Osiris, 2d ser., vol. 7: Science after ’40 ed. by Arnold Thackray

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 881 series, it pays virtually no attention to technological change or to the technical characteristics of the pipeline systems themselves. And while it does offer likely the best available answer to “how” the pipeline systems were put in place, useful supplements remain Richard W. Hooley, Financing the Natural Gas Industry: The Role of Life Insurance Investment Policies, and M. Elizabeth Sanders, The Regulation of Natural Gas: Policy and Politics, 1938—1978. If this study has a truly serious deficiency, it is not really Castaneda’s doing: it is one shared by a good deal of business history as currently practiced in this country. It is history sanitized nearly to the point of misrepresentation. A story that reeks of high-stakes chicanery, conflicts of interests, double-dealing, insider trading, and influence peddling is told in the cooly rational tone of an Alfred Chandler, rather than in the venomous but perspicacious voice of a MatthewJosephson. If anything marks the triumph ofAmerican corporatism, it is simply that this story, told the way Josephson would have told it, now likely would be legally actionable as well as academically unfashionable. Edward W. Constant II Dr. Constant teaches history oftechnology at Carnegie Mellon University and was raised in Houston. Osiris, 2d ser., vol. 7: Science after ’40. Edited by Arnold Thackray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pp. ix+307; illustrations, notes, index. $39.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). How quickly science in the making for one generation of historians becomes the history ofscience for the next. When he arrived at Harvard in 1967, Arnold Thackray recalls in his preface to this cleverly titled collection, the original Scientific Revolution was still considered recent history (and SHOT apparently was still considered “scarcely more than a distant rumor”!). Nowadays, much of the history we are describing occurred in our own lifetimes, and historians of science are talking seriously about “writing history as it happens.” In an effort “to sample the exciting work now under way on very recent science” and to “provide the maps and compasses needed by those who wish to explore this last frontier for themselves” (p. viii), Thackray has gathered contributions from scholars studying various aspects of the modern scientific enterprise, including specialties (e.g., biochemistry and botany) and subjects (e.g., regulation and compensation) not covered in similar volumes. As Thackray readily acknowledges, the history of recent science lacks anything approaching a common interpretive framework. At best it shares a literature—written largely by social scientists, journalists, and practitioners—and a sense of the decisive importance of politics in the postwar world. Disappointingly, Thackray limited himself to a short 882 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE preface and so offers us no personal vision of how the history of science after ’40 should be conceptualized and written. James Capshew and Karen Rader’s introductory essay on Big Science provides a superb survey of the literature but also raises some important questions about Big Science as an organizing theme for postwar science. If Big Science must be read as a literary artifact of the postwar scientific community and its critics, as they argue, then we must look elsewhere to understand what gave that construction its meaning and influence. Obviously the Cold War, and the subsequent mobilization of science in the interests of national security on both sides of the “iron curtain,” offers one way of making sense of the postwar world, though at the risk of losing sight of those aspects of science not closely tied to defense priorities. Here Paul Forman follows up his pioneering studies of the militarization of postwar physics with a detailed account of Charles Townes’s invention of the maser. It can easily be misread, Forman points out, as old-fashioned intellectual biography—What did Townes know and when did he know it?—though in fact it is an exemplary study of what a single artifact can reveal about the larger culture and the integration of science and scientists into that culture. Roger Geiger capably surveys (depending on your politics, in a balanced or uncritical way) the various relationships between defense agencies and American universities, which he categorizes in terms of dependence, domination, distortion, and displacement. Ronald...