History and Historiography of Science

In Praise of Historiographical Work Horses

The consolidation of gains is methodologically progressive

Who are the work horses in your field?  I’ve finished reviewing the data on my big web project at AIP, which at the moment consists of basic career data on over 800 physicists working in America at any point after 1945.  Where the information is actually available, this tells you things like where they were and when, what special posts they held (department chairs, professional society presidencies…), and what major committees they were on.  But you can also turn this around: the resource will also tell you, for certain institutions, who was there and when.  But, to make the resource complete and useful, you need to have a third dimension that links people intellectually rather than institutionally, which will be done via topic guides, on which I am now working.

Unlike gathering all the basic biographical information, which mainly requires tenacity in data mongering, this last task vastly benefits from the guidance of other historians.  And in the history of physics, when you want to find out the basics, it’s remarkable how the same names keep coming up again and again.  Should a chronological problematic ever re-emerge as an organizational principle in historiography, I think these individuals’ methodological importance will be better appreciated.

University of Illinois professor Lillian Hoddeson is everywhere, and constantly in collaboration with physicists and other historians.  She, Adrienne Kolb, and Catherine Westfall have just come out with an early history of Fermilab (2008).

Read More…Read More…

Instrumental Uses of History

Coming off the second part of my review of Richard Staley’s Einstein’s Generation, and also to try and set a tone for this year’s blogging, I’d like to consider the question of the instrumental uses of history.  I want to start with the idea that history is an inevitable component of argumentation.  Some other term might prove more convenient later on, but for the moment I want to say that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to open a discussion without invoking history in some way.

The point might be made by reference to comments in a recent discussion at the History of Economics Playground blog.  There one question is whether or not economists can get away with shoddy history when they start out with the claim that they “are not historians of economic thought”.  Yann takes the case to an extreme by pointing out that you could say, “Well, I’m not a physicist, but here’s some thoughts about physics for my fellow economists,” and physicists would have every right to call them on their errors.  However, physics is not an inevitable component of economic argumentation (as it might be for engineering argumentation), whereas it might be convenient to refer to the history of economics in making an economic argument without assuring the audience of the quality of the history.

I think this point is generalizable.  Since the past provides us with the experience from example necessary to understanding the present, the past necessarily becomes a topic of conversation.  In this instance, history becomes a sort of shadow philosophy, a set of exemplary episodes that demonstrate certain principles, which then can be invoked to discuss current situations.

Read More…Read More…

Looking Backward, Moving Forward

This blog launched on New Year’s Day 2008, so for the first post of the new year it seems like a good time to try and figure out and consolidate what has been learned in the last year.  Given the still-rather-uncertain place of blogs in the realm of professional history, any decision to continue on has to revolve around whether or not I am getting anything out of it personally.  The answer, I think, is a resounding “yes”.

Over the past two years, Ether Wave Propaganda has made a point of exploring in a continuous and semi-systematic way the concerns, methods, and history of current historiography.  While there is surely a long way to go, enormous progress has been made, which (in my opinion) puts this blog well ahead of most other commentators in trying to figure out what the sensibilities are that inform contemporary historiography.  A year ago the main insight was to make a distinction between socio-epistemic and chronological problematics, and to note that the bulk of historiography of science was dedicated to the former, and that this had something to do with the public mission of historiography.  I can now present a concordant, but clearer and more detailed picture.

Read More…Read More…

Einstein’s Generation by Richard Staley, Pt. 2

Forgetting is integral to scientific advance, but neither our understanding of the process of science nor our appreciation of its historical development can accept the limitations imposed by such forgetfulness. (Einstein’s Generation, p. 420)

David Edgerton has introduced the term “anti-history” to describe inadequacies of past historical accounts, which, for the sake of advocating some point, were systematically neglectful in portraying the history of the subject they were addressing.  Edgerton’s central concern is the history of science in Britain, and especially the history of the relationship between science, technology, and the British state.  “Anti-historian” commentators, he argues, had cause to systematically portray the history of state science and expertise in terms of its inadequacy or absence, because they viewed the further and proper deployment of science, technology, and modernization by the state as key to future social and national progress.  (See his Warfare State, 2006, and “C. P. Snow as Anti-Historian of British Science: Revisiting the Technocratic Moment, 1959-1964” History of Science 2005: 187-208).

As strong of an advocate for Edgerton’s historiographical insights as I am, I feel that the “anti-history” critique is somewhat unfair, mainly since it focuses on historical actors’ failure to be good historians, which distracts from the points they were trying to make (regardless of those points’ validity).  The real force of Edgerton’s critique lands on the genealogy of historians who have continued to take those historical narratives and their terms at face value, rather than recognizing them for the instruments of commentary and advocacy that they were.  In other words, the term “anti-history” fails to make a distinction between the instrumental uses of history made in everyday life and the task of the professional historian.

(I have argued on this blog that historians of science have themselves become appallingly poor historians of their own profession so as to amplify the significance of recent insights, and that this has seeped into the historical narratives we professionally produce.  Edgerton made a similar point in 1993 for the specific case of the “Social Construction of Technology” program.)

In Einstein’s Generation, and exemplified by the quote above, Richard Staley recognizes the crucial function that narrative-building plays for historical actors as they attempt to comprehend and develop what they are doing, focusing on the distinction built in the early 1900s between “classical” and “modern” physics, which has subsequently been taken for granted by generations of historians.

Read More…Read More…

Einstein’s Generation by Richard Staley, Pt. 1

Richard Staley’s 2008 book Einstein’s Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution is an exemplary work of progressive historiographical craftsmanship, and is very high on my personal list of best history of science books written this past decade.  The book is an unabashed work of scholarship, using past historiography constructively to pose and answer a startling variety of questions that both deepen current professional understanding of certain events, and expand that understanding into largely unexplored territories.  It is demanding, and will most reward those with at least some understanding of physics and of prior scholarship on both Einstein and the history of late 19th-century physics.

Einsteins’ Generation works as scholarship in subtle, but, I think, significant ways that will not necessarily be apparent at first reading, so I want to use this post to try and unpack this book’s argumentative strategies and analyze their power.  The first thing I want to note is that the book doesn’t follow a “sandwich” strategy: asserting a central argument in the introduction and  conclusion, and then offering a series of cases, or a long narrative, that bolsters that argument.

There are hints of a centralized anti-straw-man argument, which deflates the view of a single, radical break between a “classical” physics based dogmatically on Newton’s foundation, and a “modern” physics based on relativity and the quantum, but I don’t think this is Staley’s main intent.  More to the point, I think what Staley is trying to do is use a certain style of narrative and historical analysis to create a new view of cutting-edge physics around the turn of the century, which builds on prior scholarship while departing from it in important ways.

Read More…Read More…

CBC Radio Interviews

Sparse posting these days.  Regular readers may have noticed I took down the tabs for the Canon page and the Web Lab.  The former is because I haven’t been working on the canon project for a while, and until I find some way to reconstitute it, I thought it was better to bring it in from the cold rather than let it stand as testimony to a half-pursued project.  The second is because my “Array of Contemporary American Physicists” is nearly done and will soon be ready for public viewing.  It is in much nicer shape than the Web Lab version; but we’re still putting in pictures and polishing the content up.

The Array is taking up most of my time now, but in spare moments I’m working my way through Richard Staley’s well-crafted Einstein’s Generation, which I’ll profile here as soon as I’m finished.  In the meantime, some big-name science studies people (Schaffer, Shapin, Galison, Daston, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, Andy Pickering, Brian Wynne, Evelyn Fox Keller) plus scientists and other thinkers, were interviewed by CBC’s David Cayley at some point in the not-too-distant past as part of CBC’s Ideas program.  I just recently ran across it.  It’s called “How to Think about Science”.  As I’ve mentioned before, especially here, I’m not a fan of this framing of science studies, because it tends to set up some simplistic straw-man “public image” of science, and then say, “but, actually, science is complex“, and then present some case demonstrating how very cultural science is.  Whether this program takes that approach or not, I don’t know for sure.  Based on the abstracts, I’m not getting my hopes up.   But because I don’t have RealPlayer at work, and haven’t set aside time at home to listen, I can’t fairly speak about it.  I’ll get around to it soon.  In the meantime, have a listen and judge for yourself.

The 20th-Century Problem: Gowing and “Big” History

Gowing, MargaretA rare but exciting event in researching the history of 20th-century science is when one finds other historians as historical actors.  In researching World War II and operations research, Henry Guerlac has turned up as the official historian of the MIT Rad Lab.  More surprising, Martin Klein, who just passed away this year, served in the U. S. Navy’s Operations Research Group when he was a physics grad student.  I also found that eminent British historian of science, Margaret Gowing—best known for her work on the British nuclear program—was an early contributor to the Operational Research Quarterly (now Journal of the OR Society) back when it was essentially a newsletter publicizing non-R&D modernization strategies and techniques in state and industrial work.

“Historical Writing: Some Problems of Material Selection,” OR Quarterly 4 (1953): 35-36 briefly discusses Gowing’s experience as an official war historian in the employ of the War Cabinet.  I don’t think any reference to this article will make it into my book on the subject, so I thought I would share it as part of this post series, to which it is well-suited.  For Gowing, facing up to what I am calling the “20th-century problem” required a distinctly 20th-century historiography.

Read More…Read More…

Schaffer on Latour

Some of Simon Schaffer’s more interesting pieces are his essay reviews, which we ought to discuss more often in this series.  The most important, though, is the confrontational “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 22 (1991): 174-192, a review of The Pasteurization of France.  Schaffer discusses Latour and this piece in this video (approx. from 28:15 to 35:30):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EppQw9JHD8]

The discussion in the video, and the one it segues into about the characteristics of science studies/history of science, provide an unusually explicit discussion about what scholarship should be like, and it’s useful to have it, because I disagree with it.  Schaffer cites Latour’s arrival with a bottle of his family’s best wine to work out their positions as a testament to Latour’s personal qualities as a scholar: Latour takes the time and effort to reconcile differences rather than engage in petty infighting.  Nevertheless, the tensions brought up in “Eighteenth Brumaire” are extremely interesting, and I view it as unfortunate that the dispute was apparently resolved socially in private, rather than intellectually in public.  (If I’m missing some crucial source, as usual please correct me in comments; to my knowledge Jan Golinski comes closest.)

Schaffer acknowledges that their positions were never fully resolved, comparing the product of the tensions between their points of view to the interference fringes produced by overlapping light sources.  He goes on to discuss how our field is highly unusual in its ability to support perspectives arising from different disciplinary backgrounds.

Yet, I tend to view the persistence of unresolved perspectives as a weakness.  It is important to note that the products of unresolved intellectual tensions can exist only in the minds of those scholars who resolve the differences between perspectives on their own.  Such individuals constitute a fairly narrow group that Chris Donohue has called a “court of understanding” (see also my discussion of “perspective layering” last February).

Read More…Read More…

The 20th-Century Problem: Westwick and Classes of Institutions

For the sake of argument, let’s say that there are two kinds of well-written history books: barn-burners and bibles.  A barn-burner could be evocatively written to rival the sensory experience of a museum exhibit or film, it might present a particularly important or intriguing historical episode, or it might make a provocative argument.  Rarely a bible might manage to be a barn-burner, but more often it is a public service: something that is difficult to read straight through, but contains enough information or crucial analysis or both that one returns to it again and again, with the account usually growing richer as one gains more knowledge of a historical milieu.

Peter Westwick’s The National Labs (2003) is a bible.  One might argue it is extraneous, as individual national labs have received their own historical treatments, some quite recently.

J. L. Heilbron, Robert Seidel, and Bruce R. Wheaton, Lawrence and His Laboratory: Nuclear Science at Berkeley, 1931-1961 (1981).

Leland Johnson and Daniel Schaffer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory: The First FiftyYears (1994).

Read More…Read More…

HSS Highlights

Only a few cacti were seen in downtown Phoenix, and I am jealous of those who got a chance to get out of the city.

In the narrow space between my HSS trip, and an upcoming Thanksgiving trip, I wanted to quickly fit in a quick recap of some of the highlights of HSS.

Indiana University’s Bill Newman introduced the winner of this year’s lifetime-achievement Sarton Medal, John Murdoch.  Murdoch works on medieval and ancient science in a history of philosophy vein.  He came to Harvard in 1957, and when I was there (2002-07) his courses were of a rather different mode of pedagogy than the rest of the department.  As a 20th-century historian, I didn’t know him very well personally, but it was good to see HSS sustaining its effort to recognize and promote intellectual and philosophical history, and to bring it back into the mainstream of what we do.

[Edit, October 2011: John Murdoch died in September 2010.  An eloge written by Newman (paywall) appears in the September 2011 Isis.]

One of the big difficulties of keeping specialized intellectual history in the mainstream of a profession that has—rightly—branched out into cultural history, is how to make that work understandable and usable to those who aren’t intensively engaged with it.  On this note, I was enthused to learn about Newman’s web project,  “The Chymistry of Isaac Newton” (aka chymistry.org).

Read More…Read More…