The Mach-Planck debate revisited: democratization of science or elite knowledge?

Abstract

Is scientific knowledge the domain of the intellectual elite or is it everyman’s concern, thus making the popularization of science a democratic activity integrally required of science itself? This is a question whose history extends back even longer than the enlightenment period. As technology starts to permeate every inch of daily life, the issues involved for our future development become more pressing and a matter of socio-political development. Dostoyevsky brought this to the point in a fictional dispute between a Great Inquisitor and Christ. This was also the subject of fierce scientific debates, the most prominent of which was probably the debate between Ernst Mach and Max Planck at the turn of the century, before the first world war, when the new Physics (quantum theory and relativity) was discovered and its relevance for our view of the world and our place in it was hotly discussed. For Mach, the job of popularization should rest with science - an informed public cannot be manipulated as easily by ‘pop science’. This article focuses on the mostly neglected political epistemological level of the debate, its sporadic later flare-ups in different places with different protagonists (Wagenschein, Wittenberg), and its relevance for the popularization of science today.