1/2 idea No. 7: Sci20 Rev

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

‘Sci20 Rev’ means ‘Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond revise’. Should I update my book?

The idea for the book came from Polity Press. They emailed me in 2006 to say they were commissioning a series of century-by-century histories of science, and did I know anyone who might be interested in the last, twentieth-century volume? I replied that, in fact, I was.

I have been teaching courses on history of modern science since the mid-1990s, at Manchester, Cambridge, Harvard, and, now, UCL. At Cambridge I introduced a whole suite of courses (in Cambridge parlance a ‘Paper’, then ‘Paper 10’), and co-taught the core courses of the paper with good colleagues, first Soraya de Chadarevian and then Jim Endersby. The teaching assistant was one Helen Macdonald, who went on to much greater things. Teaching a subject really hones understanding, so, in my accumulated lectures, I had a good stock of accounts of key developments, theories, and secondary literature. I also had my own research, which has jumped around twentieth-century science and technology. One of the frustrations of teaching the subject was that there was no single textbook you could point students to. That was one reason for agreeing to write Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond.

A second reason can be found in the causes of the absence of a single textbook. History of science is often, and often usefully so, reliant on the narrow case study. This situation had long been recognised – it was the prompt, for example, of the excellent Big Picture conference organised by the BSHS in 1991, later published in the society’s journal. Remedies for narrowness have been varied, from focussing on cross-cutting themes (gender, material culture, and many others), to a prominent recent turn to global and transnational history. A third, complementary way has been the synthetic account, and that was missing for twentieth-century science.

What made a synthetic account possible at all, and forms a third reason, was the spectacular growth of history of twentieth-century science as a field of study. Older hesitations over studying recent history had well and truly been overcome. New archives were opening everywhere. And the topic was just so important: how can the twentieth century be understood without a historical understanding of science’s place, influence and shaping?

So, while still patchy, there was an immense scholarship on which a synthetic account might find firm foundations. Indeed there was no other path. Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond owes a great debt to others’ work.

Nevertheless, the final reason for writing the book was the hope of novelty and surprise. When the canvas is deliberately big – a timespan of over a hundred years, a determination to cover physical and life sciences, to be global where possible and where justified – and once part of the canvas are filled, drawing on scholarship – what new patterns can be seen, what new insights emerge at scale?

When I finally delivered the manuscript, it was at least three times the size Polity were expecting (sorry! don’t do this to publishers!). I cut it down. Out went 20,000 words on the nineteenth century – ‘Send out the clones’ – that had some ideas but was, umm, on the wrong century and was really an extended throat-clearing. Out went a rather joyful skit imagining a balloon ride around the world in 1900. The remainder was still long, probably too long, but it is the book you can read.

In practice I was quite pleased with the result. ‘Working worlds‘ was an analytical concept and insight that emerged once the the history of twentieth-century science was viewed as a whole.  I was able to cover physical and life sciences, even though my own research had been predominantly on the former. It also fed back into my research. For example, it was clear early on the long 1960s was a pivotal period, but one I knew I couldn’t quite figure out. I decided that it needed the help of a separate test, and wrote a paper ‘What happened in the sixties?’ that benefitted immensely both from writing and from peer review comments and criticisms.

On publication it was, I think, well received by my peers. (Here’s one of the longer reviews.)

So why think about revising the text?

First, it has built-in faults. The coverage of the social sciences is woefully inadequate. I would now write the global connections in different ways, with different emphases and different content. The working worlds concept, which emerged late in the process, can and should be exemplified throughout the text.

Second it was published in 2012, with some parts written in 2007. The field of history of twentieth science does not stand still. There has been much great work published since, and I wonder how, or if, the scholarship might fit the picture.

Finally. the canny ‘and Beyond‘ was deliberate. I’d like to make sense of the twenty-first century and its sciences.

But it may not be the right thing to do. Either of the tasks – fixing the faults, or triangulating with more recent scholarship – may well break the text, while I found writing very recent history (of the past ten or twenty years) very reliant on journalistic sources, good on their own terms, but their use meant the last chapter felt like a second draft of history.