STS3301 Paper Week 12

Response to readings in STS 3301.

On the engulfing tide of scientific progress

Don't try to fight it.
The scientific progress
will engulf us all.

On something deeper, whatever it is, behind accepting violence, The Smiths' "The Headmaster's Ritual"

Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools
spineless swines cemented minds
Sir leads the troops jealous of youth
same old suit since 1962
he does the military two-step down the nape of my neck
...
mid-week on the playing fields
Sir thwacks you on the knees knees you in the groin elbow in the face 
bruises bigger than dinner plates
...
Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools
spineless bastards all
Sir leads the troops jealous of youth
same old jokes since 1902
I wanna go home I don't want to stay
give up life as a bad mistake
please excuse me from the gym
I've got this terrible cold coming on
he grabs and devours kicks me in the showers and he grabs and devours

The American Bomb

From Kevles' chapter "Cold War Science" I get the sense of scientists as herds of people that come around to a sense of patriotic duty, of or of some other sort of organization. When enough scientists get on a certain bandwagon, an issue is raised to a level of importance worthy of history. Compare this to the "Eureka!" view of the history of science or to the "free-floating monads" as in Galison's critique. Kevles tells of George Ellery Hale as a man who is influenced (by Emile Picard in part) to separate science socially from Germans, but also influenced (by constituencies in America) to keep some sense of internationalism. Kevles depicts Hale as one who could choose a direction for American and Entente scientists: "By the spring of 1918, Hale had glimpsed a way out of the dilemmas..." (p. 143)

The creation of the NRC and of some international cooperation among the Entente countries, along with other wartime relations between scientists and the military drove the military to seek to make permanent these new relations in America. (p. 145, also recall <bib>Burgess:1917</bib>) Kevles shows the strength of this drive to be variable, and shows that the military, with more social power than the scientists, chose how to make science a permanent part, restricting involvement largely to secure labs inside the service. (pp. 146-148)

Michael Frayn's Copenhagen at first explores the question "why does Heisenberg visit Bohr?" as stories with false assumptions or duplicity, but then evolves into the question of "what can their history offer as an answer," and explores how causes depend on where you look. In attempting a so-called thought experiment, the play does a poor job of trying to see what evidence (an orange-y explosion) there might be had Bohr not played silent cues to deter a German a-bomb program. I remain unconvinced that these two had any power to steer such a different course. Here is a case where an interesting history-telling may be plain wrong, and I winced at the invocation of gedankenexperiment, even though I allow that a counterfactual thought experiment may be possible, because a thought experiment without rigorous accountability is only a "flight of fancy."

Kevles tells the story of the 1927 Solvay Conference, in that Einstein came from it unquestioning of Copenhagen's logic but still claiming he was unconvinced of the finality of uncertainty. Is failing to allow others' thorough logic to convince you of an idea a failing in physics? In history, can we identify an actor who chooses the wrong influences as a bad scientist? Who can take the blame, the influencer or the selector? Zeleny, if he truly believed that the "tide of scientific progress" was an uncontrollable mob, then can the selector be blamed, if "true progress" selects itself? The action Zeleny and Millikan and the rest of the Americans seem to take is not to be passively engulfed by, but to actively embrace the youngest, most prestigious science. The action of the administrators scrambling to endow American physics with more power is their incantation "embrace, embrace."

Again and again, Kevles tracks the top scientists, the top endowments. How representative of the scientific community is its leaders? How much are they in control of the whole field? How much are we allowing the journalists and philanthropists of the times write our history? When is the size of an endowment or of a reputation not proportional to one's contribution to an important story? Do the little stories of the little people, unheralded, ever add up to more than those of their overlords? How radical a departure from existing theories can our theories be if the available observations are set up by the existing theories? I laud Kevles for finding the conservatives, those who do rail against the engulfing tide. Maybe the humanist critics do speak for the race, but maybe they misinterpret a field outside their own. Does the blame lie with the engulfing tide of pro-science propaganda?

Kevles is so rife with information and ideas, often spending less than a paragraph on significant historical claims before moving on to the next. To get very far in such a book, I need to suspend most of my questioning, or a page could take a week. It's like watching a very long parade, though, with quite a lot of unmemorable floats. The crucial paragraph, supported by the rote information, is on page 219: The post-war enlargement and the fulfillment of Rowland's elitism were the mother and father of the physics we still recognize in departments like Cornell's.

A question for class, is science more naughty when it's socially driven, or when it's neutral? (Kevles, p. 239) Should science be neither neutral nor naughty, but always driven by ethics, always nice?

Another question for class, considering our community read, what do we think of the 1930s machinations of the scientists and politicians after reading Grapes of Wrath?

In class, I have been pushing a historical method of teasing the strands of influence, measuring their relative influence on an actor. Rhodes cites evidence that top-level scientists were pushed more by technological imperative than by the stop-Hitler imperative or the end-the-war-save-lives imperative. The super's technological imperative drove the implosion work. (Rhodes, pp. 544, 564). But this specific argument must be tempered with the (let's call it) Bohr imperative, that we need to know, then to show, how massively destructive the ultimate bomb would be.

References

<bib>Kevles:1995</bib>

<bib>Rhodes:1986</bib>