In 1967, Per-Olov Löwdin introduced the new International Journal of Quantum Chemistry in the following manner:

In this chapter I address the emergence and establishment of a scientific discipline that has been called at times quantum chemistry, chemical physics, or theoretical chemistry. Understanding why and how atoms combine to form molecules is an intrinsically chemical problem, but it is also a many-body problem, which is handled by means of the integration of Schrödinger’s equation. The heart of the difficulty is that the equation cannot be integrated exactly for even the simplest of all molecules. Devising semiempirical approximate methods became, therefore, a constitutive feature of quantum chemistry, at least in its formative years.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, geometry was the study of space. As such, geometrical knowledge can be found in virtually all civilizations. Ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Chinese, Indians, Aztecs, and Egyptians surveyed their lands, constructed their pyramids, and knew the relation among the sides of a right triangle. The Western geometrical tradition dates from Euclid’s (fl. 295 B.C.E.) Elements. What marks this work as seminal lies not so much in its content per se as in how that content was known.

Two tightly interwoven characteristics marked Euclidean geometrical knowledge. First, the objective characteristic was the strict correspondence between the terms of the geometry and the objects to which those terms referred. Euclid’s geometry dealt with something that we would call space. For example, the Euclidean definition “a point is that which has no part” neither explains the concept of point nor shows how to use it nor establishes its existence. It does, however, indicate what a point is. The definition has meaning; it refers to an aspect of space that we already know.

Euclidean axioms are self–evident truths; the postulates are obvious statements that must be accepted before the rest can follow. Like the definitions, the axioms and postulates are statements about space that make explicit what we already know. Euclid’s axioms and postulates do more, however. They support and structure all of the subsequent argument; all of the rest of the subject is drawn out of or built upon these basics. The adequacy of this axiomatic structure to support all legitimate geometrical conclusions is the second, rational, characteristic of Euclidean knowledge.

When we consider issues in science and religion in the nineteenth century and even in subsequent years, we naturally think first of the evolutionary controversies that have commanded public attention. However, there are important ways in which developments in physical science continued to intersect with the interests of people of all religious beliefs. Indeed, the closer one approached the end of the twentieth century, the more the interaction between science and religion was dominated by topics involving the physical sciences, and the more they became as important to non-Christian religions as to various forms of Christianity. For the nineteenth century, most issues were new versions of debates that had been introduced long before. Because these reconsiderations were frequently prompted by new developments in physical science, forcing people of religious faith into a reactive mode, the impression grew that religion was increasingly being placed on the defensive. For a variety of reasons, this form of the relationship between the two fields changed greatly over the course of the twentieth century until, at the dawn of the third millennium of the common era, the intersection between science and religion is currently being informed both by new theological perspectives and by new developments in physical science.

Religion intersects with the physical sciences primarily in questions having to do with the origin, development, destiny, and meaning of matter and the material world. At the beginning of the period under review, the origin of matter itself was not regarded as a scientific question. The development of the cosmos, however, or how it had acquired its present contours and inhabitants, was a subject that had been informed by new telescopic observations and even more by the impressive achievements of Newtonian physical scientists of the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment had also produced fresh philosophical examinations of old religious questions and even of religious reasoning itself.

Quantum mechanics is a most intriguing theory, the empirical success of which is as great as its departure from the basic intuitions of previous theories. Its history has attracted much attention. In the 1960s, three leading contributors to this history, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Forman, and John Heilbron, put together the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics (AHQP), which contains manuscripts, correspondence, and interviews of early quantum physicists. In the same period, Martin Klein wrote clear and penetrating essays on Planck, Einstein, and early quantum theory; and Max Jammer published The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics, still the best available synthesis.

Since then, this subfield of the history of science has grown considerably, as demonstrated in accounts such as the five-volume compilation by Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg; the philosophically sensitive studies by Edward MacKinnon, John Hendry, and Sandro Petruccioli; Bruce Wheaton’s work on the empirical roots of wave-particle dualism; my own book on the classical analogy in the history of quantum theory; and a number of biographies.

These sources nicely complement one another. There have been, however, a couple of bitter controversies. Historians notoriously disagree about the nature of Planck’s quantum work around 1900. Whereas Klein sees in it a sharp departure from classical electrodynamics, Kuhn denies that Planck introduced any quantum discontinuity before Einstein. Here I take Kuhn’s side, although it follows from Allan Needell’s insightful dissertation that neither Klein nor Kuhn fully identified Planck’s goals.

Few branches of the physical sciences have had more of an impact on the twentieth-century world than radioactivity and nuclear physics. From its origins in the last years of the nineteenth century, the science of radioactivity spawned the discovery of hitherto unsuspected properties of matter and of numerous new elements. Its practitioners charted a novel kind of understanding of the structure and properties of matter, their achievements gradually winning wide acceptance. With its emphasis on the internal electrical structure of matter and its explanation of atomic and molecular properties by subatomic particles and forces, radioactivity transformed both physics and chemistry. Its offspring, nuclear physics and cosmic ray physics, consolidated and extended the reductionist approach to matter, ultimately giving rise to high energy physics, the form of physical inquiry that became characteristic of late-twentieth-century science: large, expensive machines designed to produce ever smaller particles to support ever more complex and comprehensive theories of the fundamental structure of matter.

The significance of nuclear physics extends far beyond the laboratory and even science itself, however. Practiced in only a handful of places in the 1930s, nuclear physics boomed during World War II, when it provided the scientific basis for the development of nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, nuclear and thermonuclear weapons were the key elements in the precarious military standoff between the superpowers. At the same time, the development of the civil nuclear power industry, of nuclear medicine, and of many other applications brought nuclear phenomena to the attention of a large public. Nuclear physicists came to enjoy enormous prestige and to command enormous resources for their science in the context of the nuclear state.

In the past century, the state has assumed a central role in fostering the development of science. Through direct action, such as subsidies and stipends, and indirect action, such as tax incentives, the modern nation-state supports research in universities, national laboratories, institutes, and industrial firms. Political leaders recognize that science serves a variety of needs: Public health and defense are the most visible, with research on radar, jet engines, and nuclear weapons among the most widely studied. Scientists, too, understand that state support is crucial to their enterprise, for research has grown increasingly complex and expensive, involving large teams of specialists and costly apparatuses. In some countries, philanthropic organizations have underwritten expenses. In communist countries, where the state took control of private capital in the name of the worker, the government was virtually the only source of funding.

The reasons for state support of research seem universal, bridging even great differences in the ideological superstructures that frame economic and political desiderata. Some reasons are tangible, such as national security, but some are intangible, including the desire to prove the superiority of a given system and its scientists through such visible artifacts as hydropower stations, particle accelerators, and nuclear reactors. Whether we consider tangible or intangible issues, capitalist or socialist economies, authoritarian or pluralist polities, the role of the state and its ideology is crucial in understanding the genesis of modern science, its funding, institutional basis, and epistemological foundations.

Language plays a key role in shaping the identity of a scientific discipline. If we take the term “discipline” in its common pedagogical meaning, a good command of the basic vocabulary is a precondition to graduation in a discipline When disciplines are viewed as communities of practitioners, they are also characterized by the possession of a common language, including esoteric terms, patterns of argumentation, and metaphors. The linguistic community is even stronger in research schools, as a number of studies emphasize. Sharing a language is more than understanding a specific jargon. Beyond the codified meanings and references of scientific terms, a scientific community is characterized by a set of tacit rules that guarantee a mutual understanding when the official code of language is not respected. Tacit knowing is involved not only in the understanding of terms and symbols but also in the uses of imagery, schemes, and various kinds of expository devices. A third important function of language in the construction of a scientific discipline is that it shapes and organizes a specific worldview, through naming and classifying objects belonging to its territory. This latter function is of special interest in chemistry.

According to Auguste Comte, the method of rational nomenclature is the contribution of chemistry to the construction of the positivistic or scientific method. Although earlier attempts at a systematic nomenclature were made in botany, the decision by late-eighteenth-century chemists to build up an artificial language based on a method of nomenclature played a key role in the emergence of modern chemistry.

The concept of the macromolecule was formed and evolved within the framework of two sciences that emerged in the twentieth century: polymer chemistry (or macromolecular chemistry) and molecular biology. Over the past three decades, a large number of books have been published on the history of these two fields. While practicing scientists have provided their personal reminiscences as well as technical reviews, historians have shed light on intellectual, institutional, and industrial aspects of the history of these sciences.

The existing literature, however, has rarely covered both fields simultaneously. Just as polymer chemistry and molecular biology are separate disciplines that have demarcated the communities and goals of the practitioners, in like manner have their histories been compiled and treated in isolation. While historians have been eager to look into the origins of molecular biology, they tend to pay little attention, if any, to polymer chemistry. The historical link between polymer chemistry and molecular biology is a subject yet to be explored. The macromolecule was a common conceptual ground that sustained the intellectual framework of the two sciences: Scientists of both fields sought a causal chain of evidence from macromolecular structures to their properties and functions. The development of the two sciences may well be seen as a process of elaboration of the macromolecular concept, as well as the “molecularization” of the physical and life sciences. In keeping with this perspective, this chapter will focus on the “science of macromolecules” from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Coleridge thought, talked and wrote about poetics and criticism throughout his life. Until 1820, these were often primary concerns; at other times, and later in his life, his ideas about literature were ancillary to his work on philosophy, religion, psychology, history or language. Yet the task of summarising Coleridge's philosophy and practice of literary criticism is a challenging one, because he prepared almost none of his criticism for publication and his notes were left in a chaotic form. Most of what we know about his critical opinions derives from the 'Shakespearean criticism' - not a coherent text, but surviving notes and reports concerning public lectures that Coleridge presented between 1808 and 1819. There is also a multitude of passages on literary criticism in Coleridge's Notebooks and in his copious marginal annotations to editions of Shakespeare and other books. Both the Notebooks and the marginalia overlap extensively with the public lectures, for Coleridge tended to lecture extempore based on scraps of paper and annotated volumes that he brought with him into the lecture hall. Some of his major ideas about criticism did take published form in Biographia Literaria (1817), but examining the notes and fragments that testify to his practice as a critic before and after the publication of Biographia allows us to see how those principles developed, and how Coleridge applied them to the study of Shakespeare, Milton and major European writers.

Throughout his life, S. T. Coleridge was a politically engaged thinker. From his student days as an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, when he participated in agitation in support of his hero, William Frend, to his later years as the 'Sage of Highgate' criticising the pervasion of materialist thinking and commercial ethics through all aspects of life, Coleridge was a deeply political man. His writings reveal him as someone who closely followed the contemporary political scene as it unfolded during one of the most turbulent and exciting periods in the nation's history, a man steeped in the leading ideas of European political philosophy. Coleridge gave political lectures, wrote leaders, essays and editorials for the press, in which he commented on the major issues of the time, published journals full of political comment, and produced three substantial political treatises. As a young man he published sonnets on key political figures of the time, such as Burke, Pitt, Priestley and William Godwin; poems of political and religious dissent; and a number of poems about his response to the French Revolution, most notably 'Fears in Solitude' and 'France: An Ode'. All this is remarkable in a writer known chiefly as the composer of several of the greatest poems in the English language.

The concept of the symbol was vitally important to Coleridge throughout his career as a poet, critic and professional man of letters. Although his articulation of this concept varied in emphasis at different moments of his career, the underlying concept of symbol remained important as a fundamental principle throughout his intellectual development. During the last two centuries, the concept of the symbol has become one of Coleridge's most influential contributions to the discourse of literary criticism.

One persistent area of concern throughout Coleridge’s career is the question of the relation between language and thought. Coleridge formulates this question as follows: ‘Is Logic the Essence of Thinking? in other words – Is thinking impossible without arbitrary signs? & – how far is the word “arbitrary” a misnomer? Are not words &c parts & germinations of the Plant? And what is the Law of their Growth?’ (CLi, 625). Coleridge is here pondering whether the arbitrary signs that, according to such contemporary linguists as John Horne Tooke, determine thought can in some sense be described as ‘natural’. This question is a central one for Coleridge; it recurs at several crucial moments in his intellectual career. The concept of symbol, as it evolved in his mature philosophy of language, was in large part an effort to overcome the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, and to demonstrate that at least in the realm of poetry, language could become the actual embodiment of thought.

Coleridge was not a feminist, although he included women amongst his best friends. Nor was his work directed systematically at issues of gender, definitions of masculinity and femininity, or the relations between the sexes, except as these matters intersected with other topics that fundamentally informed his work such as the French Revolution, social reform, faculties of mind, the professionalisation of poetry and the poet. Still, Coleridge is useful for thinking about gender and its articulation in the early nineteenth century, occasionally in what he wrote and more frequently in what he 'was' as writer and man. To proclaim in the early 1800s that 'there is a sex in our souls' when the revolution in female manners was being conducted on the opposite principle and was barely off the ground was to disassociate oneself from feminist causes and to align oneself with gender essentialists (Friend ii, 209). Most of Coleridge's comments on gender supported the social conservatism that usually follows from essentialist claims. They positioned women in the private sphere, viewed love as women's primary preoccupation, and characterised femininity as maternal, nurturing, dependent, and domestic. Even Coleridge's advocacy of androgyny, regarded ever since Virginia Woolf as his major positive contribution to gender analysis, supported a masculinist agenda, for it was attributed only to the genius of male minds.

Coleridge's life has proved difficult to narrate. Its events are hard to understand as a developmental sequence. Like Coleridge's personality, and like his writings, they disclose numerous facets in loose and disorganised connection. His drive to articulate a philosophy of unity, with its conspicuous successes and sometimes embarrassing failures, has its fundamental context in the great sweep of momentous political and social change in Britain and Europe during the period of his life. The moves from radical to conservative, from necessitarian rationalist to philosophical idealism and Anglican Christianity, were negotiated under external pressures which were, at once, sharply focused for Coleridge personally, and profoundly representative of the spiritual journey of an entire generation. This representative quality gives a particular importance not just to Coleridge's successes, but, perhaps even more so, to his failures and failings.

At the end of 1797, Coleridge was in a quandary. He needed a new poetic language that readers would not find obscure. He wanted a new political discourse too, or at least a new analysis of politics, for events at home and in Europe left him isolated and disheartened, no longer able to believe that the millennium was at hand. In early 1798, France invaded free Switzerland. Coleridge saw this event as a final betrayal of the revolution of which he had hoped so much. It left him dispirited: the ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality had been perverted; France had become an imperialist military despotism. Already opposed to Britain's imperialist and despotic government, Coleridge was now alienated from his own nation and its revolutionary neighbour. And he was forced to ask why the population at large did not share his disgust. At home and abroad, the people were distressingly loyal to their warmongering governments. In 'France: An Ode', he recalled how Britons had been bewitched into bellicosity. 'Aslavish band', they did the bidding of a cruel monarch who bound them with 'a wizard's wand' (27, 29). The French had followed suit, abandoning their new-found liberty for slavish obedience to tyrants who acted in its name: