History and Historiography of Science

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.

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!

20th century science and technology

I’d like to jump back to the 20th century historiography problem for a bit, one of the biggest ongoing problems seems to be how to integrate the histories of science and technology in this period. Telling a history of R&D is a part of this, but, the more I try and think about this, the more it seems to me that you either have to tell a story about science or technological research. I was talking to Tom Lassman about this a few weeks ago–he used to do contract history for the Army, and is now at the Nat’l Air and Space Museum–and he felt that the business and technology historiographies presented the most rigorous approach, which may well be true. I need to do more reading there. But I thought it might be useful to try and run through a few quick preliminary (and likely incomprehensible) thoughts on how these historiographies might come together.

The reason I’ve always leaned more toward science history than technology history is because it’s always seemed to get at deeper issues. Where else can you turn without blinking between political, intellectual, legal, technological, art, and philosophical histories? Whereas the technology and business histories have always seemed a bit more dry: “first there was this kind of rocket, and then another kind of rocket, and then a third kind of rocket was canceled because of budget cutbacks or because it proved infeasible, but, in reaction to Sputnik, a fourth kind of rocket was approved”. It doesn’t have to be rockets, but you get the idea. The most conceptually problematic issues seem to revolve around the introduction of political considerations, or maybe the technology benefited some, but not others.

This view is, of course, unfair, but it’s just a perception. The converse perspective on the history of science is that we are so preoccupied with problematizing everything and demonstrating the integration of such a diverse scope of activities that we actually forget to tell a history.

But, as I’ve been working on our new AIP web project (this is moving forward; more soon), it’s clear that it is unexceptional for the technology history to be a very recognizable part of scientists’ everyday experience. In assembling a list of physicists to include in our project, we get a lot of “science of the atmosphere”; or “science of circuits”; or “science of solar energy” which makes separating the physicists from engineers seem tedious and somewhat fruitless. (This speaks to the “problem of the problem” as well). What stance to take? Are we all technology historians now? I like to think there’s an alternate route than resorting to actors’ narrative perceptions of “well, first we worked on this technology, and it worked pretty well, but then there was a big controversy, etc.” but what is it?

My concern is that it would be easy to simply write an endless series of histories detailing the emergence of different problems on which scientists worked. Besides, emergence is only half the story. Are things really so uninteresting after things have emerged and stabilized? Surely this is when things are at their most important (see Edgerton’s Shock of the Old). Traditionally, there’s been a lot of writing on the tensions between basic vs. applied science (stuff like Forman’s “Behind Quantum Electronics”), but that seems too macroscopic for a history that deserves a finer point. The fact that most science is, in some sense or another, “applied” is the nature of 20th century science. The challenge is to find histories within that reality.

Here’s a little speculation: I think the way forward will come by nailing down in what ways science matters in engineering. What is interesting about various kinds of technologies for sciences, and in what ways does science contribute to engineering practices that would otherwise be constrained? I imagine that the organization of different kinds of expertise, and people with different motivation will offer clues, as will a deeper understanding of what it takes to develop a company- or laboratory-level science policy. Odds are good that the history of biology and medicine has useful things to say here, but I’m not well-versed in that.

As I said, I’m just trying to get my head around this at this point, so none of this makes much sense, but expect more in future posts.

Biography and Canon-Building

Crosbie Smith’s Science of Energy probably takes the place in the canon of 19th century physics history writing from Energy and Empire, a biography of William Thomson that Smith co-wrote with Norton Wise. The latter is an excellent book, and would be replaced not for any defects in quality, but more because the former is more compact and also broader in its scope–more essential.

But this brings up a topic I’ve been meaning to address: biography. The best biographies not only place their subjects in their context, but they use their subjects to give the reader a kind of guided tour through that context. Smith and Wise certainly do that, and I mentioned once before that Roger Hahn’s biography of Laplace is also good. I think I’ve also suggested that it’s possible that historians of science are now really very good at writing books, but aren’t quite sure what to do with the short form. If that’s true, then the best books are probably biographies. If I’m looking for biographical information on a scientist, I’m always glad if there’s something written in the post-1990, and preferably the post-2000 period, because those biographies almost inevitably demonstrate a maturity towards science-writing that is frequently lacking in prior works, which always seem to have something on the precocious childhood, a bit on the school days, some painfully in-depth treatment of some supposedly crucial moment (“did he or didn’t he write this letter before so-and-so knew of the results of XYZ?”), and then maybe a too-detailed account of the science, or, alternatively, an almost total neglect of the science in favor of an account of the proverbial “human side” of science.

Now, it’s probably for most of these aspects of prior works that biography seems to be a sort of embarrassing topic for scholars to address, something that’s historiographically gauche, maybe because in choosing just one individual you inevitably provide them with too much agency, or it’s too much of a foray into pop history, or something similarly naughty.

I’m not too sure that writing a biography was ever the career-killer I’ve sometimes heard it made out to be. A lot of good historians have written pretty definitive biographies (of course, there will never be definitive biographies of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Darwin), but, more to the point, I think, while there will always be lousy biographies, most academic historians have learned the pitfalls and become conscious of the clichés well enough. Personally, I would not hesitate to make a good biography a canonical reference, if there were no other suitable introduction to a historical milieu.

Whose biography should be chosen is another question. Do we need to know the biographies of some of the big names, for example? Darwin, probably, because the length of his significant career is so long. I would hesitate to say Einstein, because he’s sort of an outlying figure in certain ways, so he’s not a particularly good introduction to his scientific context. One should certainly read about relativity, but I’m not sure it’s absolutely necessary to read an Einstein biography. Anyway, whose biographies are important is definitely food for further thought.

Cosmology and the Problem of the Problem

My plate is full of writing at the moment, but I really am more in a mood for research. Fortunately, the batteries on my laptop have been burned out for a couple of years now, so my recent transatlantic plane rides prevented me from doing much productive writing, but afforded me the opportunity to do some work on reading over the Schaffer oeuvre.

I should have done this years ago. I’ll post more when I come to the issue formally; for now suffice it to say that Schaffer’s pre-Leviathan work deals a lot with the reconstruction of natural philosophical cosmologies. I get the sense a lot of this early work is aimed at demonstrating that the term “natural philosophy” was more than just an antique word for “science”. We got into this a bit in my class last spring when we had the students read Leibniz’s Monadology and tried to explain what the deal with it was, but I’m beginning to see the topic for all its richness.

Basically, natural philosophy, unlike a modern scientific speciality, demanded fairly comprehensive views of the universe, meaning that conjecture relating to the natural world had to be consistent with an understanding of pretty much everything else: problems of God, mind, soul, life, comets, nebulae, the age of the universe, the origins of the earth, the nature of forces, the nature of light, etc…. By making a conjecture about any one thing, it created “problems” everywhere else, and a true philosophical mind had to reconcile their explanations with all these various problems. So, you end up creating or contributing to a cosmology.

The need to create elaborate cosmologies seems to taper off in the 19th century as specialization and professionalization start to be on the rise. After this point, you still have problem-oriented science, but these problems tend to be more practical, or at least more pointed, than the big “OK,if you believe that, then how do you explain X?” problems of the natural philosophy era. This is more of a multi-disciplinary sort of thing where it’s important to develop specific explanations that are consistent with more general principles in a variety of fields. I’ve been doing some work on the study of Antarctic ice flow and climatology recently, and the “problem of Antarctic ice” has a lot to do with jibing paleoclimatological evidence, physical principles, and field research.

The ability to reconcile various points-of-view points to a standard of robust explanation that I was trying to discuss earlier. What is interesting is a shifting standard of robustness from consistency with a possible cosmology to a robustness as measured from multiple expert perspectives. Interestingly, the ability to cleave off problems and to address them from a limited set of perspectives seems to have coincided with the rise of new physical laws leading to more satisfactorily reductive world pictures, but that’s not a connection I’m prepared to explore.

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.

Canonical: Nye, Warwick, Smith

Today’s canonical entries in the history of 19th century physics:
1. Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800-1940 (1996)
2. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (2003)
3. Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (1998)

Every good field needs an “orientation” text, and, in my experience, for this corner of history, Nye is it. Read chapters 1, 3, and 4 before Warwick and Smith, if you’re not familiar with the territory. Taking some advanced electricity and magnetism helps, too, to get a little “Fingerspitzengefuehl” in how physicists came to use mathematics in this period.

Warwick and Smith basically cover what has to be the most important shift in the history of physics in the 19th century, which is the importation of 18th century analytical techniques use in what was called “rational mechanics” primarily to study orbits (but also ordinary mechanics and hydrodynamics), as the route to the creation of valid theories. The primary entry point for analysis into non-mechanical physics is the science of energy, which established the fields of thermodynamics and electricity and magnetism. These two books, read in this order, will pretty much tell you everything you need to know about this shift, at least in Britain (German physics will be coming up).

Warwick is in my top 3 favorite history of science books of all-time, and is an excellent account of the cultural and intellectual shifts necessary to make physics into the heavily mathematical science that it has since become. Very few authors ever discuss the uses of mathematics, let alone the experience of using them. Warwick does both in a way that illustrates the watershed shift in what it meant to be a physicist, and what it meant to offer a physical theory, that took place in this period.

Smith (which I’ve actually never read before now) discusses the “program” that provided the entry point for this new kind of physics, the “North British” idea of energy, which drew on Continental engineering theory and the experimentation of James Joule, recruited little-known work by Mayer and Helmholtz on conservation of “Kraft”, systematized it in the fairly new Cambridge mathematical tradition, jibed it with geological theories about the history of the earth and the sun and attendant religious sensibilities, thereby creating an intellectual and social program (we should talk about this word “program” in the future; I find it very useful, but exploring its connotations would be worthwhile) that was capable of cementing a new scientific tradition.

Both works incorporate recent concern for social context in enlightening and highly specific ways. Both are extremely informative narrative accounts of topics of immense importance. Both concentrate largely on Britain, so we’ll need to supplement them with works addressing what was taking place on the Continent (I really would like to find a good source on 19c. French physics–any suggestions?). Still, these books beautifully illustrate what one could argue to be the most important change in physics over the course of the century, and if you had to choose just two books to read on the history of physics in this period, I think you could make a case that these would be the two to read. We’ll look at some good supplements in future posts.

The Canon Game: Preliminary Observations

I’d like to start talking now about possible canons, but, before we get started, I want to make a few observations about what I, personally, would expect out of a canon. I think for a lot of people the idea of a canon is a little repulsive, because it suggests that there is a batch of writings (usually old ones) up on a pedestal that cannot and should not be touched or questioned, and that serve as models for all us mere mortals. I also think a lot of people think of a canon as works serving as methodological milestones. Thus, obviously, we’d have to start with Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions or something, and move on from there. In my previous post on the Forman thesis, I rejected this view, arguing that milestones, however influential they may have been in their day, are not best suited to guide future inquiry.

I’m a believer in the inevitable existence of things that must logically exist whether they are acknowledged or not. The idea of the inevitable rationale underlying policy plays a big role in my research on the policy sciences. I think the same applies to a canon: one always exists whether we want it to or not. Even if we don’t have a specific set of writings we’ve all read, there is a certain constellation (or “model” to borrow once again from C. S. Lewis’ framing of medieval literature) of arguments and strategies that are derived from set of writings, as well as certain key ideas about the “Enlightenment” or the “Victorian era” or the “Cold War” within which we may write. Thus, we are best off to acknowledge the necessity of canonical literature, and to ask the questions: what does it do for us, and is there a better one available?

I believe that a canon should help us mine the available historiography, which is actually very deep, and build on it. One theme I’ve been circling around is the tendency of historians of science to do a remarkable impersonation of 19th century Homesteaders in going further and further afield from the actual history of science to find new land to till. This is fine, but are we exploiting the land we’re already on to its fullest? A properly selected canon can be very revealing of the richness of the historical terrain that is available to us.

This brings up the most important point. We can think of a canon as the tool of specialists or as a general tool for all of us. I lean toward the general tool interpretation. Specialists are obligated to be familiar with an entire literature within a certain area, and would probably be inclined to pick out a game-changing paper, thus bringing us back to the pedestal conception of canon. But I think to the non-specialist these papers don’t resonate as effectively without the necessary background knowledge. A well-chosen canon will allow those who know it to be familiar enough with the terrain to speak competently about it, even if they can’t achieve “wonk” status, and thus be a receptive and discerning audience in areas outside their specialty.

Also, at least from my perspective, the selection of canonical works should focus on familiarity with history rather than methodology. I know there are many who disagree, but I’m of the opinion that unless you know the history, you’re doomed to making absurd statements; cleverness cannot save you. This has been a priority of mine, especially since teaching my intro class last semester. So, rather than start out in an area I’m really familiar with, I’d like to start with something I’m semi-familiar with, but in which I still ought to be much better schooled: 19th century physics.