The Natural History of Disciplines

At this stage of my enquiry 1 can draw only a few tentative conclusions from the case-histories presented above. I shall return at the end of the book to the issue of how disciplines evolve and when, to adopt biological parlance, a new discipline becomes self-fertile. 

We have seen that physical chemistry evolved from a deep dissatisfaction in the minds of a few pioneers with the current state of chemistry as a whole one could say that its emergence was research-driven and spread across the world by hordes of new Ph.Ds. Chemical engineering was driven by industrial needs and the corresponding changes that were required in undergraduate education. Polymer science started from a wish to understand certain natural products and moved by 

Aernoudt. K., van Houtte, P. and Leffers, T. (1993) in Plastic Deformation and Fracture of Materials, edited by H. Mughrabi, Volume 6 of Materials Science and Technology, ed. R.W., Cahn, P. Haasen and E.J. Kramer (VCH, Weinheim) p. 89. 

Alexander, A.E. and Johnson, P. (1949) Colloid Science, 2 volumes (Clarendon Press. Oxford). 

Bartlett, P. and van Megen, W. (1993) in Granular Matter, ed. A. Mehta (Springer, Berlin) p. 195. 

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