Up until the early 21st century, the History (and Philosophy) of Modern Physics primarily focused on the origins of modern physics in the first third of the 20th century, with the emergence of quantum mechanics and the relativity theories. These topics
were investigated with close attention to the conceptual and technical details of theory and experiment; but in recent years, this field of research has been running out of steam, and research has turned more strongly to the new frontier of the history of physics after WWII. This latter research has, however, been far less technically and conceptually informed.
In my talk I will argue that this development, while paralleling developments in other subfields of the history of science, is not actually part of an ideologically driven rebranding of the discipline – rather it is motivated by the great difficulties involved in constructing technically and conceptually informed histories of post-WWII physics. I will further argue that these difficulties do not just consist in sheer technical complexity.
We also encounter a great plurality of different approaches due to the global growth of physics; subject matters that have not percolated into the undergraduate curriculum, which most historians of modern physics would be familiar with; manifold questions in fundamental physics that remain unresolved to this day; and novel forms of transport and communication that devalued what is still the preferred source in the history of
modern physics: the long-form, explanatory journal paper. I will conclude with thoughts on how to address these challenges.

In the 1920s, Japanese Marxist intellectuals developed the study of science history, emphasizing the interplay of historical and natural dialectics. While suppressing Marxist activities in the 1930s, the government began supporting historical studies in natural sciences, aiming to validate the ingenuity of premodern Japanese who were thought to have anticipated aspects of modern Western science. Following World War II, Marxists re-entered academia, celebrating modern science as a tool against the semi-feudal government that served monopolistic capitalism and American imperialism.
In the late 1960s, however, non-party Marxists grew increasingly skeptical of this approach, a sentiment that culminated in widespread student protests across colleges, where critics argued that modern science itself was responsible for contemporary inequities, injustices, and suffering—exemplified by the atrocities of the Vietnam War, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, and more.
This critique, coupled with the introduction of Thomas S. Kuhn’s paradigm theory in the early 1970s, spurred a new interest in relativizing the authority of Western science. Although this interpretation diverged from Kuhn’s intent, it attracted young scholars and led to a surge in science studies.
The fall of communist regimes by the early 1990s lessened political motives in historical studies. Given that other political issues, such as racial or gender inequality and environmental concerns, have not captivated students to the same degree as Marxist ideologies once did, the academic discipline of the history of science in Japan now enjoys relative stability as ‘normal science.’

The aim of my presentation is to address both goals of the symposium by focusing on one part of the so-called Global South, namely Latin America, and more specifically on Argentina.

To address the first goal, I will begin by distinguishing two types of sources of possible crises: on the one hand, those related to the socio-material, i.e., material, cultural, political, and social conditions necessary for the development and flourishing of the history of science; on the other hand, those related to the historiographical turn in the ways of doing the history of science, as mentioned in the abstract of the symposium.

Whereas the first type of potential crisis directly affects the Global South, this is not necessarily the case for the second type.

With regard to the second goal of the symposium, I would like to suggest that a conceptual (intellectual, theoretical, philosophical) history of science, in some of the ways in which it is being carried out by some researchers in Latin America and Argentina, could contribute to resolving this second type of crisis of the history of science in general, if there is one.