Uncategorized – Page 16 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Historians as Methodologists (Isis, Pt. 4)

Jane Maienschein, Manfred Laubichler, and Andrea Loettgers, in “How Can History of Science Matter to Scientists?” offer a number of cases in which the study of past experiments or chance encounters with historians have led scientists to examine their methodology and do things like question key assumptions, leading to productive scientific research. The chance encounter is a frequent spur to innovation, whether or not it is historical. These encounters can be substantive, such as reading about research in an unrelated field, or trivial: Richard Feynman told the story about how he was inspired to new research by seeing a student toss a plate in the air in a cafeteria, which led him to think about the physics of its wobble, which led to, um, magnificent things (Feynman didn’t say).

Anyway, if inspiration can come from the chance encounter, maybe the real question is how this benefit can be systematized. The reform of methodology and the questioning of assumptions reminded me of a couple of mathematician philosophers turned operations researchers I ran into in my dissertation work: West Churchman (right) and Russell Ackoff, who were students of Edgar A. Singer, who was a student of William James and a proponent of a little-known philosophy of science called “experimentalism” (which will be the subject of a talk at HSS this year by Alan Richardson; update: he’s also on the PSA program, which is joint with HSS this year, talking about Churchman and Ackoff as well: good times).

Before their turn to OR around 1950, Churchman and Ackoff proposed establishing Institutes of Experimental Method or Methodology Departments in universities, which would train multi-disciplinary “methodologists” and subject current experimental methods to systematic scrutiny to make sure they

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History as Font of Lessons (Isis, Pt. 3)

Santayana, yadda, yadda… This afternoon I’m going to write about Andrew Hamilton and Quentin Wheeler’s “Taxonomy and Why History of Science Matters for Science: A Case Study”, which derives lessons from the history of numerical taxonomy (phenetics) for the future of DNA bar-coding. I wasn’t aware of phenetics, which seems to have been a mid-century attempt to measure living things and then group them without recourse to any overarching theory. This has intriguing parallels to the mathematics of the Bourbaki collective that I won’t go into (and don’t actually know much about), but I just wanted to throw that out there. The big point here is that the phenetics movement precipitously collapsed after its haphazard data-collecting failed to produce a believable taxonomy, and the authors argue that the same could happen to DNA bar-coding, which uses DNA arrangements to draw relationships between different organisms.

The first point I’d like to address is the use of the lesson from history. In my first post in this series, I discussed the use of history by filmmakers. Here I’m more reminded of the constant use of history in politics, which is notoriously dicey in its deployment of analogies with past events. Here in America we’re being subjected to fairly sophisticated historical analyses on a daily basis as the Presidential campaign goes forward. Inevitably, we learn why the strategies being deployed are similar to Reagan vs. Carter in 1980 or Nixon vs. Kennedy in 1960, and so on… I think, as with filmmakers using history, this is both inevitable and healthy, but there’s a difference.

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History and Science Education (Isis Pt. 2)

Continuing on with the new Isis focus section, let’s start at the beginning, with Graeme Gooday, John Lynch, physicist Kenneth Wilson, and Constance Barsky’s article, “Does Science Education Need the History of Science?” This article is divided into two more-or-less separate points: 1) What role could history of science play amid a science curriculum, and 2) couldn’t we be doing more to debunk popular misconceptions of the history of science, with intelligent design proponents’ arguments as a case-in-point?

The authors start out by addressing the possibility that history of science could actually be seen corruptive because of its relativistic leanings, citing an old Stephen Brush article “Should the History of Science Be Rated X?” A couple of superficial points here: first, the old X rating is now NC-17, so ostensibly college kids are old enough to endure our corrupting forces!; and second, I am amused that I indirectly inherited my History 174 course at Maryland from Brush (AIP postdocs have been teaching it for a while now). Anyway, the authors (and I) assume this is a non-issue these days, so we move on.

More to the point, the article portrays history as a potential force of enculturation while science courses portray a more “static” and stripped-down picture of what science is. We can show how scientific communities

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Web Lab

This is just a quick post to point out the new “web lab” tab at the top of the blog. Basically, this space will be used to air ideas for new kinds of web applications. Right now it’s a demonstration of what sort of information a biography-oriented page of my new web project would look like. I threw together the I I Rabi example last fall when I was first pitching this idea; based on this template, if you have any comments on what kind of information is useful or might be useful I’d like to hear them. I’ll put up new examples from time to time.

Historians, what are they good for?

It’s been a good night, watching the Milwaukee Brewers and the St. Louis Cardinals on ESPN while sprawled out on the couch with the latest Isis, marinating in the humid nighttime heat of Washington, DC. Too bad I’m out of beer. The focus section of this issue asks the pointed question “What is the value of the history of science?” Can we be of use outside of our own academic interests? All in all, I’m underwhelmed, with the exception of Zuoyue Wang and Naomi Oreskes’ look at historians’ actual participation in public policy debates. (Disclosure: Naomi is overseeing my Antarctica project that I’ve mentioned from time to time, but I really do think it’s the best of the lot). I’m going to do a series of posts on this section, but, since none of the articles really captures my own view of the potential of our discipline, I thought I’d start by airing my perspective.

First off, I feel somewhat vindicated in my continual ragging on the case study approach, because the articles pretty uniformly take a view of history as relating to the “telling historical incident” rather than the analysis of historical traditions, which I think really narrows the potential contributions of the field (see my responses to the Locality versus Globality series on Galison’s Problems from the last Isis, and, of course, have a look at his original entries).

My own perspective on this issue relates a lot to my understanding of how history inflects disciplines other than science, particularly creative disciplines which seem to encourage a sort of historical geekdom among participants. Modern filmmakers, for example, know about and understand the French New Wave. They of course know the technical bits: jump cuts, hand-held cameras,

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Web work and physics historiography

In Friday’s post, there was a bit about relying on “iconic individuals” etc…, which I don’t think necessarily applies to the historiography of a lot of fields; but is probably still true of the historiography of physics, which tends to focus heavily on quantum mechanics, the atomic bomb, and the “big science” of tiny particles… and Einstein. This historiography concentrates on perhaps 2-3 dozen people. There are exceptions, of course, but simply creating exceptions to the rule does not create new narratives and interpretations of history. It’s struck me that using new kinds of publication formats might be the best way forward. So I’m now in the initial stages of a two year project to create a web resource containing the biographical details on about 600 American physicists from the post-1945 period: members of the National Academy of Sciences, Nobel Prize and APS-prize winners, department chairs, members of major government or international committees, etc…. These names will then be interlinked through institutional pages (departments, gov’t labs, committees…), and through major lines of research (assembling these from review articles, secondary sources…).

From: David Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences. 33 (2002): 131-159.

The project is inspired, in part, by current work of Dave Kaiser on the postwar physics “bubble” (when PhDs awarded in physics multiplied rapidly), and its attendant impact on teaching. Kaiser’s work makes clear that the period brought major changes in what it meant to do physics. But this also has to do with “historiography from below”. On Friday, we got into a nice discussion about shifting winds in the history of science profession, and how a rejection of triumphal histories and military histories have allowed historians to discount military R&D in their appraisals of 20th-century “science” in discussions of science and the state, etc. This discussion inevitably has political overtones, but the fate of historiography from below isn’t necessarily bound to the shifting political winds. In this case, it involves things like

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Historiography from Below

One of the ways this blog really is propaganda is in my ongoing advocacy for the historiographical views of David Edgerton. There are a lot of historians whose work I admire, but it is shocking how few scholars are really interested in researching how our views of the past have been built through past historiography. It is a constant temptation to make our work look better by caricaturing how “we” have thought in the past, and then proceeding to knock down straw men, all the while rehearsing iconic individuals, works, and controversies that keep us tied to the same narrow track of thinking. I know I continue to struggle to eliminate this tactic in my own work, and to construct genuinely new views of the past. Edgerton has helped me tremendously in this struggle.

With the recent publication of Shock of the Old, Edgerton’s view has gained ground that the most historically important topics, the ones that make a difference to the most people, are too-often ignored because they are seen as mundane and old. Although the real test is to see if new histories of the mundane and old begin to appear and be noticed. However, his big historiographical statement is, in my view, Warfare State, which fewer people will likely read because the topic is a bit more niche. This would be a shame, because the book is notable for the way it assembles a new view of science and technology in Britain by counting people, events, and trends as significant that other histories pass over too quickly, if they take notice of them at all. The effect is jarring and the book can be difficult to read. I know I tend to page back and forth through it rather than read it straight through.

Getting to today’s topic, pop history has been an issue both here and at AHP (see my exchange with Matt Stanley on whether it is worthwhile to criticize popularly-oriented histories in professional journals, Parts one and two), but in Warfare State Edgerton discusses the value of what he calls “historiography from below”. Pop histories and, more importantly, enthusiast histories are rarely satisfying in terms of methodology, but, he points out, provide a valuable alternative perspective to the concerns of academic historians. Contrary to the narratives of Britain as a

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The relevance of Darwin the person

I usually don’t post much on contemporary science issues or on science journalism. There are plenty of science blogs out there. However, Olivia Judson’s piece “Let’s Get Rid of Darwinism” on the NYTimes website caught my attention. Essentially, she argues that a continued adherence to Darwin as an intellectual hero undermines public understanding of natural selection in science. This speaks directly to my understanding of why it matters to do history, which is to understand the persistence and transformation of rhetoric and practice over time. By continuing to concentrate rhetorically on the scientific accomplishments of this specific person (through terms like “Darwinism”), we tend to forget the tremendous robustness that natural selection has built up as a conceptual tool, rather than as a statement of fact. Generations of ecologists, paleontologists, and zoologists, straight down to medical researchers and molecular biologists have successfully adapted Darwin’s logic to their own work. Do we, counter-intuitively, strengthen the idea if we diminish the status of its “creator”?

Now, I don’t belong to the “if we just make our argument a little more clever,

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Globe interview with Steven Shapin

Steven Shapin was recently interviewed by the Boston Globe (available on the boston.com web site) concerning the arguments in his forthcoming book, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late-Modern Vocation. (I nabbed this off the University of Chicago Press website’s promo blog, actually). The gist seems to be a critique of commenting on academic-industry relations in terms of a Polanyi-esque emphasis on the sanctity of independent scientific virtue.

The book doesn’t appear until this fall, and I haven’t had any sneak peeks, so we can’t really say much about it for certain at this point. But I’d like to enumerate some common strategies that seem to be at work in the interview (and which regular readers know I take all opportunities to point out).

1) There is a naive position that “we” have held for awhile now [sometimes this is since the 17th century or the Enlightenment, but the “since World War II” time frame gets trotted out here], which is that scientists are inherently free thinkers that must be given freedom to pursue their muses. Shapin helpfully informs us that scientists can see intellectual opportunity in technological application as well as in purer forms of knowledge, and that their freedom can actually be enhanced by pursuing commercial and team-oriented rather than individualized academic goals.

2) Interviewer: “Who still believes in this idealized picture?” Shapin: “If you put to members of the academic humanities or social sciences the question of academia and industry, the presumption is…” The circle of life continues.

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Connoisseurship in Sci-Tech

*First, on the WordPress version of this, please post a comment if you can’t see the banner with the picture of the radio tower. I’ve been having trouble with this. It seems to be stabilized, but that’s only on browsers on work computers.

Continuing on with the 20th-century historiography issue, I’d like to mention that I’ve been pretty taken with recent trends studying “connoisseurship”. To an extent, this idea has been allied with the idea of “tacit knowledge”–those elements of science that cannot be easily expressed and replicated. I used to be really into the tacit knowledge idea, but I’ve been less excited about it lately because I haven’t been able to find a good use for it outside of the standard critiques of the idea of obvious science (science that is readily recognized as truthful, and is easily replicable).

But, what really grabs me about connoisseurship is its power to describe motivation. Put it this way: Robert Oppenheimer famously described the hydrogen bomb problem as “technically sweet”, which was a motivation for pursuing it. If we can describe the criteria of what might constitute a “sweet” problem, or standard heuristic and argumentative methods in various times and places, we will have a historiographical tool that can be used to address multiple histories.

What I like best is that it’s the sort of tool that translates easily between scientific and technological milieus. What constitutes “the innovative approach”, “the appealing”, “the pressing problem”, and why? In technology studies, I’ve really liked some recent work I’ve seen on technical enthusiasm (MIT grad student Kieran Downes has been doing some nice work on audiophiles that I have specifically in mind). Within this kind of culture you have a stock of common knowledge (gizmos, mathematical methods, experimental apparatuses), and a set of things you’re on the lookout for (useful applications in certain fields, elegant solutions, certain kinds of phenomena). Innovation consists of combining these things in novel, but well-appreciated ways. While deeper innovation might consist of doing something more unfamiliar and pursuing strategies to assemble a culture of connoisseurship around it.

All this is very social studies of science and technology, of course. To understand the success or failure of a piece of science or of a technology, you have to understand the culture of its reception. I think the point of departure is in historians’ need to identify traditions of connoisseurship, and to examine the ways in which they became robust or stable and the reasons why. Anyway, that’s all on that for now.