Lorraine Daston - When Science Went Modern
The history of science
is punctuated by not one, not two, but three modernities: the first, in the
seventeenth century, known as “the Scientific Revolution”; the second, circa
1800, often referred to as “the second Scientific Revolution”; and the third,
in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when relativity theory and
quantum mechanics not only overturned the achievements of Galileo and Newton
but also challenged our deepest intuitions about space, time, and causation.
Each of these moments
transformed science, both as a body of knowledge and as a social and political
force. The first modernity of the seventeenth century displaced the Earth from
the center of the cosmos, showered Europeans with new discoveries, from new
continents to new planets, created new forms of inquiry such as field observation
and the laboratory experiment, added prediction to explanation as an ideal
toward which science should strive, and unified the physics of heaven and earth
in Newton’s magisterial synthesis that served as the inspiration for the
political reformers and revolutionaries of the Enlightenment.
The second
modernity of the early nineteenth century unified light, heat, electricity,
magnetism, and gravitation into the single, fungible currency of energy, put
that energy to work by creating the first science-based technologies to become
gigantic industries (e.g., the manufacture of dyestuffs from coal tar
derivatives), turned science into a salaried profession and allied it with
state power in every realm, from combating epidemics to waging wars. The third
modernity, of the early twentieth century, toppled the certainties of Newton
and Kant, inspired the avant-garde in the arts, and paved the way for what were
probably the two most politically consequential inventions of the last hundred
years: the mass media and the atomic bomb.
The aftershocks of all
three of these earthquakes of modernity are still reverberating today: in
heated debates, from Saudi Arabia to Sri Lanka to Senegal, about the
significance of the Enlightenment for human rights and intellectual freedom; in
the assessment of how science-driven technology and industrialization may have
altered the climate of the entire planet; in anxious negotiations about nuclear
disarmament and utopian visions of a global polity linked by the worldwide Net.
No one denies the world-shaking and world-making significance of any of these
three moments of scientific modernity.
Yet from the
perspective of the scientists themselves, the experience of modernity coincides
with none of these seismic episodes. The most unsettling shift in scientific
self-understanding—about what science was and where it was going—began in the
middle decades of the nineteenth century, reaching its climax circa 1900. It
was around that time that scientists began to wonder uneasily about whether
scientific progress was compatible with scientific truth. If advances in
knowledge were never-ending, could any scientific theory or empirical result
count as real knowledge—true forever and always? Or was science, like the
monarchies of Europe’s anciens régimes and the boundaries of its states and
principalities, doomed to perpetual revision and revolution?
By 1900, when the
International Congress of Physics scheduled its inaugural meeting to coincide
with the Exposition Universelle in Paris, these anxieties had become acute: The
most spectacular recent scientific discoveries, such as x-rays and
radioactivity, and theoretical advances, such as the challenges to Newtonian
absolute space and the electromagnetic ether, were also experienced by the
scientists themselves as dizzying symptoms of malaise—or even of violence. The
American historian and statesman Henry Adams, writing about the state of
science in 1903, reached for metaphors of anarchist terrorism: “The man of
science must have been sleepy indeed who did not jump from his chair like a
scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical bomb
she called radium.”1 Scientific
advances were hurtling forward with the speed and force of a locomotive—but no
one knew its final destination, or even whether there was a destination. All
one could do was hang on for dear life.2
The Great
Acceleration
This was the moment
when science went modern, when science became not only an active motor of what
historian C.A. Bayly has called “the Great Acceleration of 1890–1914,”3 but
also its breathless subject, swept up like everyone and everything else in
gale-force winds of change. For the scientists, the realization that progress
might have its dark side had been germinating since the mid-nineteenth century,
when they noticed with consternation that their publications were no longer
read after a decade or so and that it had become necessary to revise university
curricula and textbooks several times a generation. Last year’s scientific
truths, they noted with alarm, were becoming obsolete almost as rapidly as last
year’s fashion in millinery. By the 1890s, the pell-mell accumulation of
novelties on both the theoretical and empirical fronts threatened to bury the
scientists like an avalanche and to undermine the foundations of even the most
stable sciences, astronomy and physics.
This was also the
moment when, as a response to this experience of modernity as acceleration en
route to who-knew-where, scientists and later historians of science rethought
the relationship of science to history in the broadest sense: not just the
past, but also the present and future... read more:
