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.

Some chapters focus on policy with only an indirect connection to technology development. Hans Jörgensen sketches a history of Swedish agricultural policies and the building up of expert organizations for implementing those policies. Carina Gråbacke and Jan Jörnmark review and critique the Swedish state’s housing subsidy and rent control policies. Stenlås traces the history of Sweden’s military-industrial complex. Per Högselius recounts the state’s evolving strategies to promote industry and innovation. The titular ‘science’ seems to be a tertiary concern. Most chapters outline the histories of particular institutions, technology development projects, and procurement and construction decisions. The book’s ‘glossary’ comprises a useful list of the English and Swedish names of key institutes, agencies, committees, and professional and advocacy organizations. Business history also features, including new work on the exclusive public–private partnerships that Mats Fridlund has termed ‘development pairs’. Many of the chapters structure their accounts with an eye toward elucidating larger intellectual and political contexts thought to have enabled the history at hand. Thomas Kaiserfeld’s organizational history of science and technology in Sweden suggests that a ‘fad for fashion’ (p. 57) caused the country to imitate other nations’ institutions rather than forge an independent path. Stenlås, meanwhile, argues Sweden was overcommitted to military independence, making its arms industry self-perpetuating. Sverker Sörlin and Nina Wormbs recount the history of Sweden’s rocket programme, first in the context of funding from the American military for rocket-based research, and later in the context of regional economic interest and participation in the European space programme.

There is an effort throughout the book, including in the editors’ introduction, to find analytical rubrics that might make sense of Sweden’s postwar technological history as a whole. Different programmes’ relationships to ‘warfare’ and ‘welfare’ are assessed, as is the inclusion of policies under an ideological umbrella of ‘modernity’ and ‘neutrality’. While all chapters are informative, analytical concerns sometimes divorce the subject matter from seemingly important questions. In his history of the building up of food preservation research, Gustav Holmberg is frustratingly evasive about actual problems and methods in food preservation. Ulla Rosén examines technical and economic schemes to alleviate housewives’ laundry burden, but leaves it unclear to what degree these schemes shaped or expedited the commercial impact on rapidly changing domestic experiences. The volume’s most informative studies carefully target their analyses. Kristoffer Strandqvist’s account of the strategic and circumstantial factors bearing upon the success of the Saab 29 Tunnan jet fighter explains how Saab overcame Sweden’s lack of jet expertise by capitalizing on British willingness to trade in jet engines. Maja Fjæstad and Thomas Jonter chart the course of Sweden’s nuclear reactor development programme alongside the arc of its desire to preserve its option to develop nuclear weapons, and the growing willingness of the US to sell nuclear reactors and fuel. Tom Petersson gives a fruitful juxtaposition of Datasaab’s close relationship with the Swedish state with office equipment manufacturer Facit’s attempt to compete in the international digital computer market.

The best questions posed in this volume forgo extended engagement with unsurprising or even misleading contexts, such as Sweden’s commitment to militarism. Strandqvist explicitly chafes at a ‘neutralism’ preoccupying Swedish historiography, which he compares to the rubric of ‘decline’ that once constrained the historiography of twentieth-century Britain (p. 107). Productive questions instead address the deeper choices facing the Swedish state and industry: to what extent its military and military industry should be autonomous, in what areas it could rely on trade with other countries, by what means the state should support domestic industry, how the state should foster domestic technical expertise, and by what means the state could best improve the lot of its citizens. Answering these sorts of questions helps establish independent periodizations for different policies and projects, while avoiding the possibly specious assumption that technology history can be structured primarily by reference to shifts in political rhetoric. However, without any evaluation of the scale of sectors within the national economy, and quantitative comparisons between policy alternatives as well as between Sweden and other nations, it remains difficult to gauge how the government, the military, commercial firms, and other institutions chose between options and constructed budgets. Economic historians will be disappointed by this volume’s dearth of numbers, but should consider it a crucial resource nevertheless.

William Thomas

Imperial College London

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.

Unlike William Ripley, Ross, in his Principles of Sociology (1920,) believed that while the city attracted a certain kind of individual, there is less of an emphasis on the racial type of that individual. Instead of a particular race, inhabitants of the country tended to be “backward and custom-bound.” Ripley makes much the same observations as to the character of rural inhabitants, but the ethnological content is missing from Ross’ analysis.

Ross, along with Hansen, Ammon, and others, was concerned not only with the characteristics of city-dwellers but also those inclinations which caused individuals to migrate from the countryside to the city. Ross noted, “Perhaps the trait most distinctive of those who follow the call of the distant city when farming stagnates is the spirit of initiative.” Ross continues, “A heavy outflow of this element need not leave the community poorer in physique, or brains, or character, except as these are correlated with initiative, but it does leave it poorer in natural leaders.” This is a very German sentence, reflecting turn of the century anti-urbanism in Europe, Germany and France especially. For Ross, as for Hansen, Ripley, and Ammon, the loss of leaders to the cities, whatever their racial type, was a serious problem, as leaders, “are they who launch improvements” but it is also they who “minister” to the “higher life of the community.”

Like other sociologists of the period, including Max Weber, Robert Michels, Moisei Ostrogorski, and Pareto, Ross was concerned not only about the process of industrialization and urbanization and its impact on the social fabric and its institutions- marriage, the family, the organs of government, labor and occupations- but the interaction between the elite and the masses, a problem which was becoming particularly acute in the era of increasing franchise, labor unrest, and social revolution. All of these problems began to attract social scientific attention in the nineteenth century, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was an early example, but in the decades around the First World War, this subject became a veritable obsession, as classical liberalism, socialism, and conservatism underwent sustained ideological attack.

That the masses were themselves directionless and prone to sloth was due to their conservative and almost timeless nature. The masses, particularly the masses in the country, were the seat of the mores, of the traditions, customs, and norms which governed behavior and allowed for an insight into, particularly in the case of marriage customs and sexual mores, the childhood of the “race” or the “people.” Walter Bagehot, concerned with the principles behind the evolution of society, referred to these mores as the “cake of custom,” and thought that social progress was impossible if society remained undisturbed. This was why conflict was so important in the history of the human race. Breaking through the “cake of custom” was the principle activity of elites in the minds of nineteenth and twentieth century social theorists; indeed, it was the “cake of custom” upon which one of the big bad wolves of early twentieth century sociology, Albert Keller, in his Societal Evolution, blamed the limited feasibility of a wide-scale program of “rational selection” or eugenics.

Ernest R. Groves in the “Mind of the Farmer,” in Readings in Rural Sociology, ed. John Phelan (1920,) echoed sentiments similar to Ross in his account of the mentality of the farmer, who by virtue of his occupation, intellectual and social isolation, possessed a mind that was distinct from that of the city-dweller. Farmers, continually affected by their kind of labor, had to “be efficient in a particular kind of self-control.” Farmers, moreover, displayed a kind of “rural hostility,” which was “rooted in the fundamental differences between the thinking of the countryside and of city people.” Even given this “rural hostility,” the farmer was less given to wide-scale unrest than working-class members of the city, since “the work of the average farmer brings him into limited contact with his fellows as compared with the city worker,” consequently he has less “social passion,” having a “more feeble class consciousness” and a “weaker basis for cooperation.”

Ross was especially concerned with how the quickened pace of city life fundamentally changed the psychology of the rural migrant as well as the reasons for the transformation. He noted that the “urban type” lives on “surfaces” with “little time for reflection.” He continues, “compare the big head-lines, chromatic print, dramatic posters, and palpitant lights which must be used in order to reach the city mind with the meek announcement posted at the crossroad. ” The “city atmosphere” “quickens the rustic mind,” making him more alert. As a rural worker turns into a city resident, he more readily spurs “repetition.”

For Ross, the “country soul” was bound by tradition, occupation, isolation, and distrust of novelty. For Ross, Groves, and many others, the gulf between the mentality of the country and the distinctiveness of the “urban” mindset in both rural sociology and more general social science points to the persistence of gemeinschaft in twentieth century sociology, notwithstanding the “professionalization” of the social sciences through the efforts of the “Chicago School” and elsewhere. What this hints at is a clear dependence of professionalized twentieth-century sociology on the categories and worldview of nineteenth century sociology, if not the precise vocabulary. Robert Redfield’s peasant in the 1950s is at times indistinguishable from that of Ross and Ripley. Now, of course, the real question remains as to whether Talcott Parsons or Edward Shils displayed the same reliance upon nineteenth century categories. Perhaps.

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.”

According to Chang, “Complementary science asks scientific questions that are excluded from current specialist science.”  He believes that, working in tandem, the history and philosophy of science “can recover useful ideas and facts lost in the record of past science; address foundational questions concerning present science; and explore alternative conceptual systems and lines of experimental inquiry for future science.  If these investigations are successful, they will complement and enrich current specialist science.”

Chang’s most extensive work in complementary science stems from his historical investigations into scientific inquiry relating to the boiling point of water (which he published as part of his 2007 book, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress).  Eighteenth-century savants understood that liquids did not have a true boiling point — rather their boiling behavior changed idiosyncratically with changes in temperature, as well as changes such as the type of vessel that contained them, and whether dissolved gas was removed from the liquid.  Isaac Newton’s distinction between the temperature at which water “begins to boyle” and the temperature at which “water boyles vehemently” is recorded on the thermometer shown below (and is also on the cover of Chang’s book).

Thermometer (absent its glass stem), built by George Adams, scientific instrument-maker to King George III, located at the London Science Museum. Photo from Hasok Chang's "The Myth of the Boiling Point" website.

Remarkably, these idiosyncrasies, widely investigated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were later collapsed into a single boiling point with the development of thermodynamic theory, and apparently lost.  Chang relates that this left him with a “problem of incredulity.  Were the 18th- and 19th-century scientists right? Or was this an error like the infamous recent case of ‘cold fusion’ or the older case of ‘N-rays’? I decided there was only one way to find out: see for myself, in the lab.”

Chang undertook a number of experiments, and verified the phenomena that the historical record told him he should witness.  (He has video on his website).  He relates that

already, my preliminary study has revealed some significant gaps in the common knowledge of boiling in standard physics and chemistry, especially in the way these subjects are taught, even in higher education. These gaps exist not because science is incapable of filling them, but because science needs to set aside many questions and facts in order to allow its focus on the current cutting-edge of research.

He notes that there is, in fact, a considerable body of engineering theory, which helps to explain some of the effects that relate to the relationship between boiling behavior and the type of vessel containing the liquid: “the modern theory of nucleation (bubble-formation), … gives excellent and detailed explanations of the effect of vessel-surface quality on boiling behavior.”  However, answers to other questions remain elusive to him.  For example, it is unclear how water temperature operates in the engineering theory.  In contrast to physicists’ and chemists’ thermodynamic concepts of boiling, “in the best modern theory of boiling we have, the temperature of the water itself has no role to play!”

I think that Chang’s emphasis on the tractability of these questions to present scientific knowledge is important here.  I have often found when I’m trying to reconstruct a history from available sources (my development of the topic guide for early nuclear fission research for my AIP ACAP resource comes to mind) it was necessary to go over the secondary literature with a fine-toothed comb to figure out what was going on with respect to certain details, and I sometimes even ended up back in primary sources, which were themselves sometimes hazy on certain questions.  It is, therefore, not surprising to me that, if you ask the right questions, you would find that certain ones were never actually resolved even within scientific communities — though they might easily have been.

Chang is keen to insist that complementary science is not undertaken in a spirit of criticism of present science (though this “is not to deny that there are situations which call for a prescriptive mode of HPS, in which we question whether science is being conducted properly, and propose external intervention if the answer is negative.”)  He allows that those undertaking complementary investigations of lost or neglected questions are likely to find that “there are good reasons for specialist science to neglect those questions.”  Complementary science is “a shadow discipline, whose boundaries change exactly so as to encompass whatever gets excluded in specialist science.”

There is no reason to do complementary science, except for the fact that it is not part of contemporary science, even though it could be.  This last bit seems important, and is potentially where the philosophical aspect of complementary science comes in.  I doubt Chang would agree that complementary science licenses, say, the conduct of investigations on paranormal phenomena.

Chang’s complementary science might, then, seem to be fairly boring in character, picking up assorted answerable questions from the scrap heap of science.  Personally, I think his more ambitious characterization of complementary science as opening up “specialist” science tends (as did many 20th-century critiques of scientific specialization) to overemphasize the extent to which science naturally encloses itself within silos, thus requiring some external intervention to free it from its myopia.

I tend to think interdisciplinary, or “out-of-the-box” thinking is sufficiently common to keep the sciences well-energized.  (In fact, I think a lot of people in present day science studies would be more apt to criticize scientists for being too willing to promote their work with pie-in-the-sky promises of future gains.)  Further, I would tend to think that outsiders are ill-equipped to make constructive advances on their own without effectively becoming a part of the contemporary community — I am not optimistic about complementary science making much headway on “foundational questions”.

(The small industry dedicated to quantum foundations would, I am sure, beg to differ on this point, no doubt bringing up John Bell’s belated contributions to the Einstein-Bohr disputes, and the belated attention paid to Bell’s work, as a crucial contradictory case; see David Kaiser’s misleadingly but lucratively titled How the Hippies Saved Physics for more info).

In any event, there may well be some gains to be found in opening up past questions that could not be found from hybridizing present research programs.  Chang is fairly bullish about this possibility:

On examining certain discarded elements of past science, we may reach a judgment that their rejection was either for imperfect reasons or for reasons that are no longer valid. Such a judgment would activate the most creative aspect of complementary science. If we decide that there are avenues of knowledge that were closed off for poor reasons, then we can try exploring them again. At that point complementary science would start creating parallel traditions of scientific research that diverge from the dominant traditions that have developed in specialist science.

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Chang’s “complementary science” is similar to William Newman and Lawrence Principe’s replication of experiments in alchemy and early modern “chymistry” in that the objective is to recover (or, in Chang’s case, verify) the intellectual content of past knowledge.  However, Chang’s work seems to be even further away from efforts to recover “tacit knowledge”.  Rather, his work seems to be to recover explicit past knowledge and questions.  The tactile dimension is introduced by the necessity of comparing it to present knowledge.  First, it is necessary to verify that past knowledge is, in some sense, still valid.  Also, although Chang does not seem to have initiated an active “complementary” research program as yet, say, on unanswered questions in boiling behavior, such a program would, of course, be as tactile as ordinary science.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that Chang styles his website as “an experiment in a new method of scholarly publishing.”  Partially, it is to incorporate video into his presentation, but it is also a venture in trying to get in-depth discussion to the widest possible audience (a combination of the benefits of publishing in scholarly and popular periodicals).  Of course, scholarly bloggers are attempting to do something similar.  Personally I like blogging as an opportunity to learn about and think publicly about others’ work without having to actually contribute  original research in every single area I’m interested in.

Interestingly enough, Chang explains:

I have decided not to put this paper through the normal peer-review mechanism, in which it is only judged by one or two mainstream scholars who are experts in the specific subject. Instead, I am taking peer-review in a broader sense, by bringing this paper to the attention of a number of different people whose views I respect. If they find the paper interesting and valuable, they are free to pass it on very easily to others, who can do the same in turn. Therefore the method of distribution I have chosen is the traditional word-of-mouth, assisted by e-mail and the internet.

So, since this post/series is both taking a critical look at tactile history, as well as promoting it, maybe we’re putting together two pieces a new model right here.

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.

It is entirely possible when writing the history of scientific work to discuss how evidence is marshalled in support of an argument, without having a good sense of the nature of that evidence. This variety of glazing over tends to render different kinds of evidence essentially interchangeable (which is related to what I’ve taken to calling the “MacGuffin problem” in history writing). But, by recovering a more palpable sense of what that evidence actually was, it is possible to regain a sense of its specific meaning to historical actors. Understanding this meaning can help you tell why, for example, they found that evidence, and not other evidence, particularly compelling, and why it made sense for them to include it in scientific arguments in the ways that they did.

In the preparation of his Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (2005), Martin Rudwick visited some of the geological features that geographers and natural philosophers of the late-18th and early-19th centuries discussed in their works. Accordingly, he devoted a special section to “places and specimens” in the book’s bibliography (pp. 653-654). He urged that such visits be seen as akin not only to documentary resources, but to the work of

…some historians of the experimental sciences [who] have been demonstrating the value of reconstructing the apparatus and replicating or ‘re-staging’ the experiments of historical figures in order to understand more fully how their hands-on laboratory experience of natural phenomena translated into theoretical conclusions. For a science such as geology, focused more on outdoor work in the field and indoor work in museums…, a similar kind of experiential replication — which might be called ‘re-treading’ — is not yet accepted as equally valuable, at least by historians.

By seeing things like a rock outcrop or a fossil specimen, it helped him “to understand and appreciate [historical actors'] interpretations of what they saw, in the light of seeing the same features for myself”.

There are, of course, caveats in the method, as well as limits to what can be accomplished. Geological features remained fairly static, “once one mentally subtracts the modern overlay of superhighways, power lines, urbanization, etc.” However, one could not count on such durability as far as a region’s flora and fauna were concerned. Furthermore, it was necessary to take care to avoid using the palpability of actual specimens and geological features as an opportunity to comment on what historical actors should have seen in them, that is “to use what ‘we now know’ as a standard by which to judge their conclusions and even their competence or intelligence.”

Rudwick also has a longer talk on this subject, which he gave at BSHS (abstract). For a nice, brief recap, see Katarina Larsen’s blog. (Can’t resist quoting: “…accounts about the work of Darwin made by other historians (that have never been there) made Martin suggest that some of these people ought to be sentenced to walk up and down and up (the mountains of Tahiti) to understand what Darwin was talking about.”)

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Avoiding the glazing over problem turns out to be especially important in the study of alchemy. When you know the science was correct, or at least correct-ish, you can sometimes get away with recapping what is in the documentary record. However, when you have a science such as alchemy that has been discredited, the temptation has traditionally been to glaze over while reading alchemical texts, secure in the assumption that historical actors’ writing on the subject was essentially meaningless — a charge we inherit from philosophical reformers of the 17th and 18th centuries.

'Star Regulus of Antimony'

This temptation is especially strong in alchemy where authors on the subject habitually couched what they wrote in symbolic and euphemistic language. In alchemy and other areas in the 16th and 17th centuries, understanding the relationship between symbols was often thought to be a path to a systematic understanding of the related orders of macrocosm and microcosm. Since we now know this not to be the case, it is naturally tempting to assume that their symbols did not signify real experience at all.

But, as William Newman and Lawrence Principe have repeatedly urged, by understanding the relationship between early chemical signifiers and modern substances, it turns out that many authors were working hard to bring intelligibility to a diverse array of phenomena (not all of them strictly “chemical” as the term is now applied). Further, the knowledge they generated was able to accumulate and be systematized in ways that different authors could agree upon — even if it did not do so in ways now recognized as chemically coherent.

As Principe wrote in his recent Isis article, “Alchemy Restored” (free, 310):

The desire to know what alchemists actually did in practice led me — initially back in the early 1980s — to try to replicate their results, to see what they saw (and often enough smell what they smelled, although I continue to draw the line at tasting what they tasted). Eventually, many processes that seemed implausible were found to work once impurities present in early modern starting materials were taken into account. Boyle’s transmutation of gold into silver worked exactly as he described, even if his ‘silver’ turned out to be silvery antimony. Even some of the most bizarre alchemical imagery supposedly hiding routes toward the philosophers’ stone, once decoded, yielded surprising and workable processes that must have required astonishingly well-developed experimental techniques.

The danger here, perhaps, is portraying alchemy as too akin to modern science.

Much of Principe and Newman’s experimental work (including experiment videos), as well as guides to older chemical nomenclature, can be found on the Chymistry of Isaac Newton website. (The website has also recently released digital editions of 30 of Isaac Newton’s previously unedited manuscripts of his work in chymistry.)

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The meanings that Rudwick and Newman & Principe have sought to recover through their tactile history could be fairly characterized as “tacit knowledge”. However, where Otto Sibum replicated James Joule’s experiments in order to recapture tacit knowledge that was never written down, these authors sought to restore meanings that were implicit to written text.

Further, Sibum’s replications very clearly grew out of the concern for the factors governing successful experimental performance and replication that stemmed from the sociology of scientific knowledge. Rudwick and Newman & Principe, on the other hand, have been more concerned to use tactile history to enrich the intellectual history of science, rather than the socio-cultural aspects of its historical practice.

Sibum aimed to define the boundaries of historical cultures by their possession of brewers’ “gestural” knowledge in thermometry (or scientific figures’ acceptance of Joule’s experimental skill) to explain instances of agreement and controversy. Rudwick and Newman & Principe have been less concerned with charting who historically did and did not share the experiences that they have replicated, but all of the authors we have looked at so far in this series have used tactile history to recover historical knowledge for present-day scholars.

1) H. M. Collins, “The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks,” Science Studies 4 (1974): 165-186

2) H. M. Collins, “The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or The Replication of Experiments in Physics,” Sociology 9, (1975): 205-224

Throughout the history of social constructionism in the history of science, there was never any agreement as to what the relationship between sociology and history was supposed to be.  Some proponents evidently sought to reduce the history of science to a sociological process, effectively replacing philosophical accounts (see especially David Bloor’s “Polyhedra and the Abominations of Leviticus” [paywall]).  Collins attempted to come to purely sociological accounts of scientific knowledge without resorting to philosophical appraisals, but not necessarily replacing philosophy or supposing that sociology should be able to account for the history of science.  Tacit knowledge was crucial to his analysis of how and where sociological factors operate in science.

By the mid-1980s, programmatic differences between the various proponents of SSK dominated discussion in the field.  In “The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Studies of Contemporary Science,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 265-285, Collins himself observed (265-266) that SSK was “recently disappointing because, though the field has only begun to fulfil its potential, disagreements are now taking up more space than substantive contributions, the standard for an acceptable theoretical discussion is not uniformly high, and field study design often owes more to local circumstances than to research strategy.”

In 1975, though, it was still possible to view SSK as a fresh, progressive, and unified endeavor.  Collins traced his work on the sociology of scientific knowledge-building to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), and to then-more-recent program-building works:

David Bloor, ”Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 4 (1973), 1973-91.

Barry Barnes, “Sociological Explanations and Natural Science: A Kuhnian Reappraisal” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 13 (1972), 373-391.

Richard Whitley, “Black Boxism and the Sociology of Science,” in Sociological Review Monograph No. 18 (September 1972), 61-91.

Collins’ contribution to this literature was his interest in working out the consequences of the fact that the explicit rational processes of science cannot account for the totality of science as a creative and social process.  He pointed out that interest in this issue stemmed back at least to Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) and his discussions of tacit knowledge, particularly in Personal Knowledge (1958).

Collins held that there were specific places where the rational (or “algorithmic”) work of science met the social work of science (2, 206):

The overall programme is to show how scientific concepts are related to the societies (or political interests) in which they are embedded.  What is needed if these demands are to be met, is some discussion of the mechanism of the construction of scientific cognitions which shows where ‘society gets in’.  Simply to show that particular elements in science are congruent with particular interests or cultures is not sufficient.  It has to be shown that ‘the scientific method’ — the actual practices of scientists — could yield one result rather than another in different social circumstances.

It is worth noting here that Collins’ criticism of the insufficiency of showing the “congruence” of science with a surrounding culture would be repeated by Steven Shapin in his occasional calls for the construction of a fully fleshed out social (rather than individualistic) epistemology — I believe this remains a powerful criticism of the lack of ambition in a lot of historical work, which has habitually contented itself by resorting to the notion that linking scientific work to a social, cultural, or political context constitutes a “good deed for the city,” so to speak.

Anyway, for his part, Collins thought that “sociological explanations” of science would be found in the specific places where rational (i.e., articulated) matters could not account for failures to come to agreement in scientific work (2, 208):

According to the algorithmical model we would expect a scientist wishing to replicate an experiment to search his available information sources for the algorithm, follow it, produce an exact copy of the original appartus, and ipso facto identical results.  Where this process does not take place the model implies that the explanation might be found in the incompleteness of the algorithm in available information sources, and it follows that the sociologist should look for the causes of this incompleteness.

In this way, sociological study could help account for the unarticulated “culture” that socially determines whether or not experiments have been successfully replicated, or, indeed, scientific progress has been made (2, 208):

The only way to know if any culture has been absorbed is in successful interaction with native members.  In the case of scientists, successful interaction means producing results acceptable to the scientific community, for instance, doing an experiment which works.

Collins would later devote a great deal of work to examining the powers and limits of rational processes that are embedded in computer programs, and their inability to recreate human intelligence because of their inability to recreate the necessarily unarticulated aspects of human culture, which determine when and how algorithms are to be applied, and so whether or not agreements can be reached.  (Incidentally, see also Simon Schaffer on William Whewell’s (1794-1866) critical distinction between “permanent” and “progressive” knowledge.)

Collins’ famous study of the TEA laser (ref. 1) illustrated how its builders could not explain, based on their understanding of why the laser was supposed to work, why their laser worked but a replication of it did not, until it was revealed that their understanding of why their laser worked was incomplete — their initial success relied crucially on a phenomenon generated by an incidental feature of their device’s design.  In “The Seven Sexes” Collins’ likened this knowledge encapsulated in practice but not articulated (or even “known” in the TEA laser case) to author Kurt Vonnegut’s portrayal in Slaughterhouse 5 of extradimensional aliens who state that, when viewed from an additional dimension, successful human reproduction can be seen to require the existence of seven distinct sexes, rather than the standard two.

Here, then, is the basis for much of Collins’ work as a sociologist.  Although he has studied a number of scientific communities, he has done the most extensive work with physicists attempting to study gravitational waves (“The Seven Sexes” was his first paper on this community, and he still publishes on it) where “algorithmic” knowledge-building is sparse, but the sociological content of science is, accordingly (by his conception), rich.

If by 1983 the SSK project seemed to be dissolving into programmatic disputes, it was at just this time that it was enthusiastically taken up by historians.  Circa 1990, historical research in trust in individuals’ skilled perception, instrument standardization, and the rise of self-registering instruments were all offshoots of Collins’ project to establish a theoretical structure surrounding the sociological content of science.  As with Shapin’s social epistemology, though, this was probably the last time there was a sense that new historiographical gains were being systematically derived from the theoretical consideration of the preconditions for successful science.

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.

On this note, here is sociologist Harry Collins from his seminal paper, “The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or The Replication of Experiments in Physics,” Sociology 9 (1975): 205-224, on p. 207:

…the problem becomes one of explaining the successful copies of experiments rather than the failures.  The model which seems most appropriate is one which involves the transmission of a culture which legitimates and limits the parameters requiring control in the experimental situation, without necessarily formulating, enumerating or understanding them, and which ipso-facto generates the set of anomalous experiments (failures which can’t be explained by uncontrolled legitimate parameters).

At its best, the historical literature stemming from interest in this issue elucidated the importance of instrument standardization, the complexities of experimental interpretation (Peter Galison’s How Experiments End (1987) is exemplary), or the evolution of “literary technologies” for describing experimental results (Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985)).  At its less-than-best, the literature satisfied itself by tying experimental results and metrics to the rhetoric surrounding them (see my rather cryptic remarks on the “historiography of values” in this post on Schaffer’s works on metrics; see also posts on the Schaffer-Shapiro dispute here and here).

Otto Sibum’s “Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat: Instruments of Precision and Gestures of Accuracy in Early Victorian England,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26 (1995): 73-106 (paywall), occupies a rather high point within this literature.  In it, Sibum recounts his efforts to replicate James Joule’s (1784-1858) famous “paddle-wheel” experiments (diagrammed above) wherein a falling weight does work on an enclosed volume of water, which then increases in temperature, thereby demonstrating the equivalence of different forms of (what would soon be called) energy.

(See James Prescott Joule, “On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat,” Philosophical Transactions (1850) — free.)

In broad outlines, Sibum’s paper recapitulated the then-common point that many critical experiments were more difficult to replicate than the experimenters let on.  Sibum notes, in particular, that his own attempts to replicate Joule’s experiments indicated that the vagueries surrounding the successful conduct of precision thermometry made it difficult to arrive at the quantitative equivalent reported by Joule.  Yet, he observes that there “is no literary trace of Joule’s thermometrical skills, nor does he give information about the machinery, possible problems in performance, or his likely assistants” (78) in his publications, his notebooks, or his private correspondence.  Further, these skills did not become the center of disputes over Joule’s work.

Thus, it was only through physically replicating the experiments that these aspects of Joule’s work became detectable.  Sibum states (76):

In order to be able to refer to my ‘local knowledge’ [citing Clifford Geertz's 1983 collection Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology] I use the term gestural knowledge for the complex of skills and forms of mastery developed in these real-time [experimental] performances.

This “gestural knowledge” turns out to have an intricate structure.   Sibum was unable to replicate Joule’s figures for the mechanical equivalent of heat (82):

My results show the lack of sufficient enculturation in order to accustom myself to the techniques involved in Joule’s trial.  But they gave me a sense for Joule’s meanings for ‘exactness’, ‘accurate thermometrical researches’, ‘to obtain that relation with still greater accuracy’.

Sibum then (with a nice bit of document-based research) goes on to link Joule’s thermometry skills to his background in brewing.  In the first half of the nineteenth century, brewing became an exacting exercise in England, in which the process had to be carefully controlled from beginning to end in order to produce consistent and high quality beers.  State excises further made it so that it had to be possible to carefully monitor the process.  This change in brewing was accompanied by necessary improvements in brewing instrumentation and knowledge, some of which was actually encapsulated in treatises.  However, the use of such instruments and knowledge in the production of particular brews also required learned skills (85):

…for the determination of the appropriate mashing heats, personal experience was necessary in order to produce an invariable product.  The correct temperature did not only depend upon the varying quantity and quality of the malt, and the changing temperature of the atmosphere according to a particular season, but also on the situation of and amount of radiation from the mash tun.  Therefore only long experience and a certain ‘habit of taking his mashing heats’ allowed a successful control of the brewing process.  Brewers and malsters were bearers of this gestural knowledge.  Mashing heats were often secrets of local brewers and depended on their particular scales and modes of production.  The malster’s skill made him one of the most important and respected ‘agents’.

For even such skilled individuals, it was possible for subtle changes in brewing conditions to cause breweries to go “out of order” and produce “foul or bad beer, which could go on for weeks” — but, because such events merely reflected the sensitivity an variability of the brewing process, “it was never regarded as the fault of the malting or brewing agent” (86).

Sibum argues it was just these unfailing skills that were necessary to take proper and highly precise measurements of temperature in an experimental setting where the behavior of thermometers as they change their reading matters, and where even the presence of the experimenter can cause significant changes in temperature measurements.  For these reasons, such experiments could not even be witnessed directly.  As Joule himself noted, experiments done in outside of his cellar laboratory, where others could witness them, “though abundantly sufficient to establish the equivalency of heat to mechanical power, were not adapted to determine the equivalent with very great numerical accuracy, owing to the apparatus having been situated in the open air, and having been in consequence liable to great cooling or heating effects from the atmosphere” (102).

According to Sibum, in bringing his skills to natural philosophy, Joule “had become a performer without an audience” (101).  The “embodied capability, that particular gestural knowledge” honed in his work as a brewer, “was incommunicable.  Over and above that, he could not defend his experimental accuracy by appealing to brewers’ craftsman skill.  On the contrary it was more advantageous to distance himself from this particular gestural collective” (103).  His capability was subsumed in publications under references to precision instrumentation, the unexplained skill required to use it, and tables of the values produced therewith.  Confidence in these figures rested on confidence in his personal skill as an experimenter and in his instruments, and not to the more arcane techniques of brewing.  Recovery of the nature of the skills of precision thermometry and their links with brewing was left only to those who actually attempted to follow Joule’s path.

–

*Gerald Holton, “Subelectrons, Presuppositions, and the Millikan-Ehrenhaft Dispute,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 9 (1978): 161-224

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…*

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.

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.

© 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.

Historians will appreciate Beranek’s attention to detail. Writing at a level of sophistication that should satisfy all but the most specialized needs, he recounts a variety of projects in acoustics, from the elaboration of general theory to the design of sound suppression equipment. Riding the Waves should also be of use to historians interested in music and architecture, who will find helpful leads in Beranek’s discussions of the designs of various performance spaces. Regional historians could make use of his accounts of his extensive interaction with commercial, cultural, and media institutions in the Boston area.

Beranek’s history of BBN should prove especially valuable for historians of business and technology. Beranek founded BBN in 1948 with his senior colleague at MIT, Dick Bolt, when Bolt procured a contract to design the acoustics for the new United Nations complex in New York. The firm grew rapidly and went on to provide services in the design of aircraft engines and symphony halls. For historians of computation, there is a good account of BBN’s 1957 hiring of J. C. R. Licklider, who urged the firm into computers. In the late 1960s BBN provided the interface message processors for the first ARPANET connection and then managed the network as it grew.

The book also presents Beranek’s defenses against criticisms made of him in high-profile controversies. He recounts BBN’s role in the late 1950s in setting noise standards for jet airplanes against aircraft manufacturer resistance, the circumstances leading to the initially poor acoustics of Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center in the early 1960s, and the protracted licensing battle in the 1960s and early 1970s that preceded BBI’s takeover of Channel 5 in Boston. I am ill-positioned to judge the details of Beranek’s histories. However, he certainly offers rich portraits of problems arising at the varied intersections of research, engineering, human perception, aesthetics, the public interest, government regulation, business, and jurisprudence.

While Beranek extends his zeal for detail to topics such as his geriatric diet and his passion for skiing, his writing style is conversational and engaging, even when the material becomes dense or peripheral. It is only the book’s lack of an index that might frustrate its potential as a resource.

George Cowan is a physical chemist who was a junior member of the American atomic bomb development project, first at Princeton and then at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. After the war he joined the Los Alamos laboratory, where he worked on the further development and testing of nuclear weapons. He then obtained a Ph.D. at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before returning to Los Alamos, where he spent the bulk of his career as a radiochemist and administrator. In the 1980s he became the first president of the Santa Fe Institute, an important center for work in chaos and complexity theory.

Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute offers a fascinating and tactile look at some of the experimental practices in uranium and plutonium research in the 1940s, which will help enrich our patchy understanding of fission-related science at Princeton and the post-1942 Met Lab. Likewise, our understanding of postwar nuclear research remains inferior to our knowledge of atomic politics. Cowan offers useful glimpses of research in areas such as the synthesis of elements in hydrogen bomb explosions, which illustrates some of the unusual opportunities for scientific advance afforded by nuclear weapons testing.

Lamentably, for historians, these scenes only constitute hints of what might be achieved through more focused or synthetic historical studies. Cowan provides a staccato series of reminiscences, rather than developing a detailed account of events informed by his privileged perspective. Many chapters are only two or three pages long. The prose lurches forward awkwardly, as descriptions of research work give way far too quickly to tangential anecdotes. Historical experts will not find more than brief glints of illumination on most of the topics he addresses, such as the detection of nuclear weapons tests and the artificial synthesis of heavy elements. Nonexperts should seek better primers where available.

Cowan’s approach is especially disappointing in his short and superficial treatment of the Santa Fe Institute. Though a site of considerable interest, the institute is afforded little more space than the other eclectic topics addressed in the book. The deep epistemological problems of analyzing complex systems are glossed over in favor of a pitch vaguely suggesting the benefits to be found in studying not only these systems but also his other far-ranging late-career interests, notably psychological and neurological development in early childhood.