John Heilbron, who has died aged 89, established the history of science as a professional discipline. By getting the history right, he sought to slay enduring myths created by his predecessors, some of which had become embedded in popular culture.
His book The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (1999) helped dispel the falsehood that science and religion exist in a state of perpetual warfare. A desire to fix the date of Easter was one of the things that led the Roman Catholic church to give more financial and social support to the science of astronomy than any other institution, for more than six centuries.
His biography Galileo (2010) viewed the astronomer as a man embroiled in the culture of late Renaissance Italy. As John recounted, Galileo’s scientific success sparked off in him a megalomania and a recklessness that set him at odds with friends, patrons and the church. Two further myths were slain: of Galileo the intellectual Platonist, obsessed with ideas about the natural world, and of Galileo the first experimental scientist. He was neither of these.
Yet even as John’s work changed our understanding of the emergence of science in the scientific revolution of which Galileo was part, and of the heroic view of history, he urged caution.
Things may not always be as they seem. “The myth you slay today may contain a truth you need tomorrow,” he declared. In work whose reach extended to contemporary quantum physics, he understood that writing a coherent and universal history of science is as remote as recreating the big bang origin of the universe.
Born in San Francisco, John was the son of Delphine (nee Rosenblatt) and Louis Heilbron, a lawyer who served as the first chairman of the board of trustees of what is now the California University system. From Lowell high school John went to the University of California, Berkeley, and gained a BA (1955) and MA (1958) in physics, and a PhD in history (1964).
He became the first graduate student of the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. Encouraged by the belief that the future security of cold war America rested on fostering an understanding of “the tactics and strategy of science”, Kuhn had been asked to prepare historical case studies. This led him to the conclusion that the “route to enlightenment about science ran through the swamp of history”.
When Kuhn moved from Harvard to Berkeley, John joined him as his student and helped prepare his influential text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This was an attempt to understand scientific progress in terms of periods of “normal” science conducted within a prevailing “paradigm” of unquestioned knowledge, punctuated by scientific revolutions in which the paradigms would shift. The book would reach far beyond its intended audience.
John became sceptical of both his philosophy of science and his approach to studying its history. Kuhn had figured that the right way to do history was to “climb into other people’s heads”. But John came to appreciate that Kuhn “climbed about in only small and isolated spots in the heads he hunted”.
He realised that this kind of selective approach risks populating history with bloodless ciphers, amounting to nothing more than small collections of their technical papers and letters. To do history properly required objective analysis of the often complex social, political and intellectual forces that helped promote scientific discoveries. And it demanded acknowledgement of the simple fact that the scientists at the centres of these discoveries were complete human beings.
Before The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published, Kuhn was invited to lead a wide-ranging project to conduct tape-recorded interviews directly with those scientists who had facilitated the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, and microfilm copies of their correspondence and unpublished manuscripts. John was appointed assistant director and he and another graduate student joined Kuhn in Copenhagen in the summer of 1962.
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, inventor of the atomic theory that would underpin later quantum discoveries, provided office space. The project quickly gained a sense of urgency. Bohr died just a few weeks after interviewing began.
The three-year project led to the creation of an important archive, entitled Sources for the History of Quantum Physics.
John’s PhD dissertation was concerned with Bohr’s atomic theory, a subject to which he returned in his more than 20 books, most notably in Love, Literature and the Quantum Atom (with Finn Aaserud, 2013), and Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction (2019).
Bohr was the subject that brought me into John’s orbit in 2019, and led to an enjoyable four-year collaboration. The fruit of this collaboration will be another book, Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement, to be published in April. I am hopeful it will slay a few more myths.
Following a brief spell at the University of Pennsylvania, John joined the history faculty back at Berkeley in 1967, and six years later was appointed professor and established the Office for History of Science and Technology there. From 1990 to 1994 he was the university’s vice-chancellor.
He served as editor of the journal Historical Studies in the Physical (now Natural) Sciences, and as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Companion to the History of Science and the Oxford Guide to the History of Physics.
The recipient of numerous honorary doctorates and awards, John was president of l’Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences (2001-05).
In 1959 he married Patricia Lucero; she died in 1993. Two years later he married Alison Browning.
In September they travelled to Padua, where he was scheduled to speak about Galileo at a conference of physicists and historians.
While there he was diagnosed with leukaemia.
He is survived by Alison.
• John Lewis Heilbron, historian of science, born 17 March 1934; died 5 November 2023
