During the 20th century, history and philosophy of science both developed in ways that focused increasingly on the local and the particular, and less on general structures and long-term development.
In this talk, I shall argue that there is a growing need for big picture accounts and histories of the duree longue. Many developments related to science have become increasingly policy-driven, and we need the policy-making to be based on solid knowledge of how science has developed in the past as well as now. As the primary scholarly disciplines studying the sciences, history, philosophy and sociology of science therefore needs to create knowledge that can be used to inform and advice science policy makers, science managers and science educators.
I shall reflect on what this implies for the types of study that we need to conduct, and on how the study of recent and contemporary developments calls for an integration of historical, philosophical and sociological approaches.

For Born and Heisenberg, quantum mechanics was closed (geschlossene) insofar as the wave function contained all possible information on the state of the system at any given moment. Einstein, on the other hand, was convinced that God “is not playing dice”.
This contribution examines the links between determinism and religion in Einsteinian thought. Is belief in God an argument against chance in the physical sciences? That’s what Einstein’s famous quote might suggest: a superiorly intelligent Creator exists, hence phenomena are rationally determined, hence the indeterminacy of the physical world is an illusion. I will argue that, in Einstein’s case, the series of inferences must be taken in the other way around: the world is determined, hence the God of monotheistic religions does not exist. Neither he nor anyone else is “playing dice”. Einstein’s rejection of chance shows to be prior to his rejection of anthropomorphic God: “For anyone who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible.”
The aim of this paper is twofold. I shall first look at the roots of Einstein’s deep-seated belief in the determinism of the world, largely linked to his earliest scientific works. Then, I shall demonstrate how he associated his deterministic conviction with a “cosmic religious experience” which rejects any form of personal divinity that might intervene in the course of phenomena.