340 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE main problem with the received view of science, namely its “deficit model” of public understanding and its proposed remedy: more sci entific knowledge provided by the scientific community and commu nicated more effectively to the people. The scholarship presented here indicates that what is needed is not simply more scientific knowledge but an understanding ofscience that recognizes its social character. Scientists must understand that there is a flexible bound ary between science and other forms of cultural knowledge. Sci ence—rather than belonging on center stage based upon its sup posedly apolitical, value-neutral, and epistemologically superior character—must be related and often subordinated to other sources of information. Furthermore, until science knows itselfbetter in this sense, its ability to convey what the public needs to know will be greatly limited. Readers interested in the public understanding of science and technology should find this book valuable because of its theoretical contributions, but it pays the larger history ofthis complex issue only passing attention. Relying mainly on qualitative sociological meth ods ofinquiry, MisunderstandingScience? tells us little about pre-1980s scholarly and public discussions about what the public knows and should know. We will be fortunate if this useful volume helps to in form and stimulate scholarship that is more historical. Mark Solovey Dr. Soi.ovey, an assistant professor at Arizona State University West, is writing a book about the role of national politics and science policy in helping to define the boundaries of legitimate social science inquiry in the United States after World War II. Technische Universitat Braunschweig: Vom Collegium Carolinum zur Technischen Universitat, 1745-1995. Edited by Walter Kertz. Hildesheim : Georg OlmsVerlag, 1995. Pp. xiv+919; illustrations, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. DM198 (hardcover). This history of the Technische Universitat Braunschweig (Techni cal University Brunswick) has its own history, and because the latter explains much about the former, it is well to begin with a brief ac count ofhow the volume came about. The book was conceived in the mid-1980s, when an interdisciplinary team offaculty, administrators, and financial supporters began looking forward to commemorating the founding of their institution—or, rather, its predecessor—on its 250th anniversary in 1995. Local pride and antiquarian passion, so often the wellsprings of historical enthusiasm, appear to have played an important role in this case as well. The planners, however, were determined to steer clear of the self-congratulatory celebration that is the usual fate of TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 341 such projects. Instead, the collaborative and multiauthored volume they had in mind would enlighten in the same integral and critical way in which the contemporary German technical university seeks to educate its students about the interdependence ofvalues, technol ogy, and society. As the volume’s leading editor, geophysicist Walter Kertz, articulates this goal in the preface, the project’s original archi tects all agreed that the final work should exemplify the fact “that technical, social, political, and economic processes are interwoven with one another and shape our lives” (p. vii). In short, the book was to contribute to the larger goal ofmaking engineers into citizens—a task historically neglected by German education, especially Germa ny’s system of higher technical education. Given this agenda and backed by plentiful funding from the gov ernment and organizations such as the Volkswagen Foundation, the project soon developed considerable institutional momentum. A steering committee ofsenior scholars coordinated a range ofexplor atory studies and preliminary publications. They organized annual historical conferences and workshops and recruited numerous col laborators and participants from a variety of the university’s divisions and disciplines. The project also came to serve as the launching pad for the professional careers of several graduate students and lectur ers, generating spin-off in the form of dissertations, articles, chap ters, and books that examine different aspects of the university’s his tory. All in all, a great deal more scholarship was produced between 1984 and 1995 than could possibly fit between the covers of a single volume—even though the volume in question weighs in at 6V2 pounds and has over nine hundred pages of text and appended mat ter, almost three hundred photographs, roughly the same number...