ABSTRACT
Never before has the history of science had such opportunities and confronted such challenges in the world of museums. On the one hand, recent trends in science history offer new involvement for museum collections and their interpreters. On the other, fashions in the public presentation of science seem to deny historical sensibilities by seeking to isolate transcendent principles from the contingencies of their creation, use and development. Just when historians of science are moving towards material culture, influential lobbies in science museology are retreating from it.
