Book Review: Science for Welfare and Warfare: Technology and State Initiative in Cold War Sweden, ed. Per Lundin, Niklas Stenlås, and Johan Gribbe January 25, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: Gustav Holmberg, Hans Jörgensen, Jan Jörnmark, Johan Gribbe, Kristoffer Strandqvist, Maja Fjæstad, Mats Fridlund, Niklas Stenlås, Nina Wormbs, Per Högselius, Per Lundin, Sverker Sörlin, Thomas Jonter, Thomas Kaiserfeld, Tom Petersson, Ulla Rosén
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The following book review appears in Economic History Review 65 (2012): 398–399. © 2012 The Economic History Society.
Per Lundin, Niklas Stenlås, and Johan Gribbe, eds., Science for welfare and warfare: technology and state initiative in Cold War Sweden (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2010. Pp. vi + 314. 3 figs. 26 illus. 6 plates. 1 tab. ISBN 9780881354256 Hbk. £60.95/$49.95)
In the 1950s a nation of seven million people possessed the world’s fourth-largest air force. This fact is a particularly remarkable manifestation of Sweden’s postwar status as a technological power disproportionate to its size. Given the importance ascribed to technology as means of improving nations’ competitiveness, the historical strategies of the Swedish state and industry should be of considerable interest. This volume provides a valuable service by presenting original research into some of these strategies. In doing so, it also builds on and references a substantial existing literature, much of which is only available in Swedish.
Edward A. Ross on Urbanization and the “Country Soul” January 19, 2012
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of Economic Thought, Uncategorized.Tags: Albert G. Keller, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edward Ross, Ernest W. Burgess, Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Hansen, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Mosei Ostrogorski, Otto Ammon, Robert Michels, Robert Park, Robert Redfield, W.I. Thomas, Walter Bagehot, William Ripley
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Edward A. Ross
Edward Alsworth Ross (December 12, 1866–July 22, 1951) was a professor at Stanford and University of Wisconsin, founder of the sociology of “social control,” and a forefather of the sociology of deviance and criminality systematized by Robert K. Merton. Ross was also an important author of sociological introductions and textbooks, of which Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess’ Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921) and W. I. Thomas’ Source-book for Social Origins (1909) were two important examples.
Although the function of the textbook in the standardization of social scientific knowledge and methodology is an important topic and has, in my opinion, not attracted significant scholarly attention, what I am most concerned with here is what I call the persistence of gemeinschaft in the American social sciences. What I mean by this is the construction of a dichotomous relationship between city and country. Ferdinand Tonnies in the nineteenth century believed peasants and the countryside to be dominated by tradition, kinship, and custom. The cities, on the other hand, were determined by the workings of capitalism and the market. It was in the cities, as Georg Simmel observed later, that individuals achieved an immense individual freedom, but consequently, remained strangers to one another.
This was one of the latent ideas in my post on Robert Redfield and has since become a more important element of my research. The persistence of gemeinschaft also serves to shed a light on the relatively unknown historical presence of rural sociology. As importantly, the the persistence of gemeinschaft concept also dovetails nicely with discussions of “urban selection” among social theorists.
Hasok Chang and “Complementary Science” January 9, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in Tactile History.Tags: Albert Einstein, David Kaiser, George Adams, Hasok Chang, Isaac Newton, John Bell, Lawrence Principe, Niels Bohr, Thomas Kuhn, William Newman
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Hasok Chang
In a nice coincidence, my look at “tactile history” winds toward its close with a discussion of historian and philosopher Hasok Chang, who, as it happens, is speaking here at Imperial on Thursday about how “We Have Never Been Whiggish (About Phlogiston)” (details here; also see his 2009 Centaurus paper of that title).
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In this post, I want to talk specifically about Chang’s ideas on what he calls “complementary science” — a vision for a new relationship between the history and philosophy of science and actual scientific work. You can read more about it on his website, “The Myth of the Boiling Point”.
Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of “normal science,” Chang supposes that in the process of scientific specialization “certain ideas and questions must be suppressed if they are heterodox enough to contradict or destabilize those items of knowledge that need to be taken for granted” in the day-to-day process of conducting science. However, this process is “quite different from a gratuitous suppression of dissent.” There are simply “limits to the number of questions that a given community can afford to deal with at a given time.” Therefore, “Those problems that are considered either unimportant or unsolvable will be neglected.”
Rudwick and Newman & Principe and the Recovery of Meaning December 30, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry, Tactile History.Tags: Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, James Joule, Lawrence Principe, Martin Rudwick, Otto Sibum, Robert Boyle, William Newman
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Metallic 'vegetation', from The Chymistry of Isaac Newton website
One of the most pernicious obstacles to effective historical research is a phenomenon I like to call “glazing over” — a tendency to dismiss references encountered in documents as unimportant or incidental simply for a lack of familiarity with them, or interest in them. You just glaze over until you run across something you are already interested in.
I suspect glazing over is actually extremely common, but that people don’t like to discuss it, because the lack of familiarity it implies with basic facts still smacks of professional incompetence, or, more snobbishly, interest in overcoming the problem implies a banal interest in empirical history. This is too bad, because not only does systematic glazing over likely skew and limit our historiography in more radical ways than our awareness of our “inevitably subjective perspective” supposes; it prevents historians from taking steps as a profession to readmit factual dexterity back into our practices after a long period of privileging critical reflection.
In today’s post, I want to discuss tactile history that works to restore a familiar or palpable meaning to documentary descriptions of natural or experimental phenomena by actively revisiting or recreating what the text refers to.
Tacit Knowledge and Tactile History: Otto Sibum and “Gestural Knowledge” December 17, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Tactile History.Tags: Clifford Geertz, Gerald Geison, Gerald Holton, Harry Collins, James Joule, Louis Pasteur, Otto Sibum, Peter Galison, Robert Millikan
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An 1869 illustration of James Joule's simple, but difficult-to-replicate experiment demonstrating the mechanical equivalent of heat.
This post is the first in a short series on what I call “tactile history”: the practice of historical research that extends beyond examining documents to examining the objects of science and the locations they inhabited, and to the actual reenactment of historical scientific research. The objective of tactile history is to recover aspects of historical work that would not have survived in the form of a written report. In this vein, tactile history could be seen as a step beyond “notebook studies” — say, Gerald Holton on Robert Millikan’s oil drop experiments,* or Gerald Geison’s The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (1995) — which look beyond scientific publication to recover the messier day-to-day practices of scientific life.
Where laboratory notebooks merely recover otherwise hidden practices, tactile history attempts to recover something that was never expressed in any form, and is often referred to as “tacit knowledge”. This could be an inexpressible Fingerspitzengefühl (a fine-tuned hands-on knowledge), a lack of understanding of why an experiment works, pattern recognition, or an unreasoned premonition about what new scientific knowledge will look like. In the 1980s, tacit knowledge became a crucial part of the “controversy studies” literature, because it was understood to be elemental in successfully replicating an experiment. By studying controversies surrounding replication, one could uncover the many tacit preconditions underlying successful replication. (more…)
Back Up and Running Soon…. December 6, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
*emerges from ocean, shakes off saltwater, untangles self from seaweed, sits down at keyboard*
Having let my posting schedule get away from me anyway, I’ve decided that the time was ripe to put EWP aside for the moment to do some table clearing. And, miraculously, the tables are starting to look clear! My class will be on break until the New Year after Monday, so I anticipate getting back on the posting bandwagon soon thereafter. In the meantime, if you’re interested in matters nuclear, you very much need to check out Restricted Data, a blog by Alex Wellerstein, a former colleague of mine from Harvard, as well as my successor in the postdoctoral slot at the AIP History Center. Alex has amassed a lot of archival material over the years, and is now putting miscellaneous, extremely well-explained bits of it up at a very quick pace.
*sighs, takes deep breath, jumps back into ocean…*
Available Now in Centaurus: My Review of Helge Kragh’s Higher Speculations October 28, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Helge Kragh
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I don’t believe I have permission to republish here, but my review of Helge Kragh’s book, Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology is available in Centaurus 53 (2011): 342-343, or online here (paywall, but if your library, like mine, doesn’t subscribe, you can see a scan of about 1/3 of the review for free).
I was very happy to get the chance to review the book, because Kragh’s industriousness, his technical understanding, and his interest in a wide array of subjects make him one of the most exciting historians of physics working today. My review makes quite a bit of the fact that the volume feels like more of an outline of a future history than a filled-out history along the lines of Kragh’s Cosmology and Controversy (1996). So it contains a lot of discussion of how these sketches could be pulled together into a more synthetic account. I would like to repeat a point I make at the end of the review, which is that this is intended more in the vein of engagement than criticism. If you’re interested in putting the latest multi-verse scenarios into the context of the longstanding history of physical speculation, this is your book.
Live at Leeds: Maximum HPS October 8, 2011
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Thanks to everyone from Leeds — and Manchester! — for coming out, and for the fine hospitality. Good night, and see you next time!
Apologies for the lack of substantive posts lately. My new introduction to the history of science course is starting on Monday, and I’m now in the final stages of overhauling my book manuscript. Priorities, you know. Also, I’m heading up to the University of Leeds on Wednesday to kick off the seminar season with a talk entitled “Perspectives on the Possibility for a Science of Policy after World War II”, 3:15pm in the Department of Philosophy, Baines Wing G36 (alas, I don’t think I could fill the Refectory!). Do come around if you happen to be in the neighborhood.
My book (present title: Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960) is on a topic that has received a decent amount of attention. But, to my mind, this attention seems mainly hung up on the idea that the history being told must hinge on some variation on the standard “what happens when you try to apply science to policy?” question. This was a point I originally made in a BJHS article back in 2007. My talk will boil down the central point of my book, which is that we need to distinguish different scientific activities from each other, and start to understand how they were built around different tasks, different methods, different notions of what gave knowledge integrity as “science”, how that integrity related to practical decision-making, and what implications that had (or, more often, did not have) for polity in general. Most significantly, these differing ideas complemented not only each other but traditional decision-making methods, probably more often than they were in competition.
Book Review: Leo Beranek’s Riding the Waves, and George Cowan’s Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute October 1, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: Dick Bolt, George Cowan, J. C. R. Licklider, Leo Beranek
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The following book review appears in Isis 102 (September 2011): 581-582.
© 2011 by The History of Science Society, and reprinted here according to the guidelines of the University of Chicago Press.
Leo Beranek. Riding the Waves: A Life in Sound, Science, and Industry. x + 230 pp., figs. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2008. $24.95 (paper). George A. Cowan. Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute: The Memoirs of George A. Cowan. 175 pp., illus., index. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. $18.50 (cloth)
William Thomas
Leo Beranek and George Cowan are both important figures within the history of the twentieth-century physical sciences. However, neither was so important that his memoirs will be of widespread historiographical interest. Therefore, rather than gauge how the standard caveats regarding the autobiographical genre may apply to these books as works of history, it is better to consider their usefulness as resources that historians can draw on to suit their own purposes.
Beranek is an acoustician who earned a doctorate in engineering at Harvard before World War II. During the war he became the head of the electro-acoustic laboratory based at Harvard. Afterward he served as the technical director of the acoustics laboratory at MIT, before steadily diverting his efforts, in the 1950s, into his highly successful engineering consulting firm, Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN). In the 1970s, as president of the investment group Boston Broadcasters, Incorporated (BBI), he helped develop an ambitious programming strategy for Boston’s WCVB Channel 5 TV station.
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
