Harvard Book Store is proud to introduce our Featured Scholar program. The first in this series, which will highlight the work and books of academics from all fields, is Peter Galison, the Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and Physics at Harvard University.

Click here for a selection of books written by and recommended by Peter. Check out an excerpt from his article in the winter issue of Critical Inquiry, published by the University of Chicago press. Or read on as the bookstore's Sheri Sable talks with Peter about his field of study and his career.

Sheri Sable: What is this discipline, History of Science? How would you define it? Why is it important? For the purpose of the History of Science, what is science?

Peter Galison: I think of history of science quite broadly--and in this disciplinary connectedness lies its strength. Over the last two decades, the overlap between history, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy has been enormously productive. We have a traditional set of questions around the specific development of complexes of ideas in chemistry, physics, biology, but we also have a myriad of other kinds of questions that have entered the field. How does replication work in science--not in theory, but in the practice of science? How does the material culture of science enter our historical narratives - how do machines cut across theories, across fields, across the divides separating academic science from military, industrial, and other non-academic forms of research? We can pursue the relation of science to art, to architecture, to authorship, to technology; we can ask after the dynamics of science in periods when it has been integrated thoroughly into the worlds of theology, philosophy, or pedagogy. We can ask how issues of gender enter into the formulation of science in different periods; we ask about the literary forms of scientific argumentation and the specific means employed to standardize, spread, and secure scientific work. The term science has also come to mean something less exclusive - not just the exact sciences, but also the range of techno-scientific fields including medicine but also psychology, economics, and sociology. All this is tremendously exciting--the field matters because it aims at understanding the historical conditions under which the different forms of knowledge have become possible. And in the search for answers to these questions we find ourselves criss-crossing the disciplinary map.

SS: What type of analytical/critical skills and tools does this discipline develop in students who pursue this avenue of study?

PG: The discipline is not homogeneous. Some programs emphasize institutional history, others the sociology of science. Some are policy oriented and others focus on the boundary between the philosophical and the historical. My own view is that the methods have to suit the problem domain. For someone who is going to pursue Renaissance science, a strong training in theology, philosophy, and art history count crucially. For someone who intends to pursue the history of twentieth century physics or biotechnology, the mix will necessarily include quite a bit of science in addition to historical and philosophical grounding. At the undergraduate level, studying the history of science can be a very satisfactory way of preparing for work in law, medicine, journalism, or politics.

SS:. How did the discipline evolve? Where did it come from? What kinds of phenomena do we see when we look through the lens of the History of Science? Any examples?

PG: In one sense, the history of science has been around for centuries - people were writing about Newton as a historically important figure from the time Sir Isaac completed his Principia. But more relevantly the discipline had its institutional take-off point just after World War II as people began to come to terms with a dramatically new relation between science and society. One of its first institutional sites in the United States was at Harvard, where President James Conant, after having overseen atomic weapons research leading up to the Hiroshima bomb, came to believe that a mutual understanding between science and the humanities was a vital concern. Today, the relation between science, policy, government, and ethics remain of great interest, but the circle of historical inquiry has widened - along some of the lines I mentioned earlier. Science not only can be studied in relation to policy, but also in its intersections with sectors of culture throughout our world including art, industry, architecture, authorship, philosophy, and theology.

SS: How did you arrive at this discipline? Describe your personal journey. Was there some event in your life, some question that needed answering which propelled you to move into this direction. What immediately preceded this discipline?

PG: My own interests were split between the humanities and physics - even before I went to college. I had finished high school at a rather young age, so instead of heading directly to Harvard as an undergraduate, I went to work in a physics laboratory and study mathematics at the great Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. At that time (1972-73), Polytechnique was in the V arrondissement, dead center of the turbulent political and intellectual upheaval that surrounded the aftermath of 1968. By the time I started university properly in the US, I was sure that I wanted somehow to combine an understanding of culture, history, and science but I knew practically nothing about the history of science. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was expanded in 1970 and Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (1973) had a huge and decisive impact on me as did the philosophical work of Hilary Putnam and the historical writings of E.P. Thompson and the Annales school. Here, it seemed to me, at the intersection point of social history, physics, and philosophy was a doorway into a way of thinking about science as part of the world, not as an isolated enterprise separate from it.

SS:. Can you list your books (as well as those of a few colleagues) in this field and describe how each respective book illuminates some of the answers which the History of Science asks?

PG: The main line of my work aims to capture the three principle subcultures of physics (experimentation, instrumentation, theory), and to show how each both develops in contact with the others, while retaining a certain degree of autonomy from them.

• How Experiments End (Chicago, 1987) examines the development of the experimental subculture and addresses the question: how do physicists decide that they are looking at a real effect and not at an artifact of the apparatus or the environment? How has this decision altered as the disicpline passed from table-top explorations to massive particle physics experiments?
• Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Modern Physics (Chicago, 1997) probes two competing (and more recently conjoined) traditions of instruments--machines that produce counts and statistical data, and those that produce pictures. But by examining the material culture of physics, we find ourselves at a nodal point where scientists' identties, epistemic strategies, and social organization all come together. To handle the complex relations between physics and the many fields that join to form physics, I develop here a notion of scientific interlanguages, scientific pidgins and creoles if you wil, that enable scientists to coordinate their pursuits locally even when they diverge globally.

I am now working to complete the third volume (on theoretical physics) that will finish this theory - its scope will run from Einstein to string theory.

Alongside this principle body of work, I have tried to push the boundaries of history of science by organizing a series of multi-author volumes on the relation of history of science to other fields. These include:

• (with Bruce Hevly): Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research - a collaboration between scientists and historians of science aimed at investigating the nature of and problems associated with big science. (Stanford, 1992)
• (with David Stump): The Disunity of Science -- here historians of science join with philosophers of science, sociologists of science and others to re-assess claims for and against the unity of science, and perhaps more importantly to offer new ways of thinking about this problematic (Stanford, 1996).
• (with Caroline Jones): Picturing Science, Producing Art -- art historians and historians of science here try to push the science/art discussion beyond iconography of science, and towards shared ways of thinking through the cutlural production of images in the two domains. (Routledge, 1998)
• (with Emily Thompson): The Architecture of Science -- historians of science, sociologists of science, historians and theorists of architecture, architects and scientists combine forces here to look at the built environment and its complex and changing relation to science. Sometimes this means looking at the spaces that scientists use, elsewhere at the ways in which science reshapes the notion of architecture. But throughout, the question remains: how do science and architecture each contribute to the shaping of the other's identity? (MIT, 1999)
• (with Alex Roland, due out 2000): Atmospheric Flight -- historians of science and historians of technology take a single, highly symbolized and omnipresent technology - the airplane - and explore its shifting meaning, science, and social location. Ranging from an examination of accident reports to the role of patents in airplane design; from airport architecture to the history of jet engine design and aifoil aerodynamics, the book opens widely in methodology while focusing on atmospheric flight. (Kluwer, 2000)
• (with Mario Biagioli, in preparation): Scientific Authorship -- over the last few years, the problem of scientific authorship has come to dominate concerns from priority disputes to patent litigation, and from indiginous claims to scientific property rights to the structure of thousand-author collaborations in particle physics. In this volume, historins of science collaborate with literary historians to bring the problem of authorship in science to center stage. (Chicago, still in preparation)

I'd certainly recommend to anyone interested in the history of science a sampler of books that would include the following:

• Biagioli, Galileo Courtier
• Brandt, No Magic Bullet
• Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature
• Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought
• Latour, The Pasteurization of France
• Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy
• Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump
• Smith and Wise, Energy and Empire

SS: Where is this discipline going? Is it growing? In what way. Why? What kinds of questions will it be asking during the next ten years. How do these questions reflect other phenomena in our culture and academic pursuits?

PG: There are, in my view, three main axes of exciting new work in the history of science. The first is a serious historical inquiry into contemporary science--that is the investigation of recent work using the techniques and forms of demonstration characteristic of history. Some topics: the increasing role of simulation in science, the shifting meaning of authorship and intellectual property issues, the radical reorganization of the academic-industrial relation in biotechnology, bio-ethical and cryptological privacy debates. The second is a widening of the notion of science itself to include many aspects of technology (both high and low), medicine, and non-western cultures; in short a widening of the history of science to be a history of knowledge more generally.