STS3301 Paper Week 8
Response to readings, week 8, American Science? for STS 3301
First, a haiku:
Baconianism: an army of ants? merely a side of bacon.
This week we are revisiting the week where we compared Faraday's published, specific science, with its interpretations. This time, we are comparing Augustus Henry Rowland's profession, as detailed in Sweetnam's paper, with his own professions, as exampled in Rowland's "Plea."
Rowland was a middle scientist. He was not a pure scientist, but it seems he saw himself as one to build an army of technicians and 'lower' scientists ready to be the servants of pure science.
Is Nathan Reingold's 1991 claim, as cited in Sweetnam [p. 300], that US science was characterized by no separation between the "grand savant and practitioner; theoretician and earnest mechanic," any comparison to other nations? What of Faraday, Humphry Davy's tech assistant, whose very theories were imbued with a mechanical push and pull of forces.
To Sweetnam, the diffraction grating carried attributes that became part of physics, more "active" than "passive" in shaping physics. I don't see how this is different than Galileo's work in improving on Dutch lenses by a factor of ten. The grinding of lenses was informed by Galileo's first lunar observations, as he became aware of the importance of the resolution and magnifying power of the lenses. Perhaps any tool, when it has a rapport with the scientist, is active; and, when the scientist doesn't condescend to think about the instrument, it is passive.
By being more precise than anyone else, Rowland was preserving a position for himself in his hierarchical feudalism of pure scientists (lords), resting on a foundation of technical scientists (vassals) like him, who managed then the work of technicians and marketers (fiefs). Rowland's compares the difference between valley-filling education and his ideal with the difference between democracy and fiefdom: "As far as the average man is concerned, the change is for the better."
Below everyone for Rowland were schoolteachers. "The time is almost past, even in our own country, when third-rate men can find a place as teachers, because they are unfit for everything else." [p. 250]
Lorraine Daston's claim, as cited in Sweetnam [p. 301], of the moral values of work in precision, fits with Rowland's self-view. Rowland professed that nature humbled man, thus improved man by preparing him to receive truth. His access to truth first humbled him, then elevated him above others because he accumulated more humbling in his history than others. [Sweetnam, p. 302] As in the Beatitude "the meek shall inherit the earth," Rowland writes "To these few men [pure scientists] the world owes all the progress due to applied science, and yet very few ever received any payment in this world for their labors." [p. 243, my italics]
Rowland's message is not a Jeremiad, it's a prophecy of inevitability, he says. "If I read aright the signs of the times..." [p. 243] Even so, he describes external pressures running against pure science: "I have even heard the trustee of a well-known college assert that no professor should engage in research because of the time wasted." [p. 244]
Is it an indictment on the Cornell Physics Department that it is evidently the fulfillment of Rowland's wishes, "a large and perfectly equipped physical laboratory with its large revenues, its corps of professors and assistants, and its machine-shop for the construction of new apparatus"? [p. 248] Maybe the question for Cornell is in the distinction between "any person" and "every person." Rowland wouldn't go so far, with evidence that he believed that some people were born geniuses. Evidence that the equal-opportunity system had a special quality was evidenced by S.A. Goudsmit, as cited in Schweber. Students that had experience helping repair the car or the house had a knack for physics, but in Europe such weren't allowed to attend university, by tradition. [p. 75]
One idea in our studies of 19th century science was the convergence, the unification, prophesied by the energy scientists. Rowland professed science to be universal, nature a truth on which to converge. He used this view to request the freer trade of international journals in science. [p. 249]
In echos of Rowland, as an experimentalist asking for pure scientists, Schweber credits experimentalists of the 1920s with creating a welcoming atmosphere for theorists like Dirac. [p. 56] Schweber finds evidence for a real distinction between US and European institutions, in the existence typical only in the US of a combined theoretical and experimental department. Schweber describes the highly populated pyramids as in Rowland's scheme: a critical mass of top theorists, a cadre of experimentalists, "much larger than those in German or British universities." [p. 58]
Experimentalists created a demand for theorists not just in words, but, according to Schweber and his citations, in pushing experimental results beyond theoretical understanding of themselves and of their weak theoretical partners in American universities. [pp. 71-72]
