Science in the 20th Century and Beyond

Jon Agar

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745660493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Wissenschaftsgeschichte

A compelling history of science from 1900 to the present day, this is the first book to survey modern developments in science during a century of unprecedented change, conflict and uncertainty. The scope is global. Science's claim to access universal truths about the natural world made it an irresistible resource for industrial empires, ideological programs, and environmental campaigners during this period. Science has been at the heart of twentieth century history - from Einstein's new physics to the Manhattan Project, from eugenics to the Human Genome Project, or from the wonders of penicillin to the promises of biotechnology. For some science would only thrive if autonomous and kept separate from the political world, while for others science was the best guide to a planned and better future. Science was both a routine, if essential, part of an orderly society, and the disruptive source of bewildering transformation. Jon Agar draws on a wave of recent scholarship that explores science from interdisciplinary perspectives to offer a readable synthesis that will be ideal for anyone curious about the profound place of science in the modern world.

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INTRODUCTION

This is a history of science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There are weaknesses as well as strengths in such a project. By necessity, this history is a work of synthesis. It draws extensively on a wealth of secondary literature, to which I am indebted, but which has addressed twentieth- and twenty-first-century science in an uneven fashion. Where good secondary literature is scarce I have been dependent on received histories to an uncomfortable extent. Furthermore, to borrow Kuhnian terminology, the ‘normal’ strategy of recent history of science has been to take a received account and to show, through documentary and other methods, that an alternative narrative is more plausible. This is good historiographical practice, and where it works it has led to the recognition of missing actors, themes and events as well as the questioning of assumptions and the encouragement of scepticism towards the uses of history in the support of ingrained power. But, just as in normal science, the projects tend to be devised to be at the scale of the doable, which leads to a narrowing in scope. This tendency can lead to the generation of accounts that are mere tweaks of received stories.

On the positive side, I have found that forcing myself to think on the scale of all science in the twentieth century has made the asking of certain research questions unavoidable, in ways I feel that the traditional focused, case-study-led history of science has avoided. I was determined, for example, not to break the subject down into disciplinary strands, since that would replicate existing histories. Instead I have been forced to look out for patterns that were held in common across scientific projects in the twentieth century, across disciplines, across nations. That is not to say that the national stories drop away. Indeed, comparative assessments of national science become particularly important, and again lead to new questions being asked. I think the most important of these, for a history of twentieth-century science, concerns why the United States rose to become the predominant scientific superpower. I will return to this question later.

But, first, a prior question. This is a history of science in the twentieth century, and beyond. But what do I mean by ‘science’? The guidance offered by historian Robert Proctor that ‘science is what scientists do’ provides a good working definition, although it does downplay activities such as science teaching.¹ I have tried to cover the range of activities that people who have been granted the role ‘scientist’ have pursued. Physical and life sciences are squarely within the scope of this book. In an extended treatment, social scientists would be present when they have considered their work to be within the sciences. The boundaries are both fuzzy and interesting – fuzzy in the sense that the category of ‘scientist’ can be contested, and different cultures have different senses, some broad, some narrow, of what counts as ‘science’. (It is a cliché at this point to contrast the broad German notion of Wissenschaft with the narrower English sense of ‘science’.) They are interesting because the label of science was a prized cultural attribute in the twentieth century, and the controversies sparked by efforts to police the boundary of the term, to separate insiders from outsiders, what sociologists of science call ‘boundary work’, are revelatory.²

I propose, however, a more substantial model of ‘what scientists did’ in the twentieth century. As a step towards this model, imagine that it is night, and you are in an airliner which has just taken off and is banking over a city at night. What you see is a glittering set of lights. You are impressed – it is a beautiful, sublime sight. After you rise above the clouds you see nothing but darkness. The flight is a long one. By the time you descend it is very early morning. On the approach to your destination you see a second city. This time you can see not only the lights but also the roads, the buildings, the parks and the factories. Even this early in the morning, there is a bustling sense of activity, of a world going to work. The pattern of lights now makes sense.

I think these two images – of a city at night and a city at dawn – provide a metaphor for how we can better make sense of science in the twentieth century. At first what we see is a dazzling and awesome array of isolated lights – quantum theory here, the sequencing of the human genome there, the detonation of atomic bombs in the middle, famous experiments, celebrated scientists, revolutionary theories. This image of history of science leads ultimately to ‘timeline histories’ which can be found on the web: history as isolated, bright moments. What we don’t see is why the lights of science form the pattern they do.

Working worlds

I argue that sciences solve the problems of ‘working worlds’. Working worlds are arenas of human projects that generate problems. Our lives, as were those of our ancestors, have been organized by our orientation towards working worlds. Working worlds can be distinguished and described, although they also overlap considerably. One set of working worlds are given structure and identity by the projects to build technological systems – there are working worlds of transport, electrical power and light, communication, agriculture, computer systems of various scales and types. The preparation, mobilization and maintenance of fighting forces form another working world of sometimes overwhelming importance for twentieth-century science. The two other contenders for the status of most significant working world for science have been civil administration and the maintenance of the human body, in sickness and in health. It is my contention that, just as we can make sense of a pattern of lights once we can see them as structured by the working movement of a city at dawn, so we can make sense of modern science once we see it as structured by working worlds. It is a historian of science’s task to reveal these ties and to describe these relations to working worlds.

One of my motivations for talking of ‘working worlds’ was the feeling that the use of the metaphor of ‘context’ by historians of science had become a cliché. Routinely we speak of understanding science in its social, cultural or political context. I think it is a cliché in George Orwell’s sense of clichés as worn ways of writing that were once alive and are now dead; a clichéd metaphor was a metaphor that was once startling and thought provoking and which now passes unnoticed.³ ‘Context’ originally made us think of ‘text’ and ‘context’, which in turn invited all kinds of associated questions of interpretation. While the term ‘working worlds’ is not a like-for-like replacement of ‘context’, I have deliberately chosen to avoid the word ‘context’, as far as possible, in order to force myself to reconsider science’s place.

I will go further. Sciences solve the problems of working worlds in a distinctive way. Working worlds are far too complex to have their problems solved directly. Instead there are, typically, a series of steps. First, a problem has to be recognized as such – problematization is not a given but an achievement.⁴ Second, a manageable, manipulable, abstracted representative of this problem has to be made. Across disciplines, across the decades, science has sought such representatives – a quick list might include mouse models that are representatives of cancerous human bodies, census data as representative of national population to be governed, a computer-based General Circulation Model as a representative of the world’s climate, or the abstraction from the messy reality of Amazonian soil of data that can said to represent the Amazonian rainforest many thousands of miles away.⁵ These abstractions have been well named, given their origin in working worlds, ‘microworlds’. They are of a scale that can be manipulated in controlled manner, measured, compared and moved.⁶ The representatives are also, notice, human-made: science, even when talking about the natural world, talks about artificial worlds. Irving Langmuir’s study of electron emission and light bulbs for General Electric, an exemplary early twentieth-century piece of research, has been aptly called the ‘natural study of the artificial’.⁷

A special case of this abstractive effort concerns phenomena: natural effects that are deemed important and interesting but are difficult to manipulate in their wild state. The special place of laboratories, especially in the sciences since the mid-nineteenth century, can be explained because they have been places where ‘phenomenal micro-worlds’ are made.⁸ Sociological documentaries of science support this account of the power of the laboratory.⁹ But scientists, too, have offered strikingly similar descriptions. ‘What is a scientific laboratory?’ asked Ivan Pavlov in 1918. ‘It is a small world, a small corner of reality. And in this small corner man labours with his mind at the task of … knowing this reality in order correctly to predict what will happen … to even direct this reality according to his discretion, to command it, if this is within our technical means.’¹⁰

Once the model of the working world problem is in place, its use can move in two directions. First, it can become subject to one of the stock of developed techniques for manipulating, analysing and comparing. Second, the conclusions have to be moved back into the working world. (Like problematization, this is not a given: ‘solutionization’ is also an achievement.) Because we are now dealing with simplified versions, there are often commonalities of structures and features, which in turn lead to commonalities of techniques. These similarities are the reason, for example, for the ubiquity of statistics in modern science. The discipline of statistics is, at least partly, a meta-discipline; it is a science of science. But neither the particular abstraction made nor its meaning are isomorphically determined by the working world (borrowing the precise mathematical sense of isomorphism – of a one-to-one relationship between structure of working world problem and model or meaning). Different representatives can be made, and they can be made sense of in different ways. This leads us to theory building, rival data collection, and experiment – the stuff, of course, of science. Also this is where the agonistic social character of science matters: the active encouragement of challenge, scepticism and criticism – between possessors of representative models.¹¹ The fact that the scientists are dealing with abstractions, and that the social organizations for framing challenge are distinguishable (although not separate) from others, encourages a sense of science’s autonomy, jealously guarded. But, crucially, there is an unbreakable thread that passes back to the working world – which may be ignored, often forgotten, but is never absent. My suspicion is that no meaningful science has been generated that cannot be identified with a working world origin.

I am arguing that science is the making, manipulation and contest of abstracted, simplified representatives of working world problems. Part of the outcome of this work was bodies of knowledge, but science should not be solely or even primarily identified with these. As philosopher John Dewey reminded his audience in his widely circulated essay ‘Method in science teaching’, science was ‘primarily the method of intelligence at work in observation, in inquiry and experimental testing; that, fundamentally, what science means and stands for is simply the best ways yet found out by which human intelligence can do the work it should do’ – solving working world problems.¹² I should also clarify what I am not arguing. There have been attempts in recent decades to find a classification more helpful, and more realistic in its description of science to the world, than ‘basic science’ and ‘applied science’. Gibbons and colleagues offered a new mode of production of knowledge (‘mode 2’), in which ‘knowledge produced in the context of application’ has supposedly become more prominent since the Second World War. Historians (Shinn, Godin) have torn down the division, as I discuss in chapter 18.¹³ Motivated by a similar prompt to find policy-useful language, Donald Stokes added to the simplistic basic–applied dyad another axis and argued that ‘use-inspired basic research’ (‘Pasteur’s quadrant’) was most strategically important.¹⁴ I turn the notion of ‘applied science’ upside down. I am not arguing that human health, efficient administration, weapons or industry are merely (if at all) applied science. Rather, science is applied world.

The possession of skills to manipulate representatives of working world problems granted scientists considerable authority and power in the modern world. The powerful intervention back into the world, justified by this possession, was neither straightforward nor uncon-tested. Such interventions occurred at different scales. The possession of demographic representations – such as census data – worked at national and municipal scales and reformed power relations at these levels. ‘Yet today’, for example, wrote Don K. Price in the middle of the century, ‘the most significant redistribution of political power in America is accomplished by the clerks of the Bureau of Census.’¹⁵ The intervention could be as local as the enforcement of an individual’s dietary regime. Or the ambitions could be global in scope. The X-ray crystallographer and would-be planner J. D. Bernal wrote in 1929, for example, of his hopes that, soon, the whole world would be ‘transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment’.¹⁶

Overview

If the existence of working worlds, and their crucial relationship to the sciences, is my primary finding, what are the other headlines from this history of twentieth-century science and beyond? I identify four: the extraordinary and unambiguous importance of the working world of warfare in shaping the sciences, the emergence of the United States as the leading scientific power, the missing stories, and the swing from physical to life sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. Each of these four themes is to be found in the following history. I will also address them again directly in the conclusion. However, this history is written chronologically, and the following is a brief synopsis of the contents.

Send out the clones

The first question we might ask is what the relationships were between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why should the twentieth century be like the nineteenth century? Did like beget like? Or, if not, where have the centuries differed, then why? Of course 1900 is an arbitrary date. But picture in your mind another guiding image: the river of history, temporarily frozen. If we slice this river at 1900, then we can ask what was being carried forward from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. The great distinctive achievement of the nineteenth century was the invention of methods of exporting similarity. Similar things were created by the methods of mass production. Similar ways of conducting research were invented in Paris – think of the modern hospital and the museum – and in the German states – think of the research universities and the research-based industries. These models were exported across the globe. Similar scientists were made at institutional innovations such as the teaching laboratory, the research school and the professional society. They, too, exported similarity as the similar scientists travelled. Laboratories were places where entities of interest to working worlds, such as pathological bacteria, could be made visible and manipulable – or, in the case of standard units, stable and exportable. This mass export of similarity – which makes the river of our image a vast floodtide – made the continuity between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a social achievement.

Science 1900

Chapter 2, ‘New Physics’, begins the story of science as it emerged from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. I survey the remarkable decades from the 1890s to the 1910s, which witnessed the observation of new phenomena of rays and corpuscles, the articulation and challenge of new theories, and the development of new instruments and experimental procedures in physics. Topics include Röntgen’s X-rays, Curie’s radioactivity, Planck and Einstein’s quantum mechanics, and Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. Drawing on the recent insights of historians of physics, I relate these extraordinary developments to the working worlds of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industry.

Chapter 3, ‘New Sciences of Life’, begins with another turn-ofthe-century event present in any simplistic timeline history of science – the rediscovery of Mendel’s theory of inheritance – and summarizes how historians have shown that the ‘rediscovery’ was constructed as part of disciplinary manoeuvres by interested scientists. The working world of relevance here was that of ‘breeding’ in two closely intertwined senses: of eugenic good breeding and in practical agricultural improvement. The power of science, I have argued above, lies in its ability to abstract and manipulate representations relevant to working world problems. At this abstracted level a science of genetics, typified by the work of Morgan’s fruit fly research school, was articulated. Biochemistry and plant physiology were also sciences of these working worlds.

Chapter 4, ‘New Sciences of t...