-: So I'm David Cahan,
I'm Charles Bessey Professor of History
here at the University of Nebraska.
And I'm a historian of science principally.
Though also very much interested in European cultural
or intellectual history, especially in the modern era,
meaning from about the Enlightenment to the present.
And most of my published research has concentrated
on the German speaking world,
from the late Enlightenment until the Weimar period,
so about 1750 to about 1933,
and I've published a series of books
about 19th century science, especially in Germany.
My latest book is one that I've been working on
for a good portion of my career,
called "Helmholtz: A Life in Science",
published by the University of Chicago Press,
and it appeared about a month ago.
But that's kind of the culmination of work
that I had been doing virtually since graduate school,
where I worked on a book
about a German scientific institution,
where quantum physics began in the late 19th,
early 20th centuries.
And along the way,
I also wrote a book about physicist
named DeWitt Bristol Brace,
who was the first physicist here
at the University of Nebraska,
this was about 1887,
and he trained with Helmholtz in Berlin,
the man who I study so much.
So that's the bulk of my research, dealing with Germany,
the United States, the sciences,
the cultural history of science, and so on.
I think there's three key take-aways from this book.
The first is, that Helmholtz sought to unite all
of the different sciences,
including philosophy as much as possible.
He's recently been called the last great polymath.
That is, the last person who could really, conceivably,
understand all of the sciences, and then some,
and try to put it in some kind of unified field.
I'm not saying that he did it, but he sought to do that.
So that's one take-away.
Another is that he was very much concerned about
the sources of our knowledge.
How do we know things?
Ya know, today we talk about fake news,
but how do we know what's fake and what's real?
And he was very much concerned about
the methods that scientists used,
and the instruments that they used to produce
their truth claims about the world.
And it's of course as serious in science
as it is in politics.
And the third and final take-away from the book is that
Helmholtz's person and his ideas sought to unite
the sciences and the arts.
He wrote about the scientific foundations of painting,
of color, of music.
He was himself a serious piano player,
loved the theater, loved literature,
and he believed that the arts enrich
the sciences and vice versa.
So these are the three big take-aways from the book.
Well I think that biography has been treated
a little bit too roughly by a lot of people for a long time.
Meaning that until about the 1960s,
biography kind of had, had it's way,
and then as social history became important,
as talking about social forces, gender and women's history,
and global history, as they came in,
that kind of put a discount on biography.
And I'm quite sure that this has changed now
in the last decade,
especially in Britain and the United States,
where biography is much more highly valued
than it was previously.
And I would also remind people that while
there are all kinds of movements, social movements,
economic movements, and so on,
there must be agents who do the moving.
That is to say there must be people who do the moving.