would, in Hessen's eyes, show that scientific validity could exist whatever the motivations were for undertaking it. However, there is little evidence that his paper had any effect in the internal Soviet philosophical battles over Einstein's work. Despite its lack of effect in his home country, Hessen's thesis had a wide effect in Western history of science. Hessen's work has been dismissed as "vulgar Marxism" . However, its focus on the relationship between society and science was, in its time, seen as novel and inspiring. It was a challenge to the notion that the history of science was the history of individual genius in action, the dominant view at least since William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences in 1837. Few contemporary Western readers of Hessen took his paper at face value. His rigid connection between economy and knowledge was not accepted by a majority of historians. However, his assertion that a connection existed between the growth of knowledge and the art of war, and that ballistics played a central part of physics and Newton's world, was viewed with keen interest. In the shadow of the first war to employ chemical weapons, and as the war machines were again gearing up in preparation for another world war, the role between science, technology, and warfare was becoming more interesting to scholars and scientists. Previous views of science as separate from the mundane or vulgar aspects of practical life — the disembodiment of the scientific mind from its context — were becoming less attractive than a view that science and scientists were increasingly embedded in the world in which they worked. Physics Institute and death From 1934 to 1936 Hessen was a deputy director of the Physics Institute in Moscow headed by S.I. Vavilov. On 22 August 1936 Hessen was arrested by the NKVD. He was secretly tried for terrorism by a military tribunal together with his gymnasium school teacher Arkadij O. Apirin. They were found guilty on 20 December 1936 and were executed by shooting the same day. On 21 April 1956 both Apirin and Hessen were rehabilitated (posthumously exonerated). See also History of science and technology Writings Boris Hessen, The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia in: Freudenthal, G., McLaughlin, P. (eds) The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, pp.41–101. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 278. Springer, Dordrecht. (Russian original: ). New English translation in: