The history of science has never had the easiest stories to tell.
A field suspended between the two cultures, it’s been contested territory for as long as it has existed: rife with clattering jargon, methodological skirmishes, and ideological warfare. Although it entered academe as science’s explanatory sidekick, over the past few decades the history of science has emerged a full-fledged discipline, drawing practitioners mostly from the humanities. But this independence, and the field’s critical distance, has come at a cost, many in the discipline now say.
By expanding its intellectual tent, the discipline has eroded its own authority and intellectual base, said Carsten J. Reinhardt, a science historian and president of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, a Philadelphia library and museum supported largely by retired chemists and known as one of the country’s most prominent sponsors of science-history research. Where scholars based in the sciences documented a rational march toward knowledge, historians—inspired by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—have asked how science is socially constructed and culturally received.
“We pulled it off the pedestal of untouchable, eternal wisdom and truth,” Mr. Reinhardt said. But perhaps they pulled too hard: “If you say that the field of science is not special anymore, you might end up not being special yourself. And that’s where we are now.”
That faded luster can be seen in several ways: With some exceptions, stand-alone science history and sociology programs are in decline, though at least several dozen remain in the United States today. Grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health are tight. And the History of Science Society is undergoing a fundamental rethinking of its constituency—is it just historians, or scientists, too?
Most prominently, this concern has been voiced by Hasok Chang, a professor at the University of Cambridge and president of the British Society for the History of Science, in a lecture last year. It’s time, he said to a packed hall of science historians at an international congress, “to put the science back in the history of science.”
Mr. Chang sees many historians “quite afraid of science” when it comes to, say, the gritty technical details of molecular biology or the Standard Model of particle physics. Rather, they turn toward studying medieval scientific precursors or how people in the 20th century read Isaac Newton. It’s all valid work, but it has helped sever their ties to science.
In the 1990s, feuds over the best historical approach culminated in the “science wars,” when a few humanists and scientists endlessly debated the nature of scientific truth, and eventually stopped talking altogether. “A lot of scientists think we’re out to damage the authority of scientists and belittle scientific knowledge,” Mr. Chang said. “And that’s just not true of what historians of science are trying to do.”
For Mr. Chang, the ideal analogue for their field is art history, where scholars study the historical context of their subject but also employ a certain connoisseurship. It should be no academic crime to judge one past experiment as better than another.
Not everyone agrees with Mr. Chang’s concerns, although his lecture kicked off a discussion, and the majority of historians interviewed for this article echoed his fears to some degree.
Only Steven Shapin, a science historian at Harvard University and one of the field’s top researchers, was wholly perplexed. “The world that Hasok is talking about—I don’t recognize it,” Mr. Shapin said. His colleagues and students come from a variety disciplines, many technical, and none would dig into science without mastery of its material. “The content of scientific knowledge is what we do,” he said. All the best work is a hybrid of science’s internal mechanisms and external context.
As for a lost golden relationship with scientists? It never existed, Mr. Shapin added. “Scientists, God bless them, are not much interested in the past of their own disciplines.”
Contested Boundaries
As always in academe, much hinges on vague definitions and boundaries. Many from literature or cultural studies have worked on science history recently. Some historians think of that work when characterizing the field; others don’t. Then there are the philosophy of science and science studies, overlapping disciplines that wink in and out of history’s orbit, wobbling its focus this way and that.
It was not inevitable that the history of science would transform itself into a branch of academic history. The field’s modern life began after World War II, when Harvard created its science-history program; other universities followed. Two things changed that trend toward stand-alone programs. First, the field pushed for autonomy from the sciences and needed a new institutional protector. And it became clear that for graduate students to find academic jobs, they would need to work in traditional history departments.
“I fully expect history-of-science departments to become relics of the past,” said Darin Hayton, an associate professor of the history of science at Haverford College, based in the history department. “And I think that’s for the best.”
That home base in history, however, has made it harder for researchers with graduate science degrees to pursue historical work, said Martin J.S. Rudwick, an emeritus history-of-science professor at University of California at San Diego. A former paleontologist, Mr. Rudwick wrote the definitive histories of pre-Darwinian earth sciences. Most scientists today would discourage their brightest students from pursuing a similar path.
“Some of the smartest people who’ve come into the field have done so by sticking to their guns,” Mr. Rudwick said. “Insisting on it against pressure from their scientific peers.”
Several decades ago, Mr. Rudwick defended against the notion that science historians needed to have advanced scientific training. But that trend may have gone too far. Now he looks at Isis, a leading journal, and it seems that most of the articles are disengaged from scientific content. Mr. Chang, he said, is “swimming against the tide of what I see in Isis.”
That’s a problem, said Bernard V. Lightman, the journal’s editor and a historian at York University, in Toronto. Cultural scientific history might be dominant, but it should not be exclusionary.
“I don’t want people like Martin to feel alienated,” he said.
That alienation starts early, however, Mr. Chang said. If students turn in a paper that focuses too much on the internal development of a scientific discovery, they’ll get marked down and told they’re writing the wrong kind of history. “It’s not so much to do with the quality of the work,” Mr. Chang said, “as being the wrong kind of work.”
Questions of Relevance
One possible future could be divergence, where what was once known as the history of science morphs into the history of knowledge, with interest in the modern sciences a subset of the field.
Already, the German name of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin better translates as “history of knowledge,” said Michael Bycroft, a postdoc there, “which is one way of untying this knot.”
A former student of Mr. Chang’s, Mr. Bycroft would like to see his critique go a step further. The field should accept purely internal history as methodologically sound, part of a pluralistic approach to science history. It would allow for an easy end to the internal-external tensions that flare up time and again, he said.
By some accounts, the pendulum is already swinging back. Mr. Hayton sees far fewer people interested in medieval subjects, such as his work on astrology, than in Cold War sciences, including, in some cases, their complicated technical content. Partially, that may be out of a desire for relevance—right now the world seems oblivious to the history of science. Mr. Hayton recently heard a scientist mention how people used to believe in a flat earth—a popularly held but utterly false claim. “Clearly we, as historians of science, have failed miserably,” he said.
Despair is not the answer, however.
“The wrong way to go about this,” Mr. Hayton said, “is sticking your head in the ground like an ostrich and repeating over and over, ‘What I do has relevance. What I do has relevance. What I do has relevance.’”
Rather, take Joanna Radin, an assistant professor at Yale University. She studies how the life sciences preserve, and reuse, their samples, which requires a fine-grained knowledge of population genetics and biology. All the best work shares this engagement, she said—as it has since the 1980s, Mr. Shapin points out.
Ms. Radin wants to be read by scientists; she wants her histories to ring true to the people with stakes in them. “It doesn’t make sense to cut off that world,” she said.
With another colleague, she’s started a monthly lunch for scientists and humanists. Meeting at the natural-history or art museum, or the research farm, a couple dozen researchers gather from disciplines like genetics, English, and psychotherapy to discuss topics like consumer genetic testing. Across the Atlantic, Mr. Chang has taken similar steps, starting a biweekly “coffee with scientists” reading group; a recent talk featured a biostatistician and medical historian on the possibility that Gregor Mendel had tweaked his research results.
In the end, lunch and coffee can do only so much, of course. It’s likely that the tension between science and its historians will always exist, and that the number of scholars who can master historical methods and scientific arcana will always be limited. But the field should at least make itself as open as possible to those who make the attempt, Mr. Rudwick said.
After all, Thomas Kuhn was a physicist.
