May 29, 2013

• To do a history of science, ask a historian who is also a scientist

  JDN 2456442 EDT 15:48.

  A review of How Experiments End by Peter Galison

  It seems so obvious in hindsight, but most things do. If you want a really good history of science, you need a historian who is also a scientist. Galison fits the bill; he has PhDs in both physics and history. How Experiments End is, as such, the finest history of science I’ve ever read.

  Unlike most historians who write about science, Galison has the proper respect for science. He appreciates how reason and evidence really do influence scientific decisions, and how, however imperfectly, we do gain real knowledge about the world. Yet unlike most scientists who write about science, he doesn’t sugar-coat the story either; he talks about the mistakes, the false paths, the blistered egos and funding competitions. I hope I get the chance to do some of this in the history of the Physics Department… though I rather doubt it. I suspect they’ll want it sanitized to be as unobjectionable and pro-Michigan as possible.

  At the very end of the book he sums it up this way: “In denying the old Reichenbachian division between capricious discovery and rule-governed justification, our task is neither to produce rational rules for discovery—a favorite philosophical pastime—nor to reduce the arguments of physics to surface waves over the ocean of professional interests. The task at hand is to capture the building up of a persuasive argument about the world around us, even in the absence of the logician’s certainty.”

  This strongly reminded me of one of my favorite quotations by Bertrand Russell: “Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.”

  Galison also appreciates how silly it is that we insist upon speaking of “the discovery of the muon” or “the invention of the superconductor” as a single event traceable to a particular year (or even day!).  Scientific progress is always more complicated than that; it takes a lot of people for a long time doing a lot of different things. I guess this is a problem in history in general though; we like to think of history as done by “Great Men”; it’s easier to wrap your mind around one heroic individual than a complex system of social change.

  That said, How Experiments End has its flaws. For one thing, it’s extremely technical; you need to know quite a bit of physics to understand what he’s talking about. For another, it has a very plodding pace about it, with enormous depth of historical detail, much of which seems ultimately irrelevant. Only in the introductory and conclusive chapters do you really get a sense of what Galison is trying to argue from all this. In the large middle portion of the book, it’s a long sequence of names, events, and technologies that all begin to blend together. I’m fairly interested in the history of science, and I still found sections boring. Someone who didn’t already come to the subject with such interest would probably be put off entirely.

  • 4:04 pm
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