Caltech History Professor Receives Koyré Medal

The Alexandre Koyré medal is awarded roughly every other year by the International Academy of the History of Science for a scholar’s lifetime achievements in the field. The recipient for 2023 is Caltech’s Jed Buchwald, the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History. The awards ceremony was held in Paris on March 18, 2024.

Buchwald became interested in the history of science while an undergraduate at Princeton University. He pursued doctoral work at Harvard and has been a professor at the University of Toronto, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and since 2001, at Caltech. He has authored six books, edited 11 books, and serves as the editor or co-editor for six book series and journals, all in the history of science and technology.

We recently sat down with Buchwald to learn more about his fascinating and varied career.

You’re the author of everything from The Rise of the Wave Theory of Light, which covers optical theories and experiments in the early nineteenth century, to Newton and the Origin of Civilization, about Sir Isaac Newton’s lesser-known eighteenth-century theories about history and theology. Do you have a favorite among these projects, one you’re particularly proud of, or had fun working on?

My first three books are on the history of the experimental and theoretical development of optics and electrodynamics. But in 1999, maybe 2000, I went to an old bookstore in Paris looking for mathematics books from the early nineteenth century when I saw something that was clearly very old. It was stamped in gold on the back and had the word “zodiac” in French on it. I opened it up and found a series of pamphlets which had been written about an Egyptian zodiac taken from the Temple of Dendera, just north of Luxor in Egypt, and brought to France. This zodiac generated a series of controversies about religion and science involving mathematicians and astronomers. One of my last graduate students at MIT, before I came to Caltech, Diane Greco Josefowicz, is an excellent writer, and I asked if she’d be interested in collaborating on a book about this Egyptian zodiac.

After we completed that book, Diana [Kormos Buchwald, the Robert M. Abbey Professor of History and director and general editor of the Einstein Papers Project] and I were in Egypt taking a group of Caltech alumni around, and we went to visit Dendera to photograph the zodiac. I learned that one of the people involved in criticizing the depredation of this particular temple (the zodiac was cut out and is now in the Louvre) was a young Frenchman named Jean-François Champollion who was instrumental in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics in the early nineteenth century. I got in touch with Diane Josefowicz and asked if she’d be interested in collaborating on another book. This one we called The Riddle of the Rosetta.

You were the sole author of your first three books, but you’ve had co-authors for your last three books. What has it been like to collaborate on books after writing alone?

It’s been great. Josefowicz’s first degree is in English, and she’s superb at perceiving the quintessence, as it were, that captures a cultural moment. In writing we went back and forth for nearly a decade, editing one another’s work. The same holds for Mordechai Feingold [Kate Van Nuys Page Professor of the History of Science and the Humanities], my co-author for Newton and the Origin of Civilization. I worked on Newton’s evaluations of evidence and astronomical calculations, while Moti subtly recreated Newton’s considerations in interpreting words and myths from ancient sources, including biblical ones. Again, we closely edited one another’s work.

How did you find yourself working not only at the interface of the humanities and the sciences, but between the humanities and the most rigorous sciences, where you need real technical expertise to be able to understand the work and communicate about it?

I was originally going to be a physicist and was taking graduate courses in the subject, but early on I attended a lecture series in the history of science from Thomas Kuhn. He was already quite famous for his theory that science proceeds steadily for a period of time before it is upended by an intellectual revolution that provides the paradigm for the next phase of scientific work. I eventually became Kuhn’s research assistant, and that pulled me into the history of science.

The history of science is and can be a marvelous field as long as people pay close attention to the substance and technical underpinnings of the subject and do not focus principally on aspects that, while they may provide illuminating contextual background, bypass the main event. You cannot provide a full and proper understanding of the historical course of evolving science without focusing directly on content because that’s what the subject is all about.

How do you feel about winning the Koyré medal?

I was quite surprised and of course am honored. However, almost everybody who has won that prize has been retired for 10 or 20 years. I’m now working with Moti on a book concerning Newton’s route to the Principia and another with my last graduate student from MIT (Chen-Pang Yeang, now a professor at the University of Toronto) on replications of Hertz’s experiments on electric waves. So I hope this medal doesn’t mean it’s time to stop researching and writing!