Rewards and Recognition in the Scientific Community

In reflecting in later years, in Manchester and Oxford, on the nature of scientific discovery, the norms of scientific practice, and the awarding of priority and 

It was Wigner, Seitz, Pohl, and others who pioneered the solid-state field rather than Polanyi, largely because of their mastery of the new quantum mechanics, in which he never was at ease, and their theoretical application of quantum mechanics to solids. [61] Polanyi s pioneering work on surfaces and solids became part of the background, rather than the foreground of textbook science. Yet his legacy lay, too, not only in the scientific practice about which he wrote from a philosophical and 

This paper makes considerable use of the Michael Polanyi Papers (MPP in the notes), which are held at the Special Collections of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. I am grateful for permission to have consulted these Papers. Research for this project was supported by National Science Foundation grant no. SBR-9321305 and by the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities. 

Parts of this paper have been presented and discussed with colleagues at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Yale University. See my essays Laboratory Practice and the Physical Chemistry of Michael Polanyi, in F. L. Holmes and Trevor Levere, eds, Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry (Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 2000), 367-400 and Michael Polanyi s Theory of Adsorption How Premature in Ernest Hook, ed., Prematurity in Scientific Discovery (Berkeley University of California Press, in press). 

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1962). 

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