Natural scientists turn to problems of historical dynamics - “From the Life of Ideas”

The humanities are traditionally “stepdaughters” of the natural sciences, and are often not perceived as a science by representatives of the latter. Although the general criteria of scientificity are the same for all research, compliance with them in the humanities is much less often considered necessary, often “reducing” them to the level of speculative metaphysics, while natural science complicates everything and hones the skill of measurement.

As a result of the flourishing of positivism and its struggle with metaphysics, measurement as the main way of obtaining scientific data has been conceptualized by humanists for more than a century. Social phenomena have been studied using quantitative methods since the time of the founder of Russian and American sociology P.A. Sorokin, and they reached historical science relatively late, but even here, when analyzing, for example, mass sources, one cannot do without them.

Despite the gradual diffusion of methods, the confrontation between the sciences of nature and man continues. Interest in the problems of human society forces biologists, physicists and mathematicians to take on material familiar to humanists and produce new concepts.

Having recently turned to the problem of the individual, particular and unique in history, today we present work on the general, natural and massive - on the influence of solar activity on human society. In the “From the Life of Ideas” section, “Polit.ru” publishes an article by B.M. Vladimirsky about “space weather” and social phenomena from the forthcoming third issue of the popular science magazine of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Astronomical and Geodetic Society “Earth and the Universe”. The idea discussed in the article has a difficult life: eighty years ago Chizhevsky’s first work on this topic appeared, but until now the correlation of solar and social activity exists only in the problematic field of natural sciences.