How English Beat German As the Language of Science

HughPickens.com writes German was the dominant scientific language in 1900. Today if a scientist is going to coin a new term, it's most likely in English. And if they are going to publish a new discovery, it is most definitely in English. Look no further than the Nobel Prize awarded for physiology and medicine to Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser. Their research was written and published in English. How did English come to dominate German in the realm of science? BBC reports that the major shock to the system was World War One, which had two major impacts. According to Gordin, after World War One, Belgian, French and British scientists organized a boycott of scientists from Germany and Austria. They were blocked from conferences and weren't able to publish in Western European journals. "Increasingly, you have two scientific communities, one German, which functions in the defeated [Central Powers] of Germany and Austria, and another that functions in Western Europe, which is mostly English and French," says Gordin.

The second effect of World War One took place in the US. Starting in 1917 when the US entered the war, there was a wave of anti-German hysteria that swept the country. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota there were many, many German speakers. World War One changed all that. "German is criminalized in 23 states. You're not allowed to speak it in public, you're not allowed to use it in the radio, you're not allowed to teach it to a child under the age of 10," says Gordin. The Supreme Court overturned those anti-German laws in 1923, but for years they were the law of the land. What that effectively did, according to Gordin, was decimate foreign language learning in the US resulting in a generation of future scientists who came of age with limited exposure to foreign languages. That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world. "The story of the 20th Century is not so much the rise of English as the serial collapse of German as the up-and-coming language of scientific communication," concludes Gordin.

Comments

death of German math

[phantomfive]

I read Turing's Cathedral recently that discussed this exact topic (with relation to math). German was still very strong after WW1 (Godel, Von Neumann, Hilbert, Einstein, Schrödinger and even more if you include groups like Hungary and Poland who were strong in math but discussed it in German, which is where we got Ulam and Teller). Unfortunately for the Germans, a lot of those mathematicians were Jewish, and they left when they saw war coming. Most of Ulam's family that didn't leave were killed in the Holocaust.

In the US, some foresighted individuals (like Veblen, Aydeloytte and Flexner at Princeton's Advanced Institute especially) made a huge effort to help the German scientists escape. So many top scientists did leave that the entire center of science moved from the German world to America.

Re:German illegal?

[bobbied]

The USA has not always walked worthy of the document that started it all (The Declaration of Independence) but we are generally progressing towards the realization of it's principles.

Did we have slaves? Initially, yes. However, we did fight a bloody civil war in the 1860's and managed to abolish it in our laws. Tens of thousands of lives, both white and black where lost in this war. The USA paid in blood to do right.

Did we illegally arrest and hold Japanese Americans during WWII? Yes, but we have recognized that it was wrong and done what we can to restore what was lost.

Did we take territory from Mexico during a war? Of course, during the war we actually took ALL of Mexico, seems to me we gave a lot of it back and I'd bet that the people who live there now wish we had kept it all. Also don't forget that this war was to protect the disputed areas called Texas which had already declared it's independence and then joined the Union in 1845. Territory that had gone though multiple country's hands, including France, Spain before Mexico ended up with it. But this war was initiated by Mexico's attacks, and when the USA totally defeated Mexico, we gave most of it back to them.

Civil rights laws have (as a matter of law) established equal rights for all Americans. We may not have lived up to that ideal, but it is ILLEGAL to discriminate based on race or gender. Any failure to meet that ideal needs to be subject to legal action and dealt with in the courts.

How all this says that the USA is a bad place is beyond me. Are we perfect? No. But we are advancing closer to the ideal expressed in our founding document. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." We need to keep advancing on the ideal set forth in the Declaration of Independence and should not abandon our past by declaring the USA a lost cause. Because it will only truly be a lost cause if we give up.