Einstein’s Generation by Richard Staley, Pt. 2 December 31, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: Albert Einstein, C. P. Snow, David Edgerton, Hermann Minkowski, James Jeans, Johannes Stark, Ludwig Boltzmann, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Paul Ehrenfest, Richard Staley, Simon Schaffer
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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. (more…)
Einstein’s Generation by Richard Staley, Pt. 1 December 23, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Andrew Warwick, Bruce Wheaton, Edward Morley, George FitzGerald, Gerald Holton, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré, John Heilbron, Louis de Broglie, Paul Ehrenfest, Paul Forman, Peter Galison, Richard Staley, Spencer Weart, Thomas Kuhn
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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. (more…)
CBC Radio Interviews December 21, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
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 December 14, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in 20th-Century-Science Historiography.Tags: Keith Hancock, Margaret Gowing
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Margaret Gowing (1921-1998)
A 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. (more…)
Schaffer on Latour December 7, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Bruno Latour, Harry Collins, Jan Golinski, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Simon Schaffer, Steven Yearley
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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):
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). (more…)
The 20th-Century Problem: Westwick and Classes of Institutions December 2, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in 20th-Century-Science Historiography.Tags: Peter Westwick
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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). (more…)
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
