“We Have Nothing to Learn from the Hun”:. Realization Dawns

When I returned to Cambridge in 1919 I aimed to bridge the gap between Lamb and Prandtl.

g. i. taylor, “When Aeronautical Science Was Young" (1966)1

Oscar Wilde declared that if you tell the truth you are bound to be found out sooner or later.2 There is a corresponding view that applies to scientific theories. Given good faith and genuine curiosity, a true theory will eventu­ally prevail over false ones. These sentiments make for good aphorisms but the epistemology is questionable. Even if it were right, there would still be the need to understand the contingencies and complications of the historical path leading to the acceptance of a theory. My aim in the next two chapters is to describe some of the contingencies that bore upon the fortunes of the cir­culatory theory of lift in Britain after the Great War. I shall come back to the philosophical analysis of theory acceptance in the final chapter of the book, when all the relevant facts have been marshaled. I begin the present discus­sion with some observations about the flow of information between German and British experts before, during, and after the Great War.