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This paper examines the complex and evolving relationship between science and the military in the development of listening technologies by British, French and German combatants during the First World War to combat increasingly effective ballistics and artillery on the Western Front. Land-based combat changed from the visual to the aural with an increasing selection of audio-based surveillance technologies being made available, notably sound-ranging, in part to combat the physical limitations of the human ear in the battlefield space. The article concludes by analyzing how post-war physics responded to these developments in sound-based battlefield technologies.

In a recent book on The Publics of Science; Experts and Laymen Through History, Agustí Nieto-Galan introduced his subject of a (mostly Western) history of public science, covering the times from the Scientific Revolution to the twenty-first century, with reference to Sigmund Freud. In one of his essays of cultural critique, Freud had, so to speak, put culture itself on his couch, and this session also featured talk about science and technological application. Civilization and Its Discontents identified a factor of disillusionment in the progress of science and technology, which gave rise to “The Uneasiness in Culture” (the literal translation of the title of Freud's German essay Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), and this uneasiness tainted a great deal of the happiness science and technology were intended to cultivate (Nieto-Galán 2011; Freud 1930). New technology and inventions like telephones, ocean liners, or drugs, Freud argued, were mostly remedies for negative developments technology had just created; for instance, without modern transportation people would stay close to each other and not need any telephone. (However, he did not address the issue of whether scientific knowledge itself may have provided some satisfaction.) The modern individual, as analyzed by Freud, was therefore constantly ill at ease with modern scientific and technological culture.

ArgumentGerman twentieth-century history is characterized by stark changes in the political system and the momentous consequences of World Wars I and II. However, instead of uncovering specific kinds or periods of “Kaiserreich science,” “Weimar science,” or “Nazi science” together with their public manifestations and in such a way observing a narrow link between popular science and political orders, this paper tries to exhibit some remarkable stability and continuity in popular science on a longer scale. Thanks to the rich German history of scientific leadership in many fields, broad initiatives for science popularization, and a population and economy open to scientific progress, the media offered particularly rich popular science content, which was diversified for various audiences and interests. Closer consideration of the format, genre, quality, and quantity of popular science, and of the uses and value audiences attributed to it, along with their respective evolution, reveals infrastructures underpinning science communication. Rather than dealing with specific discourses, the conditions of science communication are at the center of this article. Therefore I focus on the institutions, rules, laws, and economies related to popular science, as well as on the philosophical, moral, and national propositions related to it, and also on the interactions among this ensemble of rather heterogeneous elements. This approach allows a machinery of popular scientific knowledge to be identified, in Foucauldian terms adispositif, one which is of a particularly cultural nature.

While science education and popularization by means of print media developed in quite similar forms in many nations, the advent of radio resulted in initiatives to bring science on the air that were rather heterogeneous from country to country. The German case stands out with respect to quantity, variety and ambition, and also for its special mechanism of planning and controlling educational programs on science and technology. Hence it is argued that a closer look at how the chances of the new medium were discussed and implemented in Weimar Germany can provide a scale of reference for the development of science communication on the radio in other countries. For this reason a brief summary of the the respective developments in the United States and Europe is presented, before discussing in some detail Germany’s particular institutional organization, program structures, combination of radio broadcasts and print material into a kind of multimedia, and various formats and genres.

On the basis of an analysis of popular German journals and book series of science communication the question is posed whether the relation between science and public took on different forms in the 20th century compared to those that had been widely discussed for the 19th century under the term science "popularization." It is argued that marked changes in this relation occurred around 1900 and again in the passage from the 1950s to the 1960s. Instead of extending the concept of popularization to modern times or tracing back roots of the knowledge society substantially, it appears suitable to identify an era of science communication between c. 1900 and 1960. This periodization as well as a layered model of the exchanges between science and public is then applied to some general theses from the literature about the medialization of science and a fracture between science and public, respectively.

Physics and Politics in the Early Federal Republic of Germany. Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan between Scientific and Political Discourse. – Contrasting the historiography of two major developments in 20th century German history, the creation of quantum mechanics in 1925 and the dispute on the nuclear armament of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957, the question is raised to which extent the scientific culture was able to bridge political disagreement within the German physicists' community. A twofold story of the private and public exchange between Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan among others on the scientists' position to nuclear armament on the one hand and the writing of the history of quantum mechanics on the other hand displays different types of relating scientific work and moral responsibility. Neither politics nor science went on unaltered after the disputes between physics and politics in the early Federal Republic of Germany.

The use of the concept of social history of science is sketched in the Anglo-American and the German discussions from the mid 1970s up to recent work. By presenting a 'social map' of a selected scientific community it is argued that between the categories of discipline and single scientist there exists a wide 'social space' of groups within which science is pursued. In adopting a milieu theoretic approach an ecology of science is proposed as a suitable extension of the social history of science..