Making molecularism III. Catalogus librorum &c. Selected papers III

Seventeen years ago Henk Kubbinga’s book L’Histoire du concept de «molécule » was published by Springer-Verlag France (Paris). There followed Dutch and US-English editions in which the emphasis shifted from Antiquity-Middle Ages-Renaissance to more recent times; a German edition is well underway. The message was—and still is—clear: we are witnessing last decades the breakthrough of a new, thoroughly molecular ‘picture of the world’. Molecularism calls the tune. The series Making molecularism will highlight a collection of papers difficultly accessible that paved the way for its coming of age, with due attention for all mathematics at issue.

This third volume, then, opens with a ‘Laus bibliothecarum’, an essay in praise of libraries as the natural anchors of culture and science. The focus is on the Albert Einstein Library, a long-term project to be launched by the European Physical Society. It reproduces the catalog of the library on which the molecularism project came to be based and also specifies three other, related collections: art (paintings, drawings, etc.), physics (instruments), and chemistry (ustensils; chemicals). Catalogs like these are, of course, snap shots, since collections tend to be always on the move. This volume features for the rest an update of the ‘Bibliography’ as reproduced in volume I and, besides, five recent papers.

Henk Kubbinga (University of Groningen) is a member of the History of Physics Group of the European Physical Society (since 2006) and Corresponding Member of the International Academy of History of Science (since 2012). In 2017 he was among the co-recipients of the D. E. Osterbrock Book Prize of the History of Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society.