I have a bit of a problem with Secord’s criticism of Sobel and hero narratives in science. First I should disclose that my mother is a scientist and a grew up around a lot of scientists. In fact my mom is an astrophysicist and knows Sobel. I’m not including any of this background info in order to brag, I just want to disclose both my personal knowledge and my bias. When I read Secord’s article as at home back in Boston. I commented to my mom as I was reading the article, “so this guy seems to have a real problem with Dava Sobel.” She asked why, I told her that I’d tell her later and I went back to the article. I think the main issue I had with the article as a whole is that it seemed to extoll the pursuit of historiographical perfection above all other goals in telling the history of science. The reason I have a problem with this is that history of science is something that should be understandable and interesting to the public, and also to scientists. My mom is a well educated person, but she learned the word historiography because her daughter is a history student. Most of the engagement a lot of her colleagues seem to have with the history of science is books by the likes of Dava Sobel. I’ve actually seen books like this have a concrete positive impact on the way scientists approach their own field’s culture and history. The conference rooms at my mom’s office are going to renamed after prominent astronomers at the university many of them women, because of Dava Sobel’s book The Glass Universe.
I’ve seen dinner table conversation among scientists shift to history, because of books by authors like Dava Sobel and Walter Isaacson. Do both these authors tend to have possibly oversimplified hero narratives in their work? Probably. But does that matter more than the power of their work to get scientists talking about the history of their field? I personally don’t think so.
I should mention that when I discussed the criticism Secord had of Sobel’s specific work on Harrison and Longitude, my mother agreed that Sobel had left out too many of the contributions of members of the Royal Society. However for her Sobel’s book had still been a valuable introduction to the topic and a compelling read although it was incomplete.
I also think that certain trends in historiography around science can be especially alienating to scientists. The idea that scientific ideas do not spread because they are true can make scientists dismissive of “those wacky humanities people”. Personally I don’t think that scientific ideas spread purely because they are true, but the truth of scientific ideas is a factor in both how they spread and how long they last. My mother made what I think is a good point, which is that science is constantly checking itself, and that a wrong idea is likely to disproven and dismissed by the scientific community eventually. While cultural factors around science should not be ignored treating scientific ideas as as cultural and un-objective as say literary ones takes this concept too far and creates an intellectual chasm between those doing science and those studying its history and culture.
Most scientists I’ve met in my life are naturally curious people who want to learn about their field and other fields, but many of them find academic history just as jargon laden and confusing as most historians would find a paper on neuropharmacology. My view is that history unlike science does not work if it is not understood and appreciated by those outside the field. Your doctor can still help you if you don’t understand the procedure, but the history of science will not help scientists better understand how their culture and networks could be influencing their work if they don’t understand what the historians are saying.
I’m aware that this is turning into a bit of a rant, so I will close with some things I liked in the history science elements of this week’s readings.
I liked the idea of travel as creating networks of information exchange. I’ve personally benefitted from this in semi symbiotic way. I get to go places to learn about history (as well as other subjects), because my mom is going their to strengthen her networks of scientific communication.
I thought the discussion of “simple men” being used as witnesses for science was interesting and was something I had not come across in history readings before. Even though I had not encountered this idea in readings before I have encountered it in reality. In fact for much of my life I have been the “simple man” for my mom and some of her colleagues, especially when I was a kid. I think both historians and scientists might benefit from employing more “simple man” techniques. Perhaps not “simple man”, but at the very least “person who isn’t directly in my field”. I think that explaining an idea to a person who is not an expert on that idea or the theory surrounding it, is a good way to test the truth and usefulness of an idea.