John Heilbron’s intellectual rigour transformed how scholars approach the history of science. The intersection of people, scientific ideas and institutions was his ___domain, ranging from early modern European astronomy to the revolution of twentieth-century physics. The author of more than 20 books, Heilbron was known for his razor-sharp analysis and perceptive discernment of human frailties and strengths. He has died aged 89.

Heilbron understood institutions and how they channelled and sustained a scientist’s work. In Lawrence and his Laboratory, for instance, a 1990 book he wrote with fellow science historian Robert W. Seidel, he laid bare the world of physicist Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the ‘cyclotron’ particle accelerator whose work led to the setting up of National Laboratories in Berkeley and Livermore, California. By putting discussions of nuclear science and radioisotopes cheek by jowl with descriptions of the building and financing of institutions, the book set the stage for similar histories in other areas of ‘big science’.

The path to the quantum atom

And Heilbron’s 1999 study The Sun in the Church discussed how, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the Catholic church sought to resolve astronomical questions regarding solar motion using meridian lines laid into cathedral floors. Turning the narrative of hostility between religion and science on its head, Heilbron built an empirical case for how church clerics had contributed to the triumph of heliocentric theory. And he did it with precision and verve.

John Heilbron was born in San Francisco, California, in 1934 and he studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He did undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics in the heady time after the Second World War, before switching to the history of physics for his PhD, which he earned in 1964. Heilbron studied at Berkeley with Thomas S. Kuhn, whose work at the intersection of history and the philosophy of science introduced the world to the concepts of ‘scientific revolutions’ and ‘paradigm shifts’. Kuhn also underscored the crucial role of the scientific community as the arbiter of how well a theory fits the real world. The student took seriously the teacher’s demand that scholars consider the history of science as it really happened, rather than favouring the smoothed-out narratives that retrospection might bring. But Heilbron didn’t follow Kuhn’s philosophical tack, because he considered history to be hard enough without engaging in abstract arguments about how science works.

Heilbron’s early work examined the theory of atomic structure in the decades around 1900. For his PhD, he trawled through published papers that led to the model of the atom proposed by Danish physicist Niels Bohr and gathered archives and testimonies from the founding generation of quantum physicists. The field of quantum physics and the transformation of scientific institutions that occurred on the cusp of the twentieth century were ripe for study. But he did not stop at that era. He also studied Europe’s early modern period (1450–1789), focusing on theories of electricity and natural philosophy. And he pursued broad questions in the physical sciences, including ideas and societal impacts that emerged from the field across centuries.