Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life

by Deborah R. Coen

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty traces the vital and varied roles of science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner family, whose members included Nobel Prize–winning biologist Karl Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, artists of the Vienna Secession, and a leader of Vienna’s women’s movement. Training her critical eye on the Exners through the rise and fall of Austrian liberalism and into the rise of the Third Reich, Deborah R. Coen demonstrates the interdependence of the family’s scientific and domestic lives, exploring the ways in which public notions of rationality, objectivity, and autonomy were formed in the private sphere. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty presents the story of the Exners as a microcosm of the larger achievements and tragedies of Austrian political and scientific life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

Genres: History, History Of Science, Nonfiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

Deborah R. Coen is professor of history and chair of Yale University’s Program in the History of Science and Medicine. Her research focuses on the modern physical and environmental sciences and on central European intellectual and cultural history. She earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard, an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows.

Reviews

[James E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really engaging history. Where the author tells you the story of a single family over several generations (that included numerous distinguished scientists and other public figures)-- yet through their story immerses you seamlessly in the cultural trends of the period-- music, art, scientific thought including how to think about the variability of nature. Are we uncomfortable with nature's variability, so we average out the variations and seek a "mean"? Or do we embrace the variabilty, study science "in the open," and study the variations as key clues to weather, microscopic movement, human emotions?
You are caught up in the feelings and ideas of Vienna at an exciting moment of change.