STS3301 Mid-term essay
For STS 3301, written 2009-10-20.
From Boyle to Boltzmann, we have considered the picture of science moving from genteel philosophy towards strict utility, with push-back all the way, and its sometimes denial of its social orders intermixed with its embrace at different times of various social orders. Scientists and greater society fed on each other, and the the history of the pursuit of understanding provides a rich window into the general history of the modernizing period. I see a thread of self-preservation in this history, running through processes of industrialization, reductionism, unification, specialization. That self-preservation, especially through the reduction that occurs in scientists' published works that we use as primary sources, may even force our understanding of the times.
Indoctrination and training have been interesting topics for their view into the general culture of the period. One might consider the way that during the industrialization of mathematical physics, social hierarchy played a dominant, self-preserving role in the making of that industrialization. In the mid 1800s, The senior wrangler system, along with coaching and modernized testing, became a growing, tentacular system of drawing in and preserving mathematicians and physicists.
When physicists of the 19th century spoke of reductionism and economy, they were not only concerned with a general goal of simplicity for beauty's sake, nor just a view to the creation of comprehensible theories, but also, and perhaps more importantly to create marketable, tradable, and teachable currencies. We should not read Boltzmann's papers out of context; in the papers for this course, he was addressing a scholastic, academic community. So, while he extolled the utility of the mechanical world-view, he had in mind the fruitful learning-value of that view, not any absolute primacy of it.
Kuhn also wrote of a pedagogical necessity for a certain view of history, applicable to our traditional nose-to-the-grindstone approach to education; that is, if normal science can beget its own revolution, indoctrination into normal science is sufficient to allow revolutions, thus progress, no social questioning necessary. The establishment of a structure of indoctrination, for efficiency's sake, is described in Ken Alder's A Social Epistemology of Enlightenment Engineering: "The siege wars of Louis XIV had overwhelmed the supply of such [trained engineers], and in the eighteenth century the French state turned to new forms of training." Standardization could bring theory and practice together; standardization meant rejecting the personal incompatibilities with state that some mathematicians exhibited, while increasing the rank and accountability of others. "Gribeauval received reports on the professors too, and chastised faculty who taught their own particular methods of solving problems." [Alder, p. 67] The military school thus created the same kind of standardized texts that Kuhn would, centuries later, defend. Armed with a certain sense of meritocracy associated with this training, Alder shows the artillerymen to preserve themselves through the revolutions by seeing themselves in a hierarchy allegiant to the state, not to the ever-disconnected heads of state.
Self-preservation is no small part of any body. "The need to appeal for popular support for the discipline may account for some of the physicists' emphasis on the moral and social relevance of physics and for their use of concepts familiar from other fields to explain new concepts." [Myers, p. 313]
Myers uses this concept to understand the value of popularizers such as Tyndall and Thomson, but this concept may also be applied to the creation of industrial and governmental committees around WWI, to the loyalty of Tait to Thomson over Clausius and other German claimants to primacy in thermodynamics, to the dominance of national scientific societies before the ascendancy of the universities, and to the intentional linking of thermodynamics and religion. Scientists in these stories were claiming that their efforts were part of industrialization, part of being British in the face of Continental pressures, part of a proper gentleman's pursuits, and part of being pious.
J.L. Heilbron's model of descriptionism, "withdrawal from big questions and relaxation of claims to knowledge of truth," as self-preservation: "Its defensive role outside physics appears plainly in Pearson's reply to Salisbury: anyone who understands the methods and goals of science knows that, since it cannot attain to the essence of things, it cannot make the claims on which the accusations of arrogance are based." [Fin-de-siècle physics, pp. 51, 59]
In P.M. Harman's critical review of Maxwell's metaphysical sources, "the role of metaphysical foundations was [merely] to provide justificatory sanction for a physical and mathematical world-view," not to "shape the enunciation of physical theory." [The natural philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell, p. 214]
By making barometry a proper activity in society, the philosophers and glass-makers acted in self-preservation of their experimental and technical community. "Purchase of a barometer, in effect, implied acceptance of an invitation to participate in an experimental community." [Jan Golinsky, Barometers of Change, p. 87]
By World War I, seeing that progress in science might, without check, mean progress in any direction including evil ones, some in greater society called for a muzzle on it. [Hugh Slotten, Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism, p. 481] Some scientists were unapologetic about progress, as seen in the American Burgess' listings of the usefulness of science at the front, and some were more defensive, worrying about "permanent" repercussions of nationalistic tones in wartime proclamations by other scientists. To some, self-preservation meant national alignment, while to others it meant internationalism. It would be wrong to absolutely associate the patriots with personal self-preservation and the internationalists with their field's self-preservation (see more about scientist-on-scientist self-preservation below). Patriots saw the need to align with military and industry for the preservation of entire fields, while internationalists were concerned about their personal links to individuals in opposing and neutral nations. In America, all scientists were probably aware of the charges of the humanists, representing traditional "kultur," against barbarous science and its supposedly unfeeling curriculum.
The patriotism defense of the pursuit of science was summed by Max Born in an editorial in Physikalische Zeitschrift: "Physics too is at one with the fatherland in this time of peril and danger." [1915, as quoted in Stefan L. Wolff, German Physics in World War I] For patriotic reasons, Wien and others wanted German scientists to purge the social implications of germanized anglicisms like "Skineffekt" and add social meaning to German literature by adding more references to German literature. In this period, the problem wasn't society informed science, it was the improper alignment of that social information.
And not only have we seen the self-preservation of science in greater society, we have seen the attempts and methods of self-preservation of scientists as individuals among brethren. In claims of priority, relevance, patronage, mentorship, on top of recognizing one's personal work as defensible by being comparatively patriotic, pious, loyal, applicable, and sometimes inevitable or sometimes uniquely personal.
Lutz Haber paints a picture of "cranks and specialists" self-aggrandizing their way into wartime committees, as experimenters. Their experiments were justified to move the front, but their unpredictable outcomes were measured in hundreds of unasked-for casualties.
R. Macleod shows that, thanks to the lengthy buildup to the Great War, scientists "officially on tap, were effectively on top" by July 1915 in Britain. [The Chemists Go to War, p. 470] This self-preservation was due to committee-infiltration as well as the technical necessity for industrial chemists.
Within science, patronage and mentorship are useful historical markers. Mary Terall explores them in The Man Who Flattened the Earth: "The [post Newton-Leibniz] community was a small one, crisscrossed by ties of intellectual patronage and mentorship." [p. 37] Studying Maupertuis' development partly under Bernoulli's mentorship, Terall develops a history of a free thinker socially laying groundwork from which new work can spring, not necessarily under direct influence. [pp. 41-43] In Maupertuis' case, we have someone who showed how lack of social acceptance could stand in the way of development:<<Je ne veux point lire cette piece dans nos assemblées ou il y des gens qui le mot seul d'attraction epouvante.>> [M. to J. Bernoulli June 11, 1731]
The preservation of mathematical physics, by the time of top maths coach Edward Routh, was reproductive indoctrination. The doctrine was a set of topics, allowed to increase a bit over time, and a set of approaches to those topics, passed from top wranglers to future top wranglers. [Andrew Warwick, Routh's Men, p. 246]
Understanding that James Clerk Maxwell did not himself create the idea of a physical hypothesis, I laud him for making explicit the acceptability of the physical hypothesis, shown in the prodigious work of Michael Faraday. Faraday's lines of force and Maxwell's mechanical æther were fruitful for more than a decade in their time. As Maxwell testified to the utility of Faraday's philosophy, so Hertz testified to the utility of Maxwell's, both in the face of opposing philosophies, to audiences that couldn't oppose the utility. By making some energy conversion science useful, unity and utility saved several contributions of scientists by aligning them with values of the day. [Kuhn, Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery, p. 81]
Mary Somerville's, and others', 1834 claim and prophecy of unification in science under the banner of Energy never fully cemented, not only because of differences in philosophy between Forcists and Energists, but because professionalization, specialization, industrialization, and nationalism (and other antagonisms) made permanent splits among natural philosophers later in the 19th century. By the time of Boltzmann's inaugural address to the University of Leipzig in 1900, he identified a unified mechanical view as a temporary, pedagogical entry-hall into physical science. Science was not then merely a philosophy, it had become an industry, with convergent indoctrination and training but with divergent applications and social barriers. Were industrialists like Joule, concerned with their precision and efficiency, the prime creators of this compartmentalized, utilitarian physical science?
Let us take the person of Boltzmann to be to some degree aloof from self-preservation, possibly allowable considering his suicide. May we not then consider more trust in his description of the hegemonic campaign of the mechanical world-view preceding him? In his Leipzig address, he tells us what is more important to him as a world-view, his statistical view of deviance from chaotically stable equilibria of opposing forces. Innate drives and other forces, in his talk, are frequently seen to "overshoot the mark." But he links, as he did professionally, mechanical hypotheses with statistical outcomes quite elegantly, and attempted to soothe the poets in his audience that there was no ultimate hypothesis, just a vast, overarching mechanical hypothesis that was immensely fruitful. The barrier between vast hypothesis and ultimate hypothesis was the same as that between our ideation and the nature of things. While birds have their automatic art of nest-building, we have our fallible, intellectual pursuits. I think to Boltzmann, as long as we didn't deviate too far from the norm, our pursuits were as noble and natural as the birds'.
By the time of Burgess' account of WWI science at the front, unity was not a product of science but a war-time state of scientists. [Burgess, Applications of Science to Wartime France, Sci. Mon. Oct 1917, p. 291]
Let's consider a sampling of scientists claiming they are not overstepping their bounds:
"We need therefore take back none of the sharpness and definiteness of our previous expressions [of the mechanical world-view]. We have in any case used them only for asserting a certain analogy between mental phenomena and the simple mechanisms in nature. We have merely constructed a one-sided picture in order to illustrate certain connections between phenomena and to predict new ones thus far unknown to us." Boltzmann, Leipzig address, 1900.
"Hypothesis non fingo." Newton, General Scholium, 1713.
"Physics is experience, arranged in economical order." Mach, The Economical Nature of Physical Inquiry, 1882. Also "from [science's] amassment of wealth no one suffers the least loss."
"By referring everything to the purely geometrical idea of the motion of an imaginary fluid, I hope to attain generality and precision, and to avoid the dangers arising from a premature theory professing to explain the cause of the phenomena." Maxwell, On Faraday's Lines of Force, p. 159, 1855.
But the function of great scientists has been to overstep their bounds, but with enough care to choose or guess the right direction. So, on the one hand we have the 1790 remarks of George Adams, in line with "hypothesis non fingo," as interpreted by Golinski: "Philosophers were 'continually labouring to accumulate unconnected facts,' while carefully abstaining from premature attempts to reduce them to hypotheses." But without the hypothetical connection between weather-predictability and the barometer, there would be nothing to do for those legions of labourers.
And some scientists we've studied do not continuously fit into a model of self-preservation; these are the scientists who overstepped their bounds freely. Some, I'll include Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier and Michael Faraday here, had a formidable position from which to launch their forays into philosophy. Fourier, quoted in Harman's Energy, Force, and Matter [p. 28] "declared that 'mathematical analysis is as extensive as nature itself.'" Fourier, like Mary Somerville, preached eventual unity and universality of natural laws. Faraday, while speaking of the lines of gravitation as merely ideal lines, considered the independent existence of physical lines of force from ponderable matter "an ascertained fact." [On the Physical Lines of Magnetic Force, last sentence, 1852.] Still, Faraday's work fit neatly into the conversion of forces campaign of the first third of the 1800s, if not neatly into his role under the mentorship of Humphry Davy.
Self-preservation could mean opposite things to separated scientists. For Thomson, who went to Europe to study in its labs, not its centers of analytical thinking, efficiency in problem solving would be its own reward, leading to efficiency of expression. Those tied to the combinations of their traditional analyses, such as Thomson's nemesis Clausius, sought to build up an understanding of states by summing all the parts, starting from mechanistic atoms.
To preserve themselves in the face of questions about free will, philosophers from Kant on had to put a limit on the meaning of statistical laws, that just because in the aggregate dynamics of gases and of people were both very predictable did not mean to say anything about each individual molecule and person. [See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, p. 15] Preservation of international science and its darling, general relativity, Eddington and the Quakers saw as riding on the quick reconciliation of scientists from belligerent states over a publicity coup for science itself. Eddington, according to Matthew Stanley, was willing to suffer the distinction between claiming proof for Einstein's theory and claiming mere proof of the resultant law of bending to allow for quick publication before spectrographic analysis. [An expedition to heal the wounds of war, p. 81]
We have mostly covered the history of successful, modern science. Perhaps the history of less successful science would be less served by consideration of self-preservation within social order(s), more by deviance from social order(s) or perhaps independence from social order(s). Another approach to these same scientists is possible however, in the possible attempt at selection of cases where attempts at self-preservation backfired.
But let us compare, finally, in light of my focus on self-preservation, three historian's approach to precision and standardization. In Work and Waste, M. Norton Wise writes about Glaswegians as precise industrialists. If they continued on a course towards precision, the scientific laws would eventually out themselves. [pp. 224-225] On a different tack, Ken Alder, in A Revolution to Measure, attributes the precision and standardization of the metric standard to social and economic interests. [p. 39] In the middle sits Theodore M. Porter, who attributes variable bureaucratic pressure, depending on the topic, to studies of precision and standardization, alongside "discipline tending to self-effacement" reminiscent of the Glaswegians. Porter shows how the demands of law shaped the quest for precision, how actuaries and theorists had to adjust to what Ian Hacking called the Avalanche of Numbers to preserve any amount of their power over insurance determinations.
Again, the successful ones are a case study in self-preservation, with social, bureaucratic, numeric, industrial, pedagogical, and philosophical skills.
