STS3301 Paper Week 12

The American Bomb

From Kevles one gets the sense of scientists as herds of people that come around to a sense of patriotic duty, 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, "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)

References

<bib>Kevles:1995<bib>