Absolutely Fabulous History of Science?

Abstract

Readers of Social Studies of Science will understand, perhaps, that this caused some concern and bemusement in our corridors in the School of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of New South Wales! Some of us suspected that Buzo's animus sprang from days of yore when, as an undergraduate Arts student, he was more or less obliged to take history and philosophy of science. However, his broadside was puzzling, not least because Buzo is supposedly a 'friend' of the Faculty. We could be forgiven for thinking that with such supporters, enemies should certainly be avoided. There is always a question in such situations about whether it is better to seethe and suffer in silence than to respond.2 Precisely this dilemma has been faced by people in our field so far as the 'Science Wars' controversies have been concerned. It faces us in a less obvious and more beguiling form as a result of the outpouring in recent years of a large number of popular histories of science, what I have called the 'Sobel Effect' literature (Miller, 2002: 185). This literature, often generated in imitation or expectant emulation of Dava Sobel's immensely popular works Longitude (1995) and Galileo's Daughter (1998), remains a flood of greatly variable quality. Much of it springs from the word processors of journalists, science writers and scientists themselves, but professional historians of science and technology,