The Historian and the Progress of Science

Abstract

Arnold Thackray: It has become a commonplace that the present age is a new age, an Age of Science. A new trinity of scientific research, technological development, and rapid social change dominates our sensibilities. For the better part of 300 years, a tacit assumption of Western civilization has been that rapid change and social progress are equivalent. Thus, by a sort of shorthand, the advance of science has become equated with social progress. Now scholars, scientists, and perhaps the general public, too, are beginning question that equation, and as a corollary, grow less certain about how understand the advance of science itself. It is within this context that I invite you reflect with me on what the historian of science can contribute exploring the very large and complex issues of the nature of scientific progress. To aid in this reflection, let me begin with a definition of history offered by Douglas Adair, an American historian, who said, History is a dialogue in the present, with the past, about the future. The sciences, of course, are future-oriented, and have been so oriented since the days of Francis Bacon. Nowhere has this orientation toward the future been so exuberantly apparent as in the United States during the last century. Indeed, the Act of Congress that created the National Science Foundation in 1950 explicitly directed the agency to promote the progress of science. As this directive indicates our age-the Age of Sciencehas cast its public thinking toward the future and, an unprecedented degree, taken the idea of progress as a given. A heavy responsibility, therefore, lies with the historian of science stimulate a dialogue in the present, with the past, about the future. Let me first review how the history of science developed as a critical discipline. Even though George Sarton had established the journal Isis by 1912 and had lived in this country since 1915, the field only began emerge as a profession after World War II. Until that time, the history of science in this country was largely a part-time, amateur pursuit, one that was largely celebratory in nature. During the 1920s and 1930s, most of those few people who wrote about the history of science, if asked discourse about scientific progress, would probably have agreed that the sciences' internal criteria for gauging progress were adequate and that scientific progress continued unabated-particularly in the United States. Since then, the broad trend has been away from celebration and toward analytical inquiry. As a result, few professional historians of science today would be willing give a simple, unequivocal statement about what constitutes scientific progress, let alone offer a judgment about whether there has been progress within any particular discipline during a particular period of time. Now, celebration is a necessary function of all social institutions, and organizations often turn history assist them in their celebratory rites. If people with a short attention span want commemorate the tricentennial of the birth of Isaac Newton, for example, they can browse around in the reference books and even publicize the material they find without too much effort in research. This way of working guarantees the per-