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.

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?

References

<bib>Kevles:1995</bib>