better understood if placed against the background of then-fashionable philosophical movements, including logical positivism, and his disagreement with Bukharin in 1935. The essay studies the sources and ambitions of Polanyi’s notion of the tacit dimension, his attitude to evolution and “emergence,” and his contribution to the search for the origins of Einstein’s Relativity Theory. His success in the last of these is shown to be an exemplar of Polanyi’s own philosophy. Biographical Background I have been asked to talk about Michael Polanyi’s career as a scientist and philosopher from the point of view of history of science, and also his contribution to the history of science. But in order to arrive at my conclusions, I shall have to make some excursions also into other fields, such as the branches of politics and epistemology that were fashionable during his career. For it is fair to say that Polanyi, or as he was named at