STS3301 Paper Week 6

Responses to Readings Week 6:Chemistry and Society in the Great War, for STS 3301

"Trust not those cunning waters of his eyes,
   For villainy is not without such rheum;
   And he, long traded in it, makes it seem
   Like rivers of remorse and innocency.
   Away with me, all you whose souls abhor
   Th' uncleanly savours of a slaughter-house;
   For I am stifled with this smell of sin."
-Salisbury, in Shakespeare's King John, Act IV Scene 3, on Hubert's crocodile-lachrymose non-confession.

Hugh Slotten cites ACS and Bureau of Mines exec Charles L. Parsons, "Science was being used as it had never been used before, to aid a relentless power..." [p. 486] But the precision artillery of the previous 100 years was used thus, no? And various explosives? Four general questions arise: Through the war, was science indispensable; was it highly influential; was science itself changed permanently; and/or was the social structure of science established largely by the forces that shaped not only scientific applications but *internal* scientific activity during the war?

George Burgess, lists the several sciences applicable to the war, measured as indispensable. Burgess' measures of the accomplishments of these technical applications of science include: Making possible the continuance of trench warfare [p. 289]; the unification in spirit of scientists [p. 291]; the precision of measurements and sensitivity of devices [p. 291]; innovation [p. 292]; complexity [p.292]; understanding environment [p. 293]; and suitability for further research [timing shots, p. 294]. These measures belie the commitments considered appropriate for science in 1917.

On the question of indispensability, there is an interesting play in the readings between inevitable indispensability, and its opposite, overestimating the barbarity of the other side and a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy.

Lutz Haber, born after the war to "the father of chemical warfare," argues that "cranks," "specialists," and "committee members" bullied both sides towards chemical warfare. With some measure of delicacy, the historian stops short of assigning these epithets to each of the main players in his third chapter, but I gather he counts his father as one of those "specialists," bent on finding something more useful than the ordinary tear gas, starting with T-Stoff(xylyl bromide and benzyl bromide). I think that since Haber's chapter we read was only meant to cover 1915 and the introduction of gas shells and cylinders, I can't yet measure Haber's sense of the total influence of science on the rest of war society. But the author does paint a picture of gambling errors and faltering experimentation hampered both by zealous cranks and traditionalist militaries.

Stefan Wolff and Roy MacLeod focus on the war as a force shaping science applications and its internal issues. In fact, Wolff shows that war did not merely cause schisms among scientists, it exposed pre-existing schisms, allowing nationalistic and racist sentiments to the top. One of the most interesting schisms was that between positivism and nationalism, seen in Lorentz' admonition "...if you had said 'We cannot believe that' instead of 'It is not true,' then no would have anything to accuse you [Wien] of. Instead, however the signers had spoken in a most celebratory manner and extremely positively of things they could have known nothing about." [p. 343]

I don't see the historical propriety of MacLeod's phrase, that scientists' "performances became dress rehearsals for wars to come," which befuddles my sense of the passing of time [p. 458] But I appreciate his later statement that "scientists, officially on tap, were effectively on top." [p. 468]

For me, Slotten raises the question repeatedly, "Is scientific progress cultural progress, societal progress?" From any of these readings we can make the case that there is no single, destined path of scientific progress, that the war helped select one of many possible paths of progress. The war was the selection of a certain, partly muzzled science. Muzzled by the needs of society and industry, but free to gather some power, to bark and to bite at other pursuits, at the humanities.

As I read Matthew Stanley's "Expedition," I wonder whether there was a difference between the general public's understanding of Einstein as a German, and what any traveling European scientist would know of how a large group of 1919 German scientists felt about Jews and pacifists and Zurich-Berlin intellectuals. Aha, I see that Stanley writes that the Nicolai-Einstein-Förster manifesto didn't make it out of Germany. [p. 62]

Mentioned in multiple readings, scientists on both sides predicted incommensurable differences causing a permanent or long-after-war schism between nationalist journals, but this wasn't to be the lasting effect of the war. Rather, the burgeoning scientific-industrial complex, even on the losing side, seems to be the grandest effect. Still, the bridge between England and Germany, built by Eddington and Einstein, was at first tenuous, since they were both seen by their countrymen as the least patriotic. Could the mistrusting nature of the comments in the "Oxford Note-Book" be healed? [p. 69] The ironies of Einstein being Germany's most-famous-of-all-time scientist, are they not the spices in the ambrosia of history?