About the Contributors

Jim Bennett is Keeper Emeritus at the Science Museum, London. He was formerly Director of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford. He has published on the history of instruments, of astronomy and of practical mathematics from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Charlotte Bigg is a researcher at the CNRS, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris. She has published widely on scientific images and visual cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has co-edited The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in the Nineteenth Century (Duke University Press, 2010) and Atombilder. Ikonografie des Atoms in Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wallstein Verlag, 2009). She is currently preparing Astronomy and Photography, to appear in Reaktion Books' Exposure series.

Jimena Canales holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science at University of Illinois–UC and was previously Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton University Press, 2015) and A Tenth of a Second: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and has published widely on science, technology, art, and philosophy.

Valérie Chansigaud is a researcher associated with SPHERE laboratory (University Paris–Diderot–CNRS). She studies the relation between human beings and wild nature. She has published several books of the history of ornithology, naturalist illustration, and protection of nature. Her last book, L'Homme et la Nature (Delachaux et Niestlé, 2013), has been given the Prix Léon de Rosen of the Académie française.

Peter Dear teaches the history of science and science studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions 1500–1700 (2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 2009).

Marwa Elshakry is Associate Professor in the History Department at Columbia University. She is the author of Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and co-editor, with Sujit Sivasundaram, of Science, Race and Imperialism, volume 6 of Victorian Literature and Science (Pickering & Chatto, 2012).

Diarmid A. Finnegan is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography, Archaeology, and Palaeoecology at Queen's University, Belfast, United Kingdom. His research interests center on the cultural geography of science and religion in the nineteenth century. His work includes the book Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland (Routledge, 2009) as well as several articles on scientific culture in Victorian Britain and Ireland.

Aileen Fyfe is Reader in Modern British History at the University of St. Andrews. Her research interests lie in the communication and popularization of the sciences. She is author of Science and Salvation (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Steam-Powered Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and co-editor of Science in the Marketplace (University of Chicago Press, 2007). She is currently leading a major research project “Publishing the Philosophical Transactions: The economic, social and cultural history of a learned journal 1665–2015.”

Anita Guerrini is Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History at Oregon State University. Trained in the history of science, she has written on the history of experimenting, animals, medicine, food, and the environment. Her books include Experimenting with Humans and Animals: from Galen to Animal Rights (John Hopkins University Press, 2003) and The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2015). She blogs at http://anitaguerrini.com/anatomia-animalia/.

Klaus Hentschel is professor for history of science and technology in Stuttgart. He has worked on relativity theory, quantum physics, spectroscopy, the interplay of instrumentation, experimentation and theory formation, on social networks and on invisible hands, on taxonomies in science, and on argumentation. For his studies on the physical sciences he has received five national and international prizes. cf. www.uni-stuttgart.de/hi/gnt/hentschel and .../gnt/dsi for his international “Database of Scientific Illustrators 1450-1950” with more than 10,000 entries.

Catherine Jackson is Assistant Professor of History of Science at University of Wisconsin, Madison. She previously held research fellowships at the University of Notre Dame and Chemical Heritage Foundation. Originally trained as a synthetic organic chemist, Jackson is completing a book on the origins of organic synthesis. She has published on Liebig, Hofmann, and the chemical laboratory, and co-edited (with Hasok Chang) An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology and War (British Society for the History of Science, 2007).

Boris Jardine was the 2014-15 Munby Fellow in Bibliography, Cambridge University Library. He has published widely on scientific instrumentation, in particular the relation between instruments and texts. He has also worked at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science (Cambridge) and the Science Museum (London).

Kristin Johnson is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is completing a book on the National Security Agency, and is undertaking a historical and ethnographic account of “big data,” its relation to statistics and machine learning, and its growth as a fundamental new form of technical expertise in business, political, and scientific research. His Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking About Thinking from Pascal to Babbage is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Heike Jöns is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough University. She has widely published on the geographies of science and higher education with a focus on transnational academic mobility and knowledge production. Her books include the research monograph Grenzüberschreitende Mobilität in den Wissenschaften (Universität Heidelberg 2003) and the edited volume Geographies of Science (Springer, 2010). Her current research examines the history of European universities with an emphasis on Britain and Germany.

David A. Kirby is Senior Lecturer in Science Communication Studies at the University of Manchester. Several of his publications address the relationship between cinema and the cultural meanings of genomics. His book Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011) examines collaborations between scientists and the entertainment industry. He is currently writing a book entitled “Indecent Science: Film Censorship and Science, 1930–1968” exploring how movies served as a battleground over science's role in influencing morality.

Robert E. Kohler is Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on the history of the field sciences.

Steven J. Livesey is Brian E. and Sandra O'Brien Presidential Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests focus on medieval science, history of early scientific methodologies, science in medieval universities, and manuscript studies. His current research project, supported by the Fulbright Commission, investigates the medieval library of Saint-Bertin, and the project goal is to reconstruct the library by identifying modern survivors of a collection that has been dispersed since the French Revolution.

Paul Lucier is historian of the earth and environmental sciences and of their interconnectedness with the mining and energy industries. He is the author of Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820-1890 (John Hopkins University Press, 2008) and is currently writing a history of science and capitalism in America.

Rory McEvoy is Curator of Horology at the Royal Observatory, part of Royal Museums, Greenwich. His research has a natural focus on the production, development, and use of precision horological instruments and associated technology as well as the broader history of the Royal Observatory, civil time, and its distribution.

Cyrus C. M. Mody is Professor and Chair in the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. He is the author of Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology (MIT Press, 2011). His current research focuses on the semiconductor industry's shaping of changes in US science and science policy since 1965, and on American physical and engineering scientists' creative responses to the dire conditions of the long 1970s.

Bruce T. Moran is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno, and teaches courses in the history of science and medicine. He is the author of Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2005) and Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical Cultures with Polemical Fire (Science History Publications, 2007). A co-edited volume, Bridging Traditions: Alchemy, Chemistry, and Paracelsian Practices in the Early Modern Era, appeared in 2015 from Truman State University Press. His current project examines the relationship between private sentiment and alchemical practice.

Iwan Rhys Morus is Professor of History at Aberystwyth University in Wales. He completed his PhD at Cambridge in 1989 and since then has worked largely in the area of Victorian science, with particular interests in the public culture of science and the backstage work of scientific performance. He is the author of Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in early Nineteenth-century London (Princeton University Press, 1998), When Physics became King (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Shocking Bodies: Life, Death and Victorian Electricity (History Press, 2011) as well as co-author of Making Modern Science (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Joshua Nall is Curator of Modern Sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on mass media and material culture of the physical sciences after 1800. He is currently preparing a monograph on the role of mass media in fin de siècle debates over life on Mars.

Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her first book was The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009). She is currently working on the histories of translation, narrative, and embodiment in Ming and Qing China from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries.

Tara Nummedal is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and is currently completing “The Lion's Blood: Alchemy, Gender, and Apocalypse in Reformation Germany.”

Lynn K. Nyhart is Vilas-Bablitch-Kelch Distinguished Achievement Professor of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The author of Biology Takes Form (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2009), she is currently a Senior Fellow at UW–Madison's Institute for Research in the Humanities, working on a history of ideas about biological individuals, parts, and wholes in the nineteenth century.

Brian Ogilvie is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2006). His current research focuses on insects in European art, science, and religion from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. He is also writing a short book on the cultural history of the butterfly for the Animal series from Reaktion Books.

Donald L. Opitz is Associate Professor in the School for New Learning at DePaul University. His research concerns the role of science in Anglo-American Victorian culture, with an emphasis on gender, class, and sexuality. He is co-editor, with Annette Lykknes and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, of For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences (Birkhaüser, 2012) and principal editor, with Staffan Bergwik and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, of Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Katherine Pandora is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on questions of scientific authority, science and popular culture, and science communication, particularly in relation to nineteenth and twentieth-century natural history and social science. She is the author of Rebels within the Ranks: Psychologists' Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and blogs at katherinpandora.net/petri_dish.

Denise Phillips is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, where she teaches German history and the history of science. She is the author of Acolytes of Nature: Science and Public Culture in Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and the co-editor of New Perspectives in the Life Sciences and Agriculture (Springer 2015).

Kapil Raj is Directeur d'études (Research Professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research examines the global intercultural negotiations which have gone into its making, the subject of Relocating Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) which focuses on the role of circulation and encounter between South Asian and European skills and knowledges in the emergence of crucial parts of modern science. He has also co-edited The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Science History Publications, 2009) and has just co-edited another collective work on the history of knowledge and science in the long nineteenth century which will appear in French at the end of 2015. He is currently engaged in researching for his next book on the urban and knowledge dynamics of Calcutta in the eighteenth century.

Lukas Rieppel is David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. He received his PhD at Harvard University in 2012 and is currently writing a book that explores what the history of dinosaur paleontology can tell us about the culture of capitalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. Under contract with Harvard University Press, the book is tentatively titled Assembling the Dinosaur: Science, Museums, and American Capitalism, 1870–1930. Together with Eugenia Lean and William Deringer, he is also editing the 2018 volume of Osiris on the theme of Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories.

Nathan Sidoli received a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John's College, Santa Fe, and an MA and PhD from the University of Toronto in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, with a dissertation on the mathematics of Claudius Ptolemy. He was a principle-investigator postdoctoral fellow for the US National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, before taking up a position at Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan), where he is currently Associate Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science. His current research focuses on foundations and practices in Greek mathematics and the transmission of Greek mathematical sciences in Arabic sources.

Josep Simon teaches the history of science, technology, and medicine at the Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá. He is the author of the award-winning Communicating Physics: the Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot's Textbooks in France and England (1851–1887) (Routledge, 2011), the Handbook chapter “Physics Textbooks and Textbook Physics in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” (Oxford University Press, 2013), the Encyclopedia of Science Education entry “History of Science” (Springer, 2015) and a number of special issues, and articles on science, education, and their historiographical interfaces.

Robert Smith is Professor of History in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. In addition to books and numerous articles on twentieth-century astronomy and the history of large-scale science, he has also written on a range of topics in the history of nineteenth-century astronomy broadly conceived.

Mary Sunderland is a historian of science and technology at the University of California, Berkeley where she is affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and the Department of Nuclear Engineering. She is interested in the twentieth-century life sciences. At present, her research focuses on engineering education and translational research. Questions about how the societal roles of scientists and engineers are shaped by pedagogy motivate her work.

Liba Taub is Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on material culture of science, and Greco-Roman science. With Frances Willmoth, she co-edited The Whipple Museum of the History of Science: Instruments and Interpretations, to Celebrate the 60th Anniversary of R.S. Whipple's Gift to the University of Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She retains fond memories of “Things of Science.”

Joyce van Leeuwen is Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She pursued graduate studies at the Humboldt University Berlin and Stanford University. Her research interests lie in Greek paleography, diagrammatic reasoning, history of mechanics, and early modern science. The Aristotelian Mechanics: Text and Diagrams will appear in 2015 in Springer's Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science.

Hector Vera is a researcher at Instituto de Investigaciones sobre la Universidad y la Educación, at Mexico's National University (UNAM). He has a PhD in sociology and historical studies from The New School for Social Research. His doctoral dissertation, “The Social Life of Measures: Metrication in Mexico and the United States, 1789–1994,” is a historical-comparative analysis on how diverse institutions and groups (state agencies, scientific societies, chambers of commerce and industry) appropriated and signified the decimal metric system. He is the author of A peso el kilo. Historia del sistema métrico decimal en México (Libros del Escarabajo, 2007), a monograph on the adoption of the metric system in Mexico. He is also co-editor, with V. García-Acosta, of a volume on the history of systems of measurement, Metros, leguas y mecates. Historia de los sistemas de medición en México (CIESAS, 2011).

Jeremy Vetter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He works at the intersection of history of science and technology, environmental history, and the history of the American West. He is author of Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).

Paul White is an editor on the Darwin Correspondence Project and teaches in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Thomas Huxley: Making the ‘Man of Science’ (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and various articles on Victorian science, literature, and culture. He is working on a book on “Darwin and the Evolution of Emotion.”

Nick Wilding is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. He works on early modern science and modern forgery. He is the author of several articles, reviews, and digital projects on Hooke, Wilkins, Galileo, Sagredo, and Kircher. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge, which came out with the University of Chicago Press in 2014, has won the Aldo and Jeanna Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association.

Introduction

Bernard Lightman¹

For those of us who populate the industrialized regions of the world, it is not very controversial to assert that our lives are profoundly shaped by science. In our everyday, mundane existence we are constantly encountering, using, and relying on specific technologies that are based on scientific discoveries. In addition, we see how science has transformed the physical world that forms the stage on which we go about our business day after day. Our relationship to nature, for better or for worse, is mediated through science. The very way we think is indebted to scientific ideas. The culture surrounding us is saturated with them. Popular films bring the lives of colorful scientists, such as Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, and Albert Einstein, to the big screen. Controversies over scientific issues appear regularly in our media, whether it be the theory of evolution, the possibility of life on other planets, the dangers of climate change, or the authority of the modern scientist. But how and when did this come to be? Science was not always so central to human culture. And what is the larger significance of its centrality? These are among the questions tackled by historians of science.

Over the last 35 years the study of the history of science has been transformed by the gradual adoption of a new historiographical approach. Whereas the history of science previously stressed a big picture focusing on the theoretical progress made by great scientific heroes like Galileo and Newton, the field is now dominated by scholars offering rich, thickly descriptive, local studies. Rather than emphasizing the discovery of new scientific theories, historians of science became interested in how science was practiced in the laboratory as well as in other sites. A whole new cast of characters has been added to the story, most of them from outside the intellectual elite, including women, invisible assistants, popularizers, and members of the working class. Historians of science have integrated modes of scholarship from other fields into their work. They have looked to cultural studies, communication studies, women's studies, visual studies, and the scholarship on science and literature, to name just a few. The result has been the development of a dynamic field out of which has come some of the most exciting scholarship in the world of academe.

Those of us who witnessed this seismic shift in the 1980s and 1990s, and who maybe even contributed to the upheaval, will have a particular book or article that inspired them to see the field in a different way, or that helped them understand just how much the ground had shifted underneath us. For me, and I suspect for many others, it was Paul Forman's stirring declaration “Independence, Not Transcendence, for the Historian of Science,” published in Isis in 1991. The point of Foreman's article was to provide a “principled basis” for those historians of science who wanted independence from the sciences. He argued that the role of the scientist and the role of the historian of science were fundamentally different. While the scientist embraced transcendence, the historian of science cultivated independent moral judgment (Forman 1991, 71). Historians of science, then, had to supply their own agenda for their discipline rather than accepting that of the scientist. We could not be intellectually subservient like historians of science from earlier decades. Our business was not celebrating the past achievements of scientists. Nor was it studying those scientific theories that were considered correct by contemporary standards. If we had to understand the science of any period we sometimes had to look at scientific pursuits now seen as marginal or pseudoscientific. Whereas the defenders of the old scholarship would have considered an investigation of phrenology or mesmerism as a waste of time, those seeking independence had to be prepared to pursue the understanding of science in a particular period wherever it took them. Our job was to completely historicize “scientific knowledge—explaining possession of specific pieces or structures of it, not by appealing to a transcendent reality…, but by reference to mundane factors and human actors” (Forman 1991, 78). Forman believed that historians of science had been groping their way towards genuine intellectual autonomy; however, they had not fully grasped that the “new” history being developed was based on a renunciation of transcendence (Forman 1991, 85).

Forman's declaration of independence on behalf of historians of science was, for many, a revelation. It contributed to a reorientation of the discipline that was both exhilarating and daunting. Exhilarating because it opened up a whole new set of questions by casting a different light on some of the basic assumptions of the older scholarship. Was there a scientific revolution in the early modern period that led to the formation of what we think of as modern science—or not? Was there really such as thing as the “Darwinian revolution” in the nineteenth century? Could we really make the concept of progress the main feature of the story we told about science? But these big questions were daunting as well. They added up to one gigantic question: what, exactly, were historians of science studying? In other words, was there no essential “thing” that we could call “science” that began in ancient times and survived to the present? (Golinski 2012). In gaining our independence we had to reconstitute our discipline. The aim of the Blackwell Companion to the History of Science is not exactly to provide a single, unified “big picture”—something that many view as epistemologically suspect. Rather its object is to survey recent developments that have resulted from the effort to re-envision the field.

Deciding on a structure for this volume was anything but straightforward. The structure had to reflect the significant historiographical shift that took place since the 1980s. The chapters themselves had to be synthetic, midscale studies rather than microstudies (Kohler and Olesko 2012). But what topics should the chapters focus on, and how should the chapters be organized into parts? The initial temptation—almost irresistible for a historian—was to think along chronological lines. A chronological approach, starting with the ancient period and then moving through the middle ages, the early modern period, the eighteenth century, and the modern era, was fairly common for previous surveys of the history of science. Andrew Ede and Lesley Cormack's one-volume A History of Science in Society (2004) followed that format (Ede and Cormack 2004). So did the eight-volume Cambridge History of Science series, edited by Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg (Lindberg and Numbers 2003–). Moreover, there are many books that deal with specific periods in the history of science. I wanted to try something different. Perhaps a structure that combined chronological and thematic approaches would be best? In effect, this was the structure adopted by The Routledge Companion to the History of Modern Science (1990) (Olby, Cantor, Christie, and Hodge 1990). But there are 67 chapters in that book and I had fewer to work with. Trying to cover both key chronological periods and important themes would be impossible. I also wanted to have a tighter focus for the thematic chapters. After consulting widely with colleagues, I finally decided on a four-part thematic approach reflecting the broad analytical categories central to history of science today. Adopting this structure helps us to move the emphasis in the volume away from the discovery of abstract scientific theories, the theme of progress through the ages, and the contributions of specific elite scientists. There is a loose chronological order within some of the parts so that developments over time can be tracked. But the thematic structure has allowed contributors to cut across traditional chronological and geographic boundaries in exciting ways.

The first chapter is actually a prologue to the four parts. Here, Lynn Nyhart provides a much more detailed and nuanced discussion than the one in this introduction of the historiographical trends over the last 35 years that have made four analytical categories so important for historians of science. It is a complicated story, which illustrates how historians of science have borrowed from other disciplines as the ground beneath their feet began to shift. She examines the impact of social constructionism and feminist scholarship on the history of science, with their emphasis on how science has been constructed by a diverse group of individuals, by no means just male intellectuals, through a complex social process. Then she shows how this led historians to explore the nature of past scientific activity, or what has been called “scientific practice.” Looking at the making of scientific knowledge opened up new doors. It led historians of science to investigate communicative practices, whether it be the movement of knowledge between scientists, or between scientists and the public, or even from the local or national context to the global context. The turn to practice also raised interesting questions about the material culture of science, the stuff that scientists worked with, from specimens to gigantic instruments. The four analytic categories, then, deal with the roles, places and spaces, communication, and tools of science.

The chapters in Part I, on “Roles,” will explore the various roles of the “scientist” from ancient times to the present. The term is in quotation marks as the chapters will emphasize how the idea of the “scientist” has changed dramatically over time and to indicate that the chapters are more concerned with what could be called “roles in science.” The term itself was not coined until 1834 by the English polymath William Whewell (Whewell 1834, 59). The article in which he introduced the term was actually a laudatory review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834). Whewell did not have in mind the specialized, professional scientist that we are familiar with today. He was using the term to counter the tendency of his contemporaries to subdivide science into separate disciplines. Inventing the term “scientist” was part of Whewell's plea for unity in science and his rejection of specialization.

It is not likely that Whewell would have expanded the term “scientist” to include invisible technicians, instrument makers, artisans, or human experimental subjects. But given the diverse roles played by scientific figures in the past there is a good argument for including them. If we were to apply the term only to those who fit the current criteria for defining who is and who is not a scientist, the number of those who met the qualifications would diminish the further back we went into the past. Understanding how lines were drawn between who was considered to be in possession of natural knowledge and who was not is one of the goals of these chapters. The social role of individuals with special relationships to natural knowledge must be considered in various cultural settings located in different times and places.

The chapters in Part II, “Places and Spaces,” all examine the situatedness of knowledge. All scientists, whatever role they assume, must perform that role in a specific place. Historical geographers of science like David Livingstone have emphasized that space is not a neutral “container” in which social life takes place. “Space,” Livingstone asserts, “is not (to change the metaphor) simply the stage on which the real action takes place. Rather, it is itself constitutive of systems of human interaction” (Livingstone 2003, 7). When we are considering critical sites in the generation of knowledge, such as the university, the field, or the laboratory, we always need to ask, who manages that space? What are its boundaries? Who is allowed access? Paying attention to place, by contrast, means taking into account the local, regional, and national features of science. If we take Forman seriously then we will not think of science, as Livingstone puts it, “as some transcendent entity that bears no trace of the parochial or contingent.” Rather we will cultivate a “geography of science” that reveals “how scientific knowledge bears the imprint of its location” (Livingstone 2003, 13).

Part II, then, will examine the sites from which scientific knowledge has emerged, and will concentrate more on the local rather than the regional or national scale. It is striking to see how sites of knowledge have varied from the ancient period to the present. Durable sites, such as the university and the observatory, have changed dramatically over time. But there is nothing analogous to some of the older sites, such as the European court of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, while new sites, such as the scientific society, did not exist prior to the early modern period. Some of these spaces, such as the laboratory and the museum, have long been recognized by historians as privileged places of power. But the importance of others, such as domestic and commercial spaces, have only recently been recognized. In this section we have only touched on a relatively small number of scientific sites. Studying the remarkable range of sites in which scientific work has been undertaken illustrates why space and place matter.

After examining how location figures into the generation of knowledge, Part III focuses on how ideas and images travel between sites. As they circulate, scientific ideas and images undergo translation and transformation, since people encounter representations differently in different circumstances (Livingstone 2003, 11). Jim Secord's widely cited article “Knowledge in transit” (2004) outlines the contours of this dimension of the historical mode of enquiry. Secord points out that focusing on how knowledge is generated locally, at times, produced an obstacle for historians. “The more local and specific knowledge becomes,” Secord declared, “the harder it is to see how it travels” (Secord 2004, 660). To counter this problem, Secord suggested that we understand science as a form of communication in which the processes of movement, translation, and transmission become central. “This means thinking always about every text, image, action, and object as the trace of an act of communication,” Secord asserted, “with receivers, producers, and modes and conventions of transmission. It means eradicating the distinction between the making and the communicating of knowledge” (Secord 2004, 661).

In Part III, “Communication,” the authors examine how knowledge was transferred between sites through a variety of media, including print, visual, and oral media. There are chapters on manuscripts, letters, periodicals, books, textbooks, lectures, film, radio, and television. But there is also some attention to the changing technologies of communication, in particular print forms of communication, as in the chapter on the printing press. The chapters deal both with how scientists communicated to each other, and how they communicated to the public. We could have included many more chapters on “Communication.” It has been a topic of much scholarly interest since the turn of the century. Moreover, there are many more modes of communication central to science and connected with specific places that we could not cover due to space constraints, such as field notebooks, museum catalogues, and the experimental register. We have included, primarily, those modes of communication that have received the most attention from scholars.

Secord has pointed out that the key to creating a history of science as a form of communication “is our new understanding of scientific knowledge as practice. All evidence from the past is in the form of material things” (Secord 2004, 665). This is as true of periodicals, books, and notebooks as it is of experimental instruments, natural history specimens, and two-dimensional models. Studying the communication of science therefore leads us to the investigation of its material culture. Part IV deals with the tools of science, which also circulate between scientific sites. Chapters will cover important scientific instruments and material objects as a way to illuminate the changing practices of science. We will encounter chapters on timing, measuring, calculating, and recording devices; instruments, such as microscopes, telescopes, and spectroscopes, that enhance the senses; and material objects that have been used by scientists including specimens, collections, diagrams, and three-dimensional models.

Scientific objects are the things studied by scientists, whereas instruments are the tools by which those objects are studied. Instruments and objects have been the subject of investigation for several decades. Though they are treated by historians of science as part of material culture, this does not preclude attention to their epistemological dimensions. Daston's edited collection Biographies of Scientific Objects (2000) dealt with how “whole domains of phenomena—dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, mortality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self, tuberculosis—come into being and pass away as objects of scientific inquiry” (Daston 2000, 1). Daston was not just interested in objects as material. She wanted to understand how material objects contained a significant intellectual component. Though it is less obvious, instruments also have immaterial attributes. Liba Taub has noted that the turn toward scientific practice beginning in the 1990s brought with it attention to instruments. “At the same time,” Taub affirms, “there was a growing fascination on the part of many scholars, in a range of disciplines, with ‘materiality’” (Taub 2011, 690). However the fascination with materiality does not limit historians of science to the object qua thing. Taub argues that the work on instruments problematized them by forcing scholars to confront how they understood the term “instrument” itself (Taub 2011, 696), just as Daston asked how and when a scientific object came to be. “Object” and “instrument” both have material and immaterial attributes.

By focusing on the roles, places, communicative practices, and materials of science in the past we hope to capture what has made current scholarship in the field so vibrant and exciting. But the field continues to evolve. Undoubtedly, new analytical categories will be developed in the future by enterprising historians of science. These kinds of experiments in historical innovation are to be encouraged if the field is to retain its vitality and its relevance. Moreover, they are essential if historians of science hope to maintain their independence.

Endnote

References

Daston, Lorraine (ed). 2000. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ede, Andrew, and Lesley Cormack. 2004. A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
Forman, Paul. 1991. “Independence, not transcendence, for the Historian of Science.” Isis, 82: 71–86.
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A COMPANION TO THE
HISTORY OF SCIENCE

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY

About the Editor

About the Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Endnote

References