Science in the everyday world: Why perspectives from the history of science matter

The history of science is more than the history of scientists. This essay argues that various modem "publics" should be counted as belonging within an enlarged vision of who constitutes the "scientific community"--and describes how the history of science could be important for understanding their experiences. It gives three examples of how natural knowledge-making happens in vernacular contexts: Victorian Britain's publishing experiments in "popular science" as effective literary strategies for communicating to lay and specialist readers; twentieth-century American science museums as important and contested sites for conveying both scientific ideas and ideas about scientific practice; and contemporary mass-mediated images of the "ideal" scientist as providing counternarratives to received professional scientific norms. Finally, it suggests how humanistic knowledge might help both scientists and historians grapple more effectively with contemporary challenges presented by science in public spheres. By studying the making and elaboration of scientific knowledge within popular culture, historians of science can provide substantively grounded insights into the relations between the public and professionals.     

Popularizing the ancestry of man: Robert Ardrey and the killer instinct

This essay examines Robert Ardrey (1908-1980)-American playwright, screenwriter, and prolific author-as a case study in the popularization of science. Bringing together evidence from both paleoanthropology and ethology, Ardrey became in the 1960s a vocal proponent of the theory that human beings are innately violent. The essay shows that Ardrey used his popular scientific books not only to consolidate a new science of human nature but also to question the popularizer's standard role, to reverse conventional hierarchies of scientific expertise, and to test the boundaries of professional scientific authority. Understanding how he did this can help us reassess the meanings and uses of popular science as critique in Cold War America. The essay also shows that E. O. Wilson's sociobiology was in part a reaction to the subversive political message of Ardrey's science.     

"Shocking" masculinity: Stanley Milgram, "obedience to authority," and the "crisis of manhood" in Cold War America

Stanley Milgram's study of "obedience to authority" is one of the best-known psychological experiments of the twentieth century. This essay examines the study's special charisma through a detailed consideration of the intellectual, cultural, and gender contexts of Cold War America. It suggests that Milgram presented not a "timeless" experiment on "human nature" but, rather, a historically contingent, scientifically sanctioned "performance" of American masculinity at a time of heightened male anxiety. The essay argues that this gendered context invested the obedience experiments with an extraordinary plausibility, immediacy, and relevance. Immersed in a discourse of masculinity besieged, many Americans read the obedience experiments not as a fanciful study of laboratory brutality but as confirmation of their worst fears. Milgram's extraordinary success thus lay not in his "discovery" of the fragility of individual conscience but in his theatrical flair for staging culturally relevant masculine performances.     

Modifiable futures: science fiction at the bench

Science fiction remains an alien dimension of the history of science. Historical and literary studies of science have become increasingly attentive to various "literary technologies" in scientific practice, the metaphorical features of scientific discourse, and the impact of popular science writing on the social development of scientific knowledge. But the function of science fiction and even literature as such in the history of scientific and technological innovation has often been obscured, misconstrued, or repudiated owing to conventional notions of authorship, influence, and the organic unity of texts. The better to address those close encounters where scientific practice makes use of speculative fiction, this essay proposes that we instead analyze such exchanges as processes of appropriation, remixing, and modification.     

Redrawing the map: science in twentieth-century China

This essay argues that science in twentieth-century China is a rich topic that can be productively integrated into research and teaching on the history of modern science. It identifies major issues of science in twentieth-century China and demonstrates that they can prove useful to any scholar who wishes to consider science in a comparative and trans/international context. The essay suggests two important steps for a fruitful investigation into the topic of science in twentieth-century China: first, revising the historiographic assumptions and categories that underlie much of the conventional historical narrative of modern science; and, second, breaking free from the tunnel history of national science. To illustrate these points, the essay examines a series of case studies of science in modern China and discusses the relevance of such subjects as scientific nationalism, Maoist mass science, and transnational scientific networks for the understanding of science in the twentieth-century world.     

Gendered contexts: masculinity, knowledge, and attitudes toward biotechnology

Research into the public understanding of science has revealed that the effect of scientific knowledge on attitudes toward science is contextualized by gender; however there has not yet been an account of how gender contextualizes knowledge. This paper investigates how gender identification affects attitudes toward science, and tempers the effects of scientific knowledge on attitudes toward science. Utilizing data from the Eurobarometer 52.1, it is predicted that when males perceive a threat to their masculinity (as measured by a perceived threat to their financial security) they will become more likely to be aversive to biotechnology, and that increased levels of perceived threat will reduce the effects of knowledge on attitudes toward biotechnology. Moreover, it is predicted that these effects will be smaller than their female counterparts. All predictions are affirmed.     

Conscientious workmen or booksellers' hacks? The professional identities of science writers in the mid-nineteenth century

Existing scholarship on the debates over expertise in mid-nineteenth-century Britain has demonstrated the importance of popular writings on the sciences to definitions of scientific authority. Yet while men of science might position themselves in opposition to the stereotype of the merely popular writer, the self-identity of the popular writer remained ambiguous. This essay examines the careers of William Charles Linnaeus Martin (1798-1864) and Thomas Milner (1808-ca. 1883) and places them in the context of others who made their living by writing works on the sciences for the general reader. Martin wrote on zoology and Milner moved between astronomy, geology, and geography. The essay unravels the close but ambivalent relationship between the professions of authorship and of science and highlights writing as another aspect of scientific practice. Both writers were moderately financially successful, but Martin's sense of failure and Milner's satisfaction reflect their contrasting images of their professional identity.     

Did Kettlewell commit fraud? Re-examining the evidence

H.B.D. Kettlewell is famous for several investigations conducted in the early 1950s on the phenomenon of industrial melanism, which are widely regarded as the classic demonstration of natural selection. In a recent (2002) book-length popularization of this episode in the history of the science, science writer Judith Hooper draws attention to what she interprets as discrepancies in the results reported by Kettlewell in his first scientific papers on the subject. On the basis of correspondence among Kettlewell and his associates, a survey of scientific publications that mention outstanding questions surrounding the phenomenon, as well as interviews with his son, surviving colleagues, and scientists who have worked on industrial melanims, Hooper all but explicitly concludes that Kettlewell committed fraud. The following essay critically examines her evidence in support of this allegation, including her discussion of his character, the alleged motives, and whether fraud was even committed. None of Hooper's arguments is found to withstand careful scrutiny. The concluding section draws several conclusions about how history of science should be depicted to the public.     

Making knowledge: history, literature, and the poetics of science

As a field of study, literature and science has gradually expanded to encompass both the impact of science on literary culture and the literary-linguistic practices intrinsic to the production of scientific knowledge. Such transformations both reinforce and fundamentally recalibrate the detailed attention focused on scientific practice by historians of science since the 1980s. As a result, this essay and the Focus section it introduces suggest that history of science and literature and science are, in fact, interdependent fields. Attention to their convergences will yield better understanding of the performative dimensions of scientific practices and thence of science itself as a form of making of knowledge of things and events in the world of nature. Science as a form of making involves the convergence of things, material practices, and a panoply of meaningful artifacts-instruments of thought and action-that refuse any simple dichotomy between "text" and "action."     

高端科普智库的内涵、治理体系与建设路径

当前,科学技术与公共政策的紧密结合对发挥科普咨政建言作用提出了时代呼唤,建设高端科普智库成为新发展阶段的必然要求。从服务科学决策、团结引领社会公众参与民主决策、强化舆论引导等方面探讨了建设高端科普智库的重要意义,界定了高端科普智库的内涵,从目标、内容、对象、动力等方面剖析了高端科普智库的基本特征。探讨了当前高端科普智库建设面临的问题和困境。从治理体系、产品生产、影响力三个维度构建了高端科普智库建设路径的分析框架,并对国内外13家高端智库和科技智库的建设经验进行了比较分析,基于此总结提出高端科普智库的建设路径,包括建立科学的智库治理体系、优化智库产品生产机制、提升智库决策影响力等。     

运用科研资源开展科普活动的机制研究——以中山大学热带病防治研究教育部重点实验室为例

以中山大学热带病防治研究教育部重点实验室为例,分析实验室通过健全科普管理体系、规范化和专业化科普资源及品牌化科普活动等机制,运用开放交流、社区教育和社会服务等方式,开展具有特色的科普活动,将科研成果以科普信息的方式传播给大众,提高公众的科学素质,增强热带病疾病防控的实效。为进一步完善科研实验室面向公众开放,开展科普活动的相关形式、制度和管理提供经验借鉴。     

"Science in a democracy": the contested status of vaccination in the Progressive Era and the 1920s

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a heterogeneous assortment of groups and individuals articulated scientific, political, and philosophical objections to vaccination. They engaged in an ongoing battle for public opinion with medical and scientific elites, who responded with their own counterpropaganda. These ideological struggles reflected fear that scientific advances were being put to coercive uses and that institutions of the state and civil society were increasingly expanding into previously private realms of decision making, especially child rearing. This essay analyzes the motivations and tactics of antivaccination activists and situates their actions within the scientific and social climate of the Progressive Era and the 1920s. Their actions reveal how citizens of varied ideological persuasions, activists and nonactivists alike, viewed scientific knowledge during a period of swift and unsettling change, when the application of biologic products seemed to hold peril as well as promise.     

"This compendious language": mathematics in the world of Augustus De Morgan

Mathematics is the most chameleon of subjects, whose meaning is differently defined in different circumstances. This essay considers the mathematics of Augustus De Morgan as an illustration of the ways that the essence of the subject, the very objects that are included within it, has been adjusted in response to cultural factors. Since these cultural factors are the same ones that shape scientific development, the argument is that the history of mathematics and the history of science are always inextricably bound to one another.     

Knowledge held in common. Tales of Luther Burbank and science in the American vernacular.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the horticulturist Luther Burbank was largely considered an irrelevant figure by the scientific community, despite winning acclaim from the public as an eminent scientist. In examining the intellectual, social, and political claims embedded in texts by and about Burbank, this essay argues that consideration of the Burbank stories as they circulated in the vernacular realm can aid historians in understanding the dynamics of science in American life. Among the themes it addresses are how the Burbank stories directly engaged the question of who should legitimately count as a student of nature; the varied philosophical perspectives that derived from siting science within the deomestic sphere; and how these stories played with the possibility of a philosophy of nature based on the concept of "living matter," as opposed to one grounded on mechanistic principles. The essay also discusses how Burbank's views on evolution were mediated by the image of the child and the way in which his convictions regarding the power of the environment to release latent characteristics in physiological material presented a view of the future of the American "race" that was at odds with conventional eugenic thinking and assigned a central role to women in the drama of American evolution.     

"The joy in believing": the Cardiff giant, commercial deceptions, and styles of observation in Gilded Age America

This essay presents a historical epistemology of the nineteenth-century controversy concerning a scientific hoax, the Cardiff giant. My focus is on the shifting meanings given to the giant, which were based on epistemologies derived from scientific authority, religious belief, and market relations. In 1869 a farmer in Cardiff, New York, claimed to have discovered the fossilized remains of a prehistoric, perhaps biblical, giant on his property. While some scientists stressed the need to cooperate with commercial showmen, enthusiasm for the giant incited the ire of others, who sought to debunk it and the culture that sustained it. Drawing on local newspaper reports, memoirs, nineteenth-century exposés, and publicity materials associated with the giant's display, I link the episode to the history of popular and scientific observation. The giant was a particularly troubling spectacle because as an object of inquiry it blurred the modern boundaries separating nature, society, and religion.     

Science and sociability: women as audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1901

This essay recovers the experiences of women at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) from its founding in 1831 to the end of the Victorian era. It aims to add to research on women in science by reconsidering the traditional role of women as consumers rather than producers of knowledge and to that on science popularization by focusing on audience experience rather than on the aims and strategies of popularizers. The essay argues that, in various ways, the ubiquitous and visible female audience came to define the BAAS audience and "the public" for science more generally. The women who swelled the BAAS audiences were accepted as a social element within the meetings even as they were regarded critically as scientific participants. Portrayed as passive and nonscientific, women allowed the male scientific elites to distance themselves from their audiences. Arguing from diary and other evidence, we present examples that complicate existing notions of audiences for science as necessarily active.     

高校理科教师在科技创新中的优势和作用探讨

在科技强国的大形势下,理科教师作为高校重要群体,如何在科技创新中发挥自己的作用是值得思考的问题。本文从理科教师自身的特点出发,探讨了高校理科教师如何发挥优势、如何进行合作以增强其在科技创新中的作用等问题;同时,从外部环境的角度探讨了科研管理部门在促进理科教师参与科研创新中的作用。     

科学革命:一种流行的神话

科学革命观主要出现在对传统物理学进行历史解读的人文领域,然而其影响已超出知识界、思想界几乎遍及社会各个领域。"革命"观不仅不适用于准确地表述科学的划时代进步,更不符合科学发展的宏观脉络。如果科学革命果真存在或成功,那么为何我们要独自享受成功后的兴奋与激动而让中小学生一直生活在革命前的旧社会,继续忍受着阿基米德的静力学、牛顿力学的煎熬呢?通过对三个几近耳熟能详的案例分析表明:科学进步是不断开辟未知领域从而使已知世界的范围不断扩展的进阶模式远比流行的不断革命模式更为接近科学史的真实;所谓的"科学革命"只不过是一种流行的人文传说。     

基于“良序科学”理想对“CEPC-SPPC之争”的讨论

基切尔认为,树立于温和实在论基础之上的科学形象才是实际的,这也是将科学民主化的认识论依据;与此同时,布朗论述了将科学民主化的政治学依据。这两个依据是旨在为科学实践治理提供标准的“良序科学”理想得以建构的重要前提。“良序科学”理想要求“理想慎思过程”贯穿于科学的资助、具体的研究内容及研究成果转化的全过程,以此确保民主力量能始终发挥作用。基于“良序科学”理论来看,最近爆发的中国是否应该建造“环形正负电子对撞机和超级质子对撞机（CEPC-SPPC）”的争论至少反映出了当前中国科学实践及其治理存在的三个显著问题：1）中国科学实践的“治理”方面存在观念性障碍;2）治理主体未能充分认识到科学实践治理的民主模式及其多样性和具体性;3）治理主体未能辨明科普的双重目的：“理解”与“参与”。若要解决这些问题,下述的思路或许可供参考：1）思想观念方面强化认识科学实践时的整体论思维;2）理论研究方面引入普遍语用学的维度;3）制度设计方面重视科学实践治理的正义原则。     

晚清“科学士绅” 西方科技在中国体制化发展的最早践行者

鸦片战争以降,传统中国社会遭受西方工业文明冲击,士绅社会身份群体的组成成分和角色发生了变化。至洋务运动时期,以徐寿为代表的新兴知识职业群体运用西方科技发挥社会功能,并因此取得"科学士绅"社会身份群体成员资格。这一社会身份群体的形成同时也是西方科技在传统中国社会的体制化发展开端。"科学士绅"亲身实践科技以整合社会、领导公共事务,西方科技由此借道于中国传统行为规范、文化价值乃至社会体制,在社会生活中获得对社会成员具有规制性的影响力。