Single Review on past events

He has just arrived as Senior Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg and directly presented his research in the Jour Fixe on 5 July. Giora Hon is a full professor at the Department of Philosophy, the University of Haifa, Israel, and holds a BSc in Physics as well as an MA and PhD in History and Philosophy of Science. Hence his work is located at the interface between the history of physics and the philosophy of science. What fits better in the interdisciplinary context of the Zukunftskolleg? This was also shown in his presentation, in which he talked about “Maxwell’s contrived analogy: An early version of the methodology of modeling". James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottishphysicist and mathematician who studied among other things electricity and magnetism beginning in 1855/56. One of his prominent achievements was the formulation of an electromagnetic theory that unified all previously unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity, magnetism and optics in one consistent theory.

Giora Hon argued that, until the middle of the 19^th century, modeling was not considered a scientific methodology; much due to the pioneering work of Maxwell this methodology was introduced into science as a new concept at the turn of the last century. Maxwell adopted William Thomson´s physical analogy and modified it into what he called mathematical analogy. But Maxwell´s argumentation was different from that of Thomson: he did not seek an analogy with some physical system in a domain different from electromagnetism as advocated by William Thomson; rather, he constructed an entirely artificial one to suit his goal—recasting Michael Faraday’s rich experimental results in electromagnetism into mathematical formulae. Maxwell gave a new meaning to analogy; in fact, it comes close to modeling in current usage.