‘Van meten tot weten’. De opkomst van de experimentele fysica aan de Nederlandse universiteiten in de negentiende eeuw

From measurement to knowledge: the rise of experimental physics in the Netherlands The last decade of the 19th century saw a rapid rise of laboratory-based research in experimental physics in the Netherlands. This article discusses the educational background of the emergence of this new discipline as well as the specific shape it received in the hands of its pioneers. Traditionally, Dutch university-physics was affiliated with mathematical sciences such as mathematics and astronomy rather than with a laboratory-based science like chemistry. Partly as a result of this orientation little experimental research in physics was done during the first half of the century. The third quarter of the century witnessed the emergence of the first university chairs exclusively dedicated to physics. During this period facilities were created to allow for practical exercises by advanced students. To this end assistants were appointed. The most important novelty of this period was perhaps the creation of an new secondary school type, the hogere burgerschool (HBS), which, unlike the classical gymnasium, provided ample training in science. The enactment offered science students the perspective of a teaching career. The emergence of laboratories and practical exercises did not however imply that professors aimed at providing students with a training oriented towards research. Instead professors, disseminating a self-image as tutors of a new science-educated social elite, advertised a broad education and distrusted specialization. Research was still not high on the agenda. The new higher-education act of 1876 resulted in the creation of a large number of new chairs in science. Gradually physics chairs were split up in chairs for theoretical physics and chairs for experimental physics. From the eighties onward the latter were occupied by physicists who transformed the earlier teaching laboratories into research laboratories. Unlike their predecessors they gave priority to research as the primary goal of higher education. The first among them were the Leiden professor Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Herman Haga. Both of them stressed the primacy of measurement and precision above discovery of new effects. They thus expressed the professional ethic which provided the new discipline with a clear identity. In this respect (and more generally in their stress on research) they reflected the influence of on the one hand Dutch astronomers (partly mediated by the influential physicist Bosscha) and on the other hand German laboratories, where they had received part of their training as physicists. Ironically both the Leyden and the Groningen laboratory achieved some renown during the nineties through the creation of new physical effects (the Zeeman-effect and the diffraction of x-rays). The new self-image was not specific to physicists. In the final decade of the century Dutch scientists expressed a strong research ethos with clear nationalist overtones. In physics such patriotism supported close cooperation between theoreticans and experimental physicists aiming at the creation of a Dutch school of physics.

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