We're still unpacking a few boxes over at Wordpress, but good ideas can spawn swift action. It's like moving from one of the old VGA graphics computers to something a bit more late-'90s at least! Onwards and upwards! Ether Wave Propaganda is now located at:
http://etherwave.wordpress.com
This site will remain up but will no longer be updated, so please update your bookmarks. If you link to this blog from your site, please be sure and update your link to the new site. I'd like to get the Google rankings and hit counts up at the new location, and references from other sites help immensely. Did you know that if you Google "history of science blog" this site is #1? Thanks to all visitors from around the world for your support for our little experiment.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Connoisseurship in Sci-Tech
*First, on the WordPress version of this (http://etherwave.wordpress.com), 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. Anyway, that’s all on that for now.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
WordPress
OK, I've created another version of this page:
http://etherwave.wordpress.com
As I thought, it is a lot more dynamic--and better looking! Watch this space for any announcements of a full-scale shift. In the meantime, the Blogger page will continue to be updated, but if you have any comments about the desirability of any impending move, leave them in either space.
http://etherwave.wordpress.com
As I thought, it is a lot more dynamic--and better looking! Watch this space for any announcements of a full-scale shift. In the meantime, the Blogger page will continue to be updated, but if you have any comments about the desirability of any impending move, leave them in either space.
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!
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, July 7, 2008
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.
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.
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