Recounting the compelling tale of a systematic discovery that took greater than a century to accomplish, this trail-blazing monograph makes a speciality of methodological concerns and is the 1st to delve into this topic. This booklet charts how the biochemical and biophysical mechanisms of photosynthesis have been teased out through succeeding generations of scientists, and the writer highlights the reconstruction of the heuristics of modelling the mechanism—analyzed at either person and collective levels.

Photosynthesis makes for an instructive instance. the 1st tentative rules have been built via natural chemists round 1840, whereas by means of 1960 an complicated suggestion at a molecular point, for either gentle and darkish reactions, used to be tested. The latter continues to be assumed to be essentially right this day. the writer makes a persuasive case for a traditionally trained philosophy of technology, in particular relating to method, and advocates a background of technology whose narrative deploys philosophical ways and different types. She indicates how scientists’ makes an attempt to formulate, justify, adjust, ascertain or criticize their versions are top interpreted as sequence of coordinated study activities, depending on a community of large- and subordinated epistemic targets, and guided by means of recurrent heuristic strategies.

With committed chapters on key figures akin to Otto Warburg, who borrowed epistemic basics from different disciplines to facilitate his personal paintings on photosynthesis, and on extra normal issues in terms of the improvement of the sphere after Warburg, this new paintings is either a philosophical mirrored image at the nature of clinical enquiry and a close historical past of the approaches at the back of one in all science’s most crucial discoveries.