ABSTRACT
When scientists in our day meddle with the humanities, the outcomes are not always uplifting. Sometimes they are, as when art historians and chemists supplement each other’s expertise quite nicely in establishing or disproving the authenticity of some famous painting. In my own discipline, the history of science, the contributions scientists make are rarely so productive, unless (as, for instance, with Thomas Kuhn) they turn themselves into professional historians. Professional scientists with a layman’s interest in history certainly tend to display a deep-seated emotional involvement in past manifestations of their own present-day concerns. But the flip side of their praiseworthy engagement is most often a rather upsetting naiveté. Armed with a few facts of questionable reliability, even the most history-conscious scientists tend to lack even the most elementary idea of how historians are for good, long-established reasons wont to deal with past facts. Clearly, to them the sciences and the humanities are quite distinct, or even insuperably different, areas of scholarship.
