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PaulingBlog (now The Pauling Blog)

By the way, check out the Oregon St. special collections’ PaulingBlog (linked on the right), if you haven’t already. They just did a revamp of their site. I’m excited to see a large science history collection present regular features from their holdings (in this case the Linus Pauling collection). We are also the first mention on their blogroll, so big thanks for that! I mentioned the new AIP web project below, but the History Center’s associated Niels Bohr Library and Archives is also looking for new ways to branch out on the web. We’re (the AIP, I mean) currently putting a lot of our oral history transcripts online, some with audio clips (which I’m picking out; see, for example, the Gamow interview), but I think snazzier things still are in store, and The Pauling Blog is carving out a nice path forward.

Speaking of snazzy, The Pauling Blog and Michael Robinson’s exploration blog have me thinking about moving this operation over to WordPress, because that tool seems to have more potential than Blogger. This would mean that I’ll have to put in more than the cursory work that I’ve been doing here, but would coincide with my plans to include some graphics, as well as interviews and guest bloggers. The summer’s ticking away, and I believe I promised improvements some time ago!

New Contributor: Christopher Donohue

While I was away we’ve had a new contributor join us here at Ether Wave Propaganda: Christopher Donohue. Christopher is a graduate student in history, who is primarily interested in the intersection between the histories of political ideas, jurisprudence, and natural philosophy; he has already done a lot of work on the jurisprudence and intellectual/literary uses of shipwreck, which has resonances in problems of providence, madness, personal responsibility, and enlightenment. He also has a working interest in similar problems in the post-World War II period.

I initially met Christopher when he TA’d for my Intro to the History of Science class this spring at the University of Maryland. He’s a fascinating guy who contributed a lot to the construction of that class; and he’s very widely read, and has some pretty novel opinions on what he’s reading (some might say crazy opinions, but after listening to him at length, I’m reasonably well convinced of his approach). So, I’m eagerly anticipating his contributions here. Welcome, Christopher!

Gone Fishing

Just so any regular visitors don’t wander off permanently, I’m going to be visiting family in Minneapolis and then on vacation in Ireland until July 4th, and might not be checking in until then.

Discovery, Begone! (or not)

I’ve been thinking about what might prove canonical for early 19th century physics, and I am imagining that Jed Buchwald’s book on the wave theory of light is going to be on there. Now, studying this or that side of a epochal debate in science (you could also talk about, say, vulcanism vs. neptunism, or catastrophism vs. uniformitarianism, vitalism vs. mechanism, whatever) is a different sort of history from something like Smith’s look at the development of the massively influential energy physics program.

As Smith so ably demonstrates, energy was very much a program (tentative definition: a directed and deliberately strategized attempt to conceptualize knowledge within a certain scheme); whereas we might discuss the epochal debates as “approaches” to subjects. If we look at competing and incommensurable approaches to a problem, it’s easy to write a history of their conflict, but only at the danger of losing the motivations of the actors involved, who may or may not be invested in the conflict (even while taking the occasional pot shot across the divide). We should probably concede that it is possible for ostensibly conflicting approaches to co-exist more-or-less peaceably. Therefore (problems of unequivocally defining “moments” in science aside) it is possibly improper to look at this or that result as proving the validity of one approach over another, or at least doing damage to opponents, because the debate might not really be within the actor’s most immediate set of concerns.

In other words, by framing our narratives in terms of an epochal debate, we impose an external set of concerns on the historical actors, which is a form of Whig history, even if we are careful to not view actors as proceeding methodically toward the “correct” conclusion. Which is not to say we shouldn’t have books about epochal debates. Indeed, they are crucial to defining the traditions in which scientists/philosophers/etc. work. We merely need to be careful about understanding what these narratives are and are not saying about what actors were up to.

All this I think is fairly second-nature now. What has been primarily accomplished is to set certain vocabularies and certain formulations of historical scenarios off-limits. “Discovery” is a big off-limits area. Most books (including Smith) trip all over themselves to note that Kuhn’s efforts to identify multiple moments of discovery of a concept like the “conservation of energy” is pointless, because it takes the principle to be a pre-existing entity that exerts a magnetic force on actors, and diverts attention away from things like efforts to build credibility for the concept, and leads to the misleading condemnation of those who didn’t “get” the discovery right away.

So, I figured, maybe we should just forget about words like “discovery”; but then I was dealing (for other reasons) with 20th century elementary particles, and found that there’s no really compelling reason to not use the term to refer to the detection of something that was not there previously. Why shouldn’t Chadwick have discovered the neutron? If something is discovered in an intellectual environment in which one would expect a discovery along those lines, then the notion of discovery can be (although not necessarily is) clear cut.

All of which gets me thinking about one of the few belabored aspects of Smith’s book, which is his clear conceptual indebtedness to early Latour and Biagioli, in the development of networks of credit and credibility. The sociological literature tends to portray this as a sort of building of alliances to achieve acceptance, but it seems to me that it serves an intellectual function as well, which is building the robustness of a concept or method, arguing consistency with other ideas, and demonstrating novel applications to various kinds of problems.

I’ve been meaning to talk about robustness for awhile now, because I think it will prove important. Building alliances not only builds more widespread recognition, it also tests one’s ideas to see if they jibe with other accepted or proposed ideas and observations. So, Thomson, by fitting his energy ideas into geological and religious ideas, builds upon the robustness of the network of theories. Kuhn, in discussing paradigm shifts, emphasized the building of discrepancies between observations as leading to the breakdown of a paradigm. But the reception literature (such as Warwick’s take on the reception of relativity) has emphasized how isolated new views are within very robust explanatory schemes, and how problematic it is to expect an entire field to abandon these schemes for new and undeveloped ones. This argues for an importance of robustness above truth value in both sociological and philosophical realms.

Anyway, my point is, we use the term robustness already. It may be time to start thinking a little more deeply about what we mean by it. End of rambling post.

Possible Internet Futures

In the comments to the post below about edited volumes, Michael Robinson, who runs the Time to Eat the Dogs blog, which looks at the history of exploration and its interaction with science, asks some good questions about ways forward in using the internet to develop “wonky” scholarship, that should probably be answered with a post of their own.

All questions of online scholarship start, but do not end, with Wikipedia. The Advances in the History of Psychology blog has discussed Wikipedia, and particularly the problem of sharing space with enthusiast historians. As Michael points out, this creates especially big problems for a topic like exploration, which have a lot of basic information that should take precedence over more scholastic aspects of it. Should the wonky discussions go under “Exploration,” under a special segment of “History of Science”; or maybe we need an entirely separate resource? But this isn’t a limited problem: Wikipedia’s rules demand that pages be summaries of topics–not storehouses of all available information; and it is forbidden to post original scholarship there. Wonks need to turn elsewhere.

This was the object of the STS Wiki, which seems to have turned up defunct. You can still view a cached version of it if you Google “STS Wiki”. Ultimately, I bet this is the way that scholarship is going, and that the failure for the STS Wiki is probably due to two reasons. First, it was not publicized very well (I hadn’t heard about it until I stumbled across it). Second, our profession does not currently prioritize this sort of online work. The HSS recently did some fund-raising for a bibliographer, but it would probably not be necessary to even have a bibliographer or a cumulative bibliography, if the community was more committed to spending part of their time maintaining a communal resource. This is a reverse case of the tragedy of the commons, where no commons are built, because there is no mutual responsibility for their construction, or even the coordination of their construction. Wikipedia, while open to all editors, is actually based on an intricate series of rules and conventions of format; someone needs to invent and enforce those.

But, the internet represents such a sea change in the way that information is deposited, arranged, and accessed, that I doubt a single resource will be the answer. Michael used the term “carnival of blogs”, which I like. Intellectual conversations take place in real-time or close to it; not through “round table” sessions (which always look suspiciously and disappointingly like ordinary sessions), or in quarterly intervals in journals, which is why I thought it was essential to respond to Peter Galison’s questions in blog format. I’m hoping the carnival of blogs becomes a real thing that helps replace the edited volume and supplements the peer-reviewed journal. Blog rolls and key words (which allow one to access past posts dealing with similar issues easily, and which I’ve begun to stick on archived posts here) will help make blog scholarship become more coherent, and less “thought of the day” oriented.

The great thing is that web resources don’t have to look alike, or have the same sponsorship, and can thus evolve to fulfill a variety of needs. Since this blog is sort of a DIY space for contemplation, which is sometimes fairly critical, I prefer to keep it on blogspot for the time being. But I’d also like to do something like AHP for the history of physics under the auspices of my employers at the AIP, once I’ve completed a couple of other projects. We also do need to face down the Wikipedia problem. The current state of the History of Physics article there begs for academic intervention (I’ve been working on this, actually, and plan to replace what exists with a more organized framework if no one else beats me to it). A more centralized resource could be run by HSS (in conjunction with SHOT, 4S, etc…), which could direct visitors to the various sites that fill whatever wonky or non-wonky needs they may have.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to say what resources will fill what needs, but these things require scholars with a commitment to refashioning scholarship in novel ways, and blending the boundaries between academic, popular, and factual presentation. The best path, in my view, is to keep thinking, trying out prototypes, calling attention to new projects, and seeing what sticks.

Edited Volumes

Doing a little self-educating, and preparing for the canon-building series, (and procrastinating on some manuscript revisions), I thought a good idea would be to take a look at the collected works of Simon Schaffer. Everyone agrees he’s an enormously important scholar in the field, but I’ve never really heard any discussion of his approach beyond the fact that he likes to talk about experimentation and instrumentation. I don’t dispute the notion (as a grad student I had the pleasure of a one-on-one pub lunch with him and was as blown away by his grasp of the issues as anyone I’ve ever talked to), but I would like to have a little bit more of a discussion about his, erm, “shtick”, as in, what is it? That’s for a day far off.

Of course, he’s never written a solo book, which makes tracking his work down a little bit of a task. And, actually, it’s worse than that. It turns out a very significant portion of his work is in the format of entries in edited volumes, which brings me to today’s topic. First a straight-out gripe: edited volumes are a little annoying, particularly because, unless you happen to enjoy doing JSTOR searches of the Isis cumulative bibliography (which I try to avoid if at all possible), edited volumes are a good way of hiding scholarship from the uninitiated. If you don’t happen to know that an edited volume exists, it may as well not.

What do edited volumes accomplish? I get the impression that if people put together a good conference, they feel the contributions ought to all be published together, which means that there’s never more than a cursory effort to pull it all together (and the effort that is put in is usually pretty ponderous, because conferences rarely result in much that can be pulled together in any coherent way). This is especially trouble in vague, “thematic” conferences–“science and wooden boxes” or something. These always sort of hint at a broader significance, but are always more suggestive than conclusive. Not only is there no “end” to the work, there’s never any beginning. The old saw “read it for the footnotes” applies, of course.

And of course, there are also summary volumes like the Cambridge History of Science series, or 1990’s Companion to the History of Modern Science, to which major scholars also contribute. I’ve never been encouraged to sit down with these–probably I should. Are these our canon? Should they be taught in classes, or is that considered a waste of time in favor of more advanced material? They’re certainly not anything that’s ever “discussed”. It strikes me as smacking of German romanticism or something to want to discuss the adequacy and the “feel” of an overarching view of a topic without knowing what I mean by that. But it’s still probably worth addressing, because frankly I’m not sure how I should feel about this corner of the literature; which makes it a good topic for further blog inquiry.

But, here’s another thing with edited volumes. As a quick look at the edited volumes Schaffer’s contributed to indicates, there are also those edited volumes that seem to be the playground of the elite. Is it the case that the edited volume format is also where the vanguard issues of our field are defined? If so, what are the consequences of defining a vanguard within a format that emphasizes neither cumulative knowledge nor conclusive results? How are our readings of this vanguard literature changed if we do not have ready access to the background knowledge the contributors already possess? Maybe not being a master of this background knowledge is all just part of being a younger scholar, but I always like to be reform minded…

So, is there a more efficient way of proceeding with all of this? I have zero problem with the publication of intermediary thoughts and results–in fact, I think it should be done more often and more publicly, even if the thoughts aren’t entirely original (thus this blog). Wouldn’t it be nice if scholarship on topics could all be intertwined, so if you wanted straight-up facts, or a summary of argumentation, or access to the lines of scholarship on a given topic, or a given methodological approach, you could use a centralized gateway to access the collected literature and summaries thereof? As usual, I think the internet will be transforming. Maybe I’m just being lazy, but getting access to accumulated knowledge in the most compact way possible has always been a lever to better scholarly contributions.

*This post was edited from its originally posted version, mostly to take into account the summary literature.

Doppelganger

I admit it, I Google myself from time to time. Mostly, I want to see how visible I am on the internet, since William Thomas isn’t the most Google-able name in all the world. The last time I did so, I ran across a weird coincidence. Apparently there’s a history professor at the University of Nebraska named Will Thomas (William G. Thomas III, to be precise; on my end, I’m G. William Thomas (the original)), who studies 19th century American history and had a strong interest in new ways in which humanities scholarship can take advantage of the internet. He has a good blog called Roots of Modern America, mostly on the railroads; and a couple of other online projects, one also part of his railroads project. He even looks a little bit like an older version of me:

That’s him above, and below, for those of you who don’t know me, is a picture taken of me last weekend at a Washington Nationals game.
I only post this because I encourage you to take a look at some of his online work. The internet is undoubtedly going to transform how we publish and communicate historical work (aside from novel applications, I firmly believe that any work that would retail for more than $40-50 should have a free internet version–if it’s not commercially viable, make it available to everyone) so we should be comparing notes.

controversy and conversation

Here’s a thought for the day: how do you tell a scientific conversation from a scientific controversy? I was thinking about this while thinking about the problem of limited perspective. Yesterday I discussed C. P. Snow’s two cultures problem–he was concerned that administrators had too narrow a perspective, that they weren’t open to scientific revelations, that scientific knowledge no longer counted as part of intellectual life. The flip side to this argument is the critique of scientism: science’s limited perspective can constrain thinking within the bounds of what has been accepted as adhering to the constraints of certain kinds of scientific models. Of course, these constraints are frequently designed around certain political or technical projects.

I’ve expressed my doubts that these critiques address a realistic portrayal of the place of science in society in any era. Both seem to hinge on a scientific authority that is either ignored or fetishized, in either case supposing a final conclusion that “science” advocates. Studies of scientific controversies also seem to be mostly concerned with the circumstances of their resolution. But little emphasis seems to be placed on the productivity of debate. By emphasizing controversy rather than conversation, by emphasizing the closure of argumentation rather than its opening up, do we assume that issues of science tend to assume a bitter tone? Is this seen as a choice between optimism and pessimism, or hagiography and critique?

I don’t have a good answer, and I’m not sure how long I want to keep asking hand-waving questions. As we move into summer, I want to try and do something different and more constructive with this blog, so, following the conclusion of the responses to Galison’s questions, be on the lookout for more speculation on canon-building. I also want to try and capture some lessons from my class and do some exercises in historical summary along the lines of “if we had to tell the story of, I don’t know, physiology in the latter half of the 19th century in 10 minutes, what would we say about it?” I like reductivist exercises, because they force you to separate what you know from what you don’t.

Science and Humanities

C. P. Snow rises from the dead to haunt us once again! I’m going to take a break from Galison’s questions for a post or two to try and concentrate on some other things. In this case, it’s a New York Times article on a curriculum to unite the sciences and the humanities, which Advances in the History of Psychology picked up on as well.

We are confronted with the question of whether the science and the humanities (a.k.a. non-science) cultures can ever resolve their perspectives. I’ve been hacking away at the intro to my book, which essentially says that we among the academic commentariat have missed the boat. The two cultures never existed. (See also Edgerton’s Warfare State and Guy Ortolano’s recent intellectual history dissertation on the Snow two cultures controversy).

This is a hard subject to address in blog format, but I’d just point to two issues. First, the problem of specialist knowledge is not limited to science. Modern society is effectively founded on the notion that many differing kinds of specialist knowledge and skill must be brought together even though no one individual (or committee) can master it. Questions of trust and fairness abound. This issue is much bigger than science, and Snow was wrong to suggest that the inclusion or exclusion of science, in particular, was central to this problem (science studies could do with some reality checks here as well).

The second issue is the definition and relevance of the humanities to public and scientific culture.
By any reasonable standards, science is incredibly mainstream. And humanistic thinking is equally mainstream, if, by humanistic thinking, you mean non-scientific thinking. The two get along quite nicely, again, by any reasonable standards. Snow was (needlessly) worried that Britain’s administrative ranks were chock full of people who could quote obscure literary passages, but knew nothing of the second law of thermodynamics. But this was not representative of the state of British science-society relations in Snow’s day. Today the concern is even less relevant.

Science has been incorporated into the technological life of society to the point where the university-commercial divide has ceased to exist in a meaningful way. There are many who hand-wring about the integrity of academic science, perhaps in some cases rightfully, but the situation we enjoy was precisely what Snow was advocating. The question thus becomes, do the academic humanities have anything to contribute along the lines suggested in the NYT article?

The NYT article suggests the contents of the humanities could be useful (not just some vague analysis and writing skill acquired through work in humanities courses regardless of their content). Personally, I doubt it. I think our work could be useful, if we wanted it to be (and it’d be legitimate if we said we don’t want it to be). Public discourse consists of a series of short-hand references–historical references (witness the recent hubbub over Bush’s reference to appeasement), turns of phrase, etc. Humanists could be good at researching, dissecting, and judging the pertinence of the way public discourse unfolds.

We in the history of science could demonstrate how people are bad at talking about science and technology; but that would mean taking what non-historians have to say seriously. Traditionally, some non-historians have done very well in arguing about issues. A humanities training could be good at preserving the quality of prior arguments and rearticulating them, and repackaging them in useful ways so as to promote originality and cumulation of ideas. But our work will never be pertinent unless we are committed to being cumulative ourselves–working amid abstruse details, and refusing to set up straw men. Scientists have no problems with either, and it’s gotten them a long way. Until we can match them in terms of quality and the core importance of their contributions, I don’t think programs that attempt to link science with the humanities can flourish.

–apologies for sloppy use of the term “humanism” in the prior version of this; it’s still not up to snuff (humanists=practitioner of the humanities; ugh), but will have to do.

History and Museum Studies

Just looking over Jenny’s overview of our online debate/conversation, I noticed a remark of mine that historical studies of material culture could “devolve” into museum studies. That sounds a little dismissive, but I stand by it, provided we don’t take “devolve” to mean “degrade”. I think my point is more that the analysis of objects is not the same thing as history, so to take a historical artifact and analyze it according to whatever criteria we please (say, using a literary-type analysis), does not constitute the practice of “history”.

But this is not to say that museum studies is below history. If I’ve taken away any big points from reading the Copenhagen Medical Museion’s blog, it’s that museum studies can similarly devolve into history. Thomas Söderqvist has often expressed on that blog his boredom at simply placing objects in their context. I am completely convinced that museum studies is a pedagogical-aesthetic-historical hybrid activity, and should not simply be “history”.

Ultimately, this just goes back to one of the points I started this blog with, which is that we need to be clear up front about what our motivations are, and who we expect our audience to be. I’d like to see a sort of renaissance of historical analysis that is not automatically labeled “bland” or “conservative” because it’s not museum studies. I see the two areas as related but distinct enterprises, and, by keeping them, and other areas, conceptually distinct, I hope that historical analysis (versus literary analysis, philosophical analysis, sociological analysis, or, for the lack of a better term, “issue” analysis) can be seen as a lively and progressive field of inquiry.