An ethnography of the Bloomberg Physics Building at Johns Hopkins
University
Steve Mizrach
INTRODUCTION: Why should science be investigated?
In recent years, the so-called 'sociology of knowledge' and/or
'cognitive anthropology' approach to the history and philosophy of
science has come to predominate over the earlier 1950s approach which was
couched in terms like the 'history of ideas.' Not only have sociologists
and anthropologists begun to examine science as one form of the social
construction of knowledge; even historians of science have utilized this
method. The goal of these investigations has not been to demonstrate the
irrationality of science, as some critics have claimed; rather it has
been an attempt to investigate the claim that science has a privileged
status in society. In Marxist analysis, for example, while almost all
other social forms (art, religion, etc.) are ideological (i.e. pertain to
the 'superstructure'), science is claimed to be free of ideology or
social determination by virtue of its direct connection to the 'base' or
material factuality of the world. Thus, in some ways, the investigation
of science is a project of demystification, or if you want,
deconstruction, of privileged knowledge[1].
When sociologists of knowledge observe the 'victory' of one
idea over another, whether in science or in politics, they ask questions
like: whose interests are served, what ideological values or social
currents are expressed, and what types of knowledge are simultaneously
invalidated? Largely, the originator of this method was Robert K. Merton.
While current sociologists of science such as Paul Feyerabend and Steven
Woolgar have taken a more relativist and constructivist position than
Merton, many of Merton's initial questions and probings of science
provide the basis for the field[2]. One of Merton's central
questions was: why did science as we know it today largely originate in
northern Europe? (in the terms of an institutionalized apparatus for the
generation of knowledge of nature - all cultures have had their
'ethnosciences,' but the so-called "scientific revolution" did take place
largely in those countries in the 17th and 18th centuries.) What
connections were there to capitalism, the industrial revolution, and the
Protestant ethic, as well as the burgeoning growth of urbanism and the
colonial enterprise[3]?
The Mertonian Norms of Science
One of the important factors in the formation of any
institutionalized profession is the formation of norms. Such norm
development is sometimes explicitly codified - as in the case of the
Hippocratic Oath of professional medicine - but usually it is implicit
and develops as a kind of unprofessed code. By the 'norms' of science,
Merton was not referring to its methodology, i.e. the 'scientific
method', but instead to the unstated behavioral guidelines of the
community of scientists[4]. These norms are: universalism
(the scientific enterprise is not to be limited by national, racial,
ethnic, religious, gender, or credal boundaries, nor should these
particulars in any way shape its exercise) , communalism (of
intellectual, not material, property - ideas belong to no one, and are to
be shared openly and freely with the community of one's peers),
disinterestedness (objectivity/impartiality/impersonality - the
scientist is supposed to rise above his individual, subjective, and
idiosyncratic biases; and be free of personal passions and desires in his
work), and organized scepticism (the practice of the critical
method - theories must be falsifiable and constantly subjected to
criticism and review, and the burden of proof lies in the making of the
claim, not in its 'debunking'.) Other commentators in the Mertonian realm
have also suggested cumulativity (the scientific enterprise is
continually adding to itself - it never goes backwards or revises its
assumptions in the way politics or the arts does) and
rationality (the consistent use of logically defensible
premises.) The last two are controversial - T.S. Kuhn has showed the
falsity of the former, Paul Feyerabend the latter[5] - so I will
concentrate on the four originally proposed by Merton. In my opinion, the
basis for these norms already existed in the cultural process that gave
birth to modern science.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution
In the sixteenth century, when science had not been separated from
the more general endeavour of 'natural philosophy,' there were two
competing philosophies of nature. The 'chymical philosophy,' which was
exemplified by figures such as Robert Boyle or Paracelsus, and largely
described Nature in organic and fluid terms (many often borrowed from
alchemy), utilized a discourse of terms pertaining to the mixing,
solution, and recombination of substances. The 'mechanical philosophy',
which had as exemplars Descartes and Newton, and derived much of its
basis from an intellectual climate of religious Deism (the clockmaker
Deity), utilized a discourse which pertained to the operation of
machines: a certain mathematical formalism that describes the interaction
of unconnected parts set in motion[6]. (The problem that the
mechanistic philosphy faces in the 20th century is, as it tries to rid
itself of teleological explanations, it is forced to acknowledge that
machines are nonetheless almost always built with a purpose in mind.)
Most of the assumptions in science today, such as the regularity and
universality of natural law, derive from the mechanistic philosophy. The
underlying discourse of science today still derives from this model: we
search for the 'mechanisms' behind events in Nature much as 17th century
scientists looked for the 'hidden Architect' or 'blind watchmaker' who
wound up the clockwork world. When the ever-modern Jacques
Monod[7] tries to describe the purely mechanical basis of life, he
is only recovering ground proposed by the 17th century philosopher La
Mettrie in his book, Man: A Machine .
The Victory of the Mechanistic Philosophy
Many of the historians of science have realized the connections
between the mechanistic philosophy of the scientific revolution and the
ideology of the rising borgeouisie of northern Europe. The mechanistic
philosophy expressed a worldview that reflected their interests. The
industrial project would not have succeeded without Lord Francis Bacon's
assurance of the dominatibility of Nature and the boons it would provide
mankind[8]. The Protestant ethic, which Weber shows to be
inextricably connected to the 'disenchantment of the world' and the rise
of capitalism in the West, emphasized the propriety of parsimony of
speech and the equation of hard work and effort with moral perfection.
Here also lie the primary criteria for scientific theories: they must not
talk too much (i.e. by being simple and elegant and proposing as few
theoretical entities as possible) and they must do as much work as
possible (i.e. provide the same results over and over again with strict
rigor and complete dependability.) The scientific revolution, from a
purely pragmatic sense, can be said to have laid the basis for
colonialism by providing the tools it needed. But it also provided an
ideological justification which cannot be ignored. The feudal system of
Europe relied on an increasingly disbelieved theological justification.
So the rising bourgeouisie needed a system that could provide the basis
for their authority (and would supplant that of the Church, which
resisted usury and other things they wanted) and justify their claims to
being the most efficient 'managers' of society. If society could be
presented in mechanical terms, and the bourgeouisie could claim to have
the most mechanical aptitude, then they could justify their
rule[9]. The rise of science cannot merely be described as an
intellectual awakening of slumbering mankind: this is a product of the
Enlightenment episteme . Instead, we must look at the
institutionalization of science as a social phenomenon, and explicable
via social processes.
Physics as the best exemplar and foil of the mechanistic
philosophy
All of the other sciences today, from geology to chemistry to
meteorology, utilize the mechanistic discourse. But physics, which dealt
with the the most direct aspects of the physical world, such as the
motions of bodies through space and the energy flow of physical systems,
became the mechanistic science par excellence . Since in the
Cartesian view all things extended in space (res extensa ) were
physical and material, they could all be described in physical terms: the
attempt to describe the category of mental things (res cogitans )
in such terms would not begin until the 19th century, but proceeds apace
today in behavioristic psychology. Physics always sought to describe the
behavior of the most basic entities of Nature, in the hope that
everything more complex can be deduced from their properties[10].
In the 20th century, as physics began to penetrate into the heart of the
atom, this reductionist project ran into a terrible snag. The entities of
the subatomic world did not obey classical, deterministic, mechanical
laws: instead their behavior was statistical, stochastic, and
complementary. In short, unlike anything commonsensical to our
experience. Simultaneously, as 20th century astronomers looked outward
with their new instruments into the cosmos, they found a dynamic place
full of similarly mysterious entities - quasars, pulsars, black holes,
supernovae - leading Sir James Jeans to declare "the universe seems to be
more a great thought than a great machine."[11]
The second scientific revolution: the 20th century paradigm
shift
There were two reactions in the scientific world to these new
phenomena which defied classical description. One, not surprisingly, was
conservative: it can be found in the logical positivism of the Vienna
School and the 'ordinary language' philosophy of V.O. Quine. The
positivists basically felt that if you could not sense an entity directly
or describe its properties precisely through instrumentation, it did not
exist. To the positivists, then, anything you could not describe in
materially visualizable terms was merely a speculative, mathematical, or
theoretical entity: thus quantum electrodynamics was nothing 'real,' only
a mathematical trick with no reference to reality[12]. (This
position is also occasionally called 'naive realism.') Other
conservatives proposed the 'hidden variables' theory which suggested that
the non-deterministic behavior of quantum entities was not an intrinsic
property: if we could only discover the "hidden variables" then
everything could be discussed in purely classical terms[13]. But,
by and large, physics abandoned positivism, and two interpretations
developed to deal with the curious uncertainty presented by Heisenberg
and the ever-paradoxical, living/dead Schrodinger's Cat: the Copenhagen
interpretation and the Many-Worlds theory. The Many-Worlds theory
suggests that the universe divides everytime an observation is made of a
quantum phenomenon, but 'we' are only in one of the branching worlds. The
Copenhagen interpretation grants a more important role to subjectivity
and suggests the consciousness of the observer collapses the wave
function and 'creates' reality - a position of interest to a
constructivist theory of knowledge.[14]
The Horns of the Dilemma: What does one do during a revolution?
Interestingly, many physicists working in quantum
mechanics today eschew positivism - they acknowledge the physical reality
of the objects of study - but do not subscribe to either of these
interpretations. The basic principle for them is pragmatism and the
hypothetico-deductive method: if we do this, certain things follow, hence
certain things exist; even if these things have unrepresentable
properties or are unobservable in the ordinary sense[15]. Largely,
most physicists act as if they have not emerged from a revolution: the
legendary battles of Einstein and Bohr over the quantum theory ("God does
not play dice with the universe!") are fait acompli . This is, as
one observer has noted, perhaps because "most quantum mechanics are as
philosophically inclined as garage mechanics."[16] Most are not
concerned with epistemology, and subscribe to what might be called
"mediated realism," because they believe themselves to be dealing with
'independent facts of nature' that are 'out there in the world'. Largely,
this is also due to the physicists attempting to reduce what the
sociologist Leon Festinger calls cognitive dissonance : the state
of one's expectations being sharply contrary to the world-as-it-is, much
like the prophet who discovers his prediction to be false[17].
They do so by attempting to reduce the 'signal' to 'noise' ratio by
working on the puzzles they can solve and leave the ones they can't to
others. As T.S. Kuhn suggests, most of the work in 'normal science' is
puzzle-solving, and most scientists continue to do 'normal science' even
when faced with periods of 'revolutionary' or 'crisis science', since
they have not shifted to the new paradigm.
The Rise of Big Science
There is another important historical force behind modern
physics. Significantly, this is a counterbalancing and conservative
force, and it counteracts the revolutionary implications of the other.
That force is the consolidation and institutionalization of science as a
result of World War II. Most nation-states began to transfer large
portions of their GNP toward scientific R & D, resulting in breakthroughs
like radar and the atom bomb. The effective result was that, even in the
'free countries,' the autonomy of science from the State (to the degree
it ever existed) was eroded. Largely, this was due to changes in the
nature of physics itself: as ever more powerful accelerators and
telescopes were needed, so were larger funds which could not be solicited
from private sources[18]. Yet, one must also acknowledge that the
tension of the Cold War also provoked governments to improve technologies
in all areas from surveillance to the Space Race. The government became
the premier financier of scientific work, and he who controls the purse
pulls the strings... one effective result of World War II was a
conflation of the scientific work with the so-called 'military industrial
complex.' Labs such as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory arose
out of important military 'search' projects - in their case, the
development of the proximity fuse for bombs[19]. Scientists
working on such projects learned the importance of secrecy, oversight,
and haste. The increasing encroachment of governmental control over
science policy and scientific research might be said to be the 20th
century 'counterrevolution' in physics which counterbalances the ongoing
epistemological revolution. National governments are interested in
technological applications, not physical concepts that might be dangerous
to their social systems.
METHODOLOGY
Description/Evaluation and the Fact/Value Dichotomy
One of the problems in dealing with the ways scientists describe
science, either in statements about it or in their writings, is the whole
problem of fact and value. "Science is the most rational human
enterprise" seems to be, on the face of it, simply a descriptive
statement. There is something called rationality, and science is the
field in which it is most used. Period. But unfortunately, this statement
is evaluative in nature because the author of that statement
expects his audience to concur with the implicit value judgement that
rationality is more desirable than irrationality. The statement "this
table is made of oak" is merely descriptive because neither its
utterer nor the audience has the context as to whether oakness is more or
less desirable than, say, the table being made out of teakwood. Many
statements used to justify the status or privilege of science are
seemingly descriptive, but in actuality evaluative, because they contain
implicit assumptions or judgements about normality and
potentiality[20]. My position is that statements about any human
activity must, by necessity, contain an evaluation: one either admires
one or more features of that activity or dislikes one or more features.
When science refers to itself, however, it is often in very
non-evaluative terms, which are presented as given, objective, and not
subject to dissent or debate. Who wants what they do to be thought of as
irrational? One might argue, for example, that fields outside of science
might express a different type of rationality rather than an absence of
rationality. My methodological approach was to look at all statements as
being potentially evaluative, hence expressing values and judgements
implicit in physics relative to other human endeavours. The scientists
largely viewed their speaking as a means of communicating information, of
data transfer like their computers, not a rhetorical/persuasive/political
cant. By and large, the noun-heavy language of science serves to mask
interests and intentions, ambiguities and personality
conflicts[21].
Fieldwork Technique
My principal method of data collection was field interviews with
physicists in their offices. That was later combined with surveys to
assess the sociological composition of the lab and ask more quantitative
questions. The amount of direct observation of 'laboratory life' was
small to none: much as I would have wanted to become part of the life of
the lab, I had other classes to handle at the time I was doing my
research. Therefore, I cannot say to any degree what inconsistency there
might be between the statements the physicists made about the norms of
their community and their 'real-world' behavior, though other
sociologists of science have looked to that same inconsistency. Do
scientists really obey the so-called four "Mertonian" norms? Or do they
break and bend rules all the time to reach their conclusions, as
Feyerabend suggests? Is there a sharp dichotomy between principle and
praxis? Many of these questions were on my mind, and I did not have the
necessary participant-observation time to deal with them appopriately. I
am therefore forced to take my interviewees' remarks at face value, i.e.
assume they at least correspond to what they believe to be the truth ,
if not the truth itself, about their community.
Reflexive Aspects of the Investigation
Many sociologists of science have anguished over the reflexivity
of their activity. If sociology is (or wishes to be) a science, and
scientific knowledge is not objective or value-free, then sociology
cannot make pretense to objectivity through seeking to become more
'scientific.' Some sociologists feel that sociology is principally
'humanistic,' belonging to a different cognitive domain than science.
Yet, few sociologists would wish to claim that sociology is somehow a
less rational or empirical an activity than science[22]. Many
working in the sociology of knowledge have decided that there is nothing
to be gained in imitation of the scientific method, and are unafraid to
ask questions which seek to reinforce or reflect existing concepts that
they already have: the heresy of making facts fit theories. (which is
what they claim science 'really' does anyway.) As a cognitive
anthropologist, I approached physics as a cognitive activity; even one of
many possible cognitive activities. In essence, while I potentially
shaped the physicists' discourse about their activity through some
pre-existing notions I was interested in investigating, I allowed the
discourse as much free rein as possible. At this point, I will be
explicit: I made no pretense to absolute objectivity, because there were
certain things about physics I was interested in probing, and other
aspects I deliberately chose to ignore. This was in part due to time
limitations. But what might be called unfairly 'subjective' factors were
involved as well: in particular, I was very incensed at the scientific
discourse which declared scientific research to be culture-free and not
socially determined.
The Nature of the Questioning
Broadly speaking, there were three basic areas of investigation.
First, I was interested in what I might term the 'macrosociological'
dimensions of physics: how does physics establish itself in the hierarchy
of professions? How did it see itself in relation to other cognitive
endeavours? What 'large-scale' sociopolitical forces "transmitted"
themselves from the society-as-a-whole to the physics community?
Conversely, what influences did the concepts of physics "transmit" to the
social world and societal discourse? Second, I wished to look at the
'microsociological' dimensions of the physics community-as-a-whole,
considered as a domain. How did conflict, prestige, credit, reputation,
motivation and hierarchal decision-making manifest within the community
of physicists? What social processes were involved in knowledge
formation? What were the guiding norms of physics, and were they the ones
that Merton suggested were particular to science? How did the physics
community organize itself? Lastly, I was interested in certain
'ethnological' or 'micro-micro-sociological' questions. What features of
the spatial, social, and temporal organization of Bloomberg were
significant in an ideological sense? What was the interrelations of the
lab with other facilities on campus, such as the Space Telescope
Institute or Applied Physics Lab? Was there anything unique about the
sociological composition of the lab vis-a-vis gender, ethnic makeup,
etc.?
PART I: ETHNOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE STUDY
Bloomberg as a Case Study of a Physics Laboratory
The physical organization of the Bloomberg Physics Building seems
to give expression to the scientific norm of openness. Any part of the
building is accessible from any other part, with few exceptions. Almost
all the physicists, when they are in their offices, keep their doors
open, in anticipation of the arrival of colleagues and peers. During the
day, all the labs (with all of their expensive equipment and computers!)
are kept open, even when they are not in use. Even when most of the
physicists have gone home, the lights in the building stay on, and much
of the building stays open, largely because the Schaefler Auditorium is
used by so many Continuing Studies courses. The divisions of the building
seem to be more based on professional interest than hierarchy: the 1st
floor is for space science and astrophysics, the 2nd for nuclear and
solid-state physics, the 3rd for graduate students and administrative
offices, the 4th for condensed-matter physics, the 5th appears to be
mostly assorted experimentalists, and the 6th floor is for the
particle/high-energy physics. But I could not help but wonder: why are
the high-energy physicists on top ? Their presence on the highest
floor of the building may signify nothing... but it does seem to suggest
otherwise. One of the most important features of the physics building is
the striking sculpture on the ground floor: it is both cerebrum and
mushroom cloud at the same time. It seems to say: the atom bomb comes
forth from the mind of the scientist, that you could not have one without
the other - the price of genius is risk, that from the mind of the
physicist comes both the atomic explosion (his parthenogenic, Zeus-like
child) and all the other wonders around you.
Temporal Organization of the Laboratory
Banal as it might be to say, the lab seems to be structured
around the same five-day workweek as other facilities on campus. The
physicists come in around nine or so, teach their classses, have lunch,
and do their daily work, and leave around five or so. Of course, only one
aspect of the activity of the lab ceases at five: when the scientists
stop fiddling with their gadgets and doodling equations, then out come
the janitors for a few hours to clean offices and sweep the building,
with curious clockwork regularity. They treat the equipment of the
scientists with almost religious respect. I asked one janitor if he ever
touched one bank of instruments, and he replied, "Nah, I don't go near
the stuff, I'm afraid I'd break it." One important temporal structuring
pattern comes from the infrequent colloquia and symposiums that are held
throughout the year. Those that are aimed at the specialized physics
community usually are held around four in the afternoon; those presented
for a more general audience (such as the latest set of pictures from the
Hubble Telescope) are held at eight in the evening. Attendance for these
events is often large, though they are not mandatory. "Beamtime" is not a
real concern for the lab per se, as there are no accelerators or other
'Big Science' large-scale equipment present. But the temporal life of the
physicists is centered around travel: they are always leaving to go do an
experiment at an acclerator somewhere else, or to attend this or that
international conference, or participate in a reading of papers. It is a
reality of the schedule of the lab that a large number of its residents
at any given time will not be present. The pace of the physicists is
fast; appointments are hard to make and schedules are frequently limited
by time constraints. Few physicists ever really seem to dawdle or tarry -
even theorists seem to scribble on their boards with a furious speed
rather than at a dreamy, contemplative rate.
Social Organization of the Lab
Consonant with the Mertonian norm of universalism, the
physicists of
the lab do everything they can to play down difference. They all dress in
such a way as to deny differing social status or background. One sees
very few dressed in suit and tie. 'Incidental' differences such as
ethnicity, religion, nationality, and gender seem to be downplayed by an
egalitarian spirit. Nobody, not even the Department Chair, gets a bigger
office. There are no perks and privileges: everybody gets their mail in
the same place and uses the same photocopier in the office. Much about
Bloomberg seems to reinforce the notion that science transcends frontiers
and barriers. The names on the mailboxes, Eastern European, Japanese, and
'Hispanic,' certainly suggest that "physics is the most complete model of
humanity without national or territorial boundaries." Where there are
separations within the lab, it seems to be on the basis of division of
labor. Experimentalist and theorists, while operating in different
spheres, are often in offices next to each other. The only basis for
hierarchy appears to be on the basis of educational credentials. The PhDs
seem to be given a great deal of deference and respect, more than those
with a Master's degree. Graduate students are forced to share offices
with one or more colleagues and they appear to be more physically
concentrated than others in the lab. Undergraduates are not even extended
the privilege of residence: they are temporary transitors, who come for
their classes, talk to their TAs, and then leave. Some, working on
projects for independent study, do become a more integral part of life in
the lab, but they still know that "they are not low man on the totem
pole, they are the dirt under the pole," and frequently do the more
menial, tedious tasks.
Semiotic Organization of the Lab
Most of the lab is painted in a clinical, asceptic white,
alternating with some soft grays. The neutrality of color cannot help but
reinforce in the mind of the observer the all-too important
disinteredness and dispassionateness of science. Many scientists keep
various items on their door, ranging from newspaper clippings to cartoons
to small diagrams. Most of these are for passerby to look at and laugh,
to suggest that physicists are not dour and are readily able to laugh at
themselves: in short, that physics does not take itself very seriously.
Unlike the offerings on doors in other departments, few of these items
are very political, and even fewer are personal. Some make some very bold
claims in an implicit, surreptitious way. One door poster had a diagram
with a picture of two neurons touching, and in the space where the
dendrites met the adjacent axon was a caption which said "consciousness."
The implication is that thought, language, and the other things which
make us human are merely gaps in the relentless search-beam of science,
and that in due time physics will fill even those in. Others poke fun at
creationism, pseudoscience, and other taboos and anathemas of the physics
community, sometimes in an almost mean-spirited way. One thing that an
outside observer in Bloomberg cannot help but notice is the absence of
signs to indicate directions or the locations of places in the building.
The implication seems to be, "if you don't know where you're going, why
are you here?" While Bloomberg is very open to those inside of it, its
imposing edifice almost seems threatening and unwelcome to outsiders to
its hallowed halls of knowledge. This, plus its location on campus, seems
to keep traffic to a minimum; unlike when I was in other buildings such
as Levering, I rarely encountered any individuals who didn't have a
'reason' to already be there. Few people wandered the halls with the sort
of aimlessness that was characteristic of my explorations: they always
had a definite destination.
PART II: MACROSOCIOLOGY OF PHYSICS WITHIN THE WORLD SYSTEM
Physics and Society: A Global Question
When I ask about the interrelations of physics with society,
the question refers to more than just 'this' society, our
ever-Eurocentric/Western/Logocentric culture. Because physics is now a
global affair, as my respondents asserted, it is transnational - thus it
interacts with societies of all kinds. (This is, they suggest, is because
it utilizes a 'universal' language, mathematics, which does not require
translation, and whose meanings are context-free: 2+2 is "4" in both
Canada and Nepal.) There are physicists in almost every country of the
world, although European, North American, and Asian physicists seem to
dominate the field. Nonetheless, the fact that a phenomenon is global
does not escape the particularities of its origin. Many of my respondents
were inclined to think that modern science might be distinctly different
if its institutionalization had taken place in another part of the world
than northern Europe - China, say, or the Middle East, both of which had
very complex ethnosciences. And most also agreed that despite the
universality of science, its practice might be shaped by the national
cultures who adopted it. But the physicists almost always insisted that
this was a modification of practice, not a change of content,
assumptions, norms, or boundary conditions: Chinese or Egyptian physics
would still reach the same conclusions about the nature of the world as,
say, American physics. If they reached different conclusions (for
example, about the validity of acupuncture) it was due to a diversion
from the scientific method, not an alteration of its cultural assumptions
or norm structure.
The Place of Physics in the Hierarchy of the World System
Only one survey respondent assented to the statement "science
produces more practical value for society than the humanities." And only
one survey respondent agreed to the statement that "the humanities could
benefit from being more scientific," although they also indicated as well
that "science could learn some things from the humanities." The purpose
of this question was to establish the status ranking of science in
relation to other cognitive endeavours, loosely lumped under the
categorical term 'humanities': i.e. the arts, politics, religion,
philosophy, sports, etc. In my opinion, the very fact that C.P. Snow and
other authors make this distinction, that there are a set of endeavours
which are 'humanistic', and that there is another, which is not, suggests
many presuppositions: such as that the ultimate purpose of science is not
to contribute to humanity, but merely to accumulate knowledge without any
anthropocentric factors[23]. The fact that the physicists did not
attribute a higher status ranking to science than other cognitive
activities is very telling, but there are many reasons to believe that
this is a result of the shaking of faith in science that has come from
the technological horrors of the past forty years. Certainly, in the
1930s when C.P. Snow formulated his essay on the 'Two Cultures,' there
was a definite climate of opinion that attributed more value and validity
to science than to the humanities. The reasons for the erosion of this
status judgement are outside the scope of this paper.
What was perhaps of greater interest was the status ranking
that physicists gave to physics in the hierarchy of science
specializations. It is a well-known social fact that practicioners of a
subdiscipline attempt to claim that they exemplify more traits of the
discipline than other subdisciplines. Hence, the Navy tries to claim
better military discipline than the Army; football claims to be more of a
'real sport' than tennis; and general physicians try to signify the fact
that podiatrists or osteopaths "don't practice medicine" by denying them
access to a medical degree. The survey attempted to examine a
preconception I located in other texts: the declared superiority of the
'hard' sciences such as physics and chemistry over the 'soft' sciences
such as psychology and ecology. The 'hard' sciences are said to be more
rigorous and produce more well-defined, mathematically formulable
results: and as a result, many of the 'soft' sciences have tried to
rectify their lower status ranking by emulating the 'hard' sciences
through greater use of quantificative over qualitative methods. Moreover,
in many physics textbooks, physics is declared to be the 'king' of the
hard sciences, because it best exemplifies their character. The gendering
of these terms is also interesting to the anthropological observer: the
'hardheaded' masculine contrasted to the 'soft-touch' feminine.
In response to the survey, two physicists agreed to the
statement "physics is the most exact and rigorous of sciences." But three
agreed to the statement "physics is the foundation of all other sciences
because ultimately all phenomena are physical phenomena." Two assented to
the fact that "physics is at a stage where it tools, methodology, and
discourse are more developed." Surprisingly, two agreed to the assertion
"Physics is no more important than any other science." Of those two, one
described his reputation in the physics community as "High," while
another described it as "Other." This indicates a diversity of positions
regarding the status ranking of physics in the Bloomberg building.
However, one might note an interesting, if tenuous, connection, in the
fact that both physicists asserting to the clear superiority of physics
described their reputation as "High." Advancement in a field is connected
in many areas to being a 'team player,' and part of team spirit is
believing that 'we're#1.' Of course, one problem in this area is the
seriousness of held beliefs. Many individuals may assert jocularly their
superiority to other individuals without attempting to demonstrate it, as
in the case of the Eskimo song duel or any "insult battle" in an
elementary schoolyard. Since jocularity is an important factor in the
social life of the Bloomberg Building, this factor cannot be ruled out.
As Gilbert and Mulkay note[24], scientific jokes can be highly
complex, and physicists often use cartoons and jokes as means of
argumentation.
The Impact of Physics on Society
There are notable examples of ways in which social movements or
belief systems arose from scientific concepts. Social Darwinism, as
exemplified by Herbert Spencer, attempted to derive economic and social
principles from the natural selection of Darwinian biology. In many
cases, these have been dismissed as a result of the "naturalistic
fallacy," i.e. that we can decide human ethics from behavior in the
animal kingdom or social principles from natural law[25].
Nonetheless, it is certainly an ongoing endeavor in science to locate
human action in natural law, and such determinism is the organizing
principle of behaviorist psychology or artificial intelligence research.
So, it is not unreasonable to expect that, with the validity attached to
science, that social movements will utilize the language and appearance
of science (if not science itself) to gain authority and
appeal[26]. Such examples of scientism might include Lysenkoism
in the Soviet Union, or population control movements in the United
States.
Most of the physicists felt that there was a definite
vulnerability on the part of fields like biology to be utilized in this
way, "because biology deals with human nature." But, as physics deals
with nonhuman entities, and human entities are of a different order of
complexity from these nonhuman entities, physics "should be unable to be
used this way." Certainly, even if the physicists deny this influence,
there are individuals who have claimed to see it at work. Nazi scientists
claimed that Einsteinian relativity theory encouraged moral relativism,
i.e. permisiveness and 'degeneracy', because it denied the possibility of
absolute standards of reference. The counterculture of the 1960s eagerly
embraced quantum mechanics and attempted to connect it to Eastern
philosophy and mysticism. And some have already begun to use catastrope
theory/ chaos theory - more properly, nonlinear dynamics, originally
devised for nonlinear physical systems - in the fields of neurology,
economics, and political science, while in popular culture chaos theory
has been taken to mean the impossibility of predicting anything, least of
all political outcomes[27]. Most of the physicists agreed to the
possibility of physical laws being used to draw conclusions in the social
realm, but felt that this usage of physical concepts was fundamentally
invalid.
The one area in which the physicists felt that physics had the
greatest impact on society was technology . No one can possibly
argue against the fact that physics has revolutionized the technologies
of communication, information storage, transportation, and other areas,
or the fact that these technological revolutions have radically
transformed modern culture. However, almost all the physicists pointed to
their greatest breakthrough, and their enfant terrible , the
Bomb. Atomic weaponry has transformed the waging of war, international
relations, and the basic psychology of the human race: since 1945, for
the first time, humanity has held the power to destroy the world. Robert
Jungk and others have pointed to this psychological climate as creating a
feeling of powerlessness, fatalism, and helplessness in many
societies[28]. Certainly, the one country to suffer an atomic
detonation, Japan, has been galvanized by the experience socially,
economically, and culturally; and curiously enough, while it is a
self-declared Nuclear Weapon Free Zone, it is also a world leader in
nuclear physics. The development of atomic weaponry resulted in a true
internationalism among the physics community for the first time,
resulting in the formation of the International Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists; the international control of atomic energy (while never
achieved) was one of the main impetuses in the formation of the United
Nations. Some political scientists feel that without the Bomb, many
nations might never have agreed to the sacrifice of self-determination
needed for international governance. In this way, perhaps more than any
other, physics has united the globe.
Sociocultural Influences on Physics
The physics community has generally vehemently denied the
influence of cultural factors on physics. Generally, this denial
indicates their fear of the norms of disinterestedness and universalism
being violated. Most American physicists see the autonomy of science from
social pressures and the will of the State as being axiomatic and
necessary. My respondents generally agreed that this autonomy was
violated in "totalitarian" states, and also generally had dire
consequences for the independence and impartiality of scientific
research. Society could and should benefit from "applied science," with
the end product of technology for social melioration, they said, but the
social sphere of "pure science," science-for-its-own-sake and the
production of objective knowledge, should be left alone. "Pure science"
should discover the facts of nature, then "applied science" can work on
their refinement and application for technological needs. Curiously, this
separation is often hard to make. "Pure science" gained in prestige and
respectability largely due to the successes of "applied science" during
World War II, and national governments began to take a larger role in
both; projects in "applied science" such as the Apollo Project often
produce serendipitous "pure science" breakthroughs; and "pure science"
often produces direct economic benefit in the future, as the Byatt-Cohen
formulation attempts to demonstrate[29].
The physicists did point out that one way in which the State
controls scientific research is through funding of programs. Many notable
scientific areas where such funding has decreased recently in the U.S.
are victims of political pressure, such as contraceptive testing, fetal
tissue research, and alternative energy programs. "Big Science," they
said, with its massive particle accelerators and capital-intensive
instruments, could never be wholly privately financed: only the State can
provide the levels of funding necessary. However, many physicists
described the ongoing "battle" they are having with the government over
the building of a new particle accelerator, the Superconducting
Supercollider, which will provide higher energies (GeVs) than any
previous instrument. Their point of view is that without this
accelerator, particle physics cannot solve many of its most pressing
problems, but the legislators always reply with "With all this hunger,
homelessness, recession, and debt, why should we finance such a
multibillion dollar project?" The physicists, in turn, as ad hoc
lobbyists, counter that it is not a "boondoggle" like the Space Station
project, and try to suggest ways in which the facility will improve
tourism and jobs. They know that this is not the real reason for the
accelerator, but they "must play politics." In hard economic times, they
said, physics has a much harder time getting its priorities addressed:
many bemoaned the decline of the government's "pure science" R & D budget
and the increased difficulty of getting grants.
But the competitive nature of "Big Science" can also be said
to play an eliminative role in scientific research, they also said.
Administrators in charge of the accelerators must often evaluate several
proposals for various experiments, and reject them on the grounds of
their relative "merit and feasibility." The physicists believe that this
procedure is free of social criteria outside of scientific merit, in
concordance with the Mertonian norms of organized scepticism and
disinterestedness. But, I also noted that on various occasions, they
admitted that the status position of the physicists connected with the
experiment did play a role in the selection of experiments, and
that the status of physicists might be influenced by such factors as
seniority (age), certification (educational background), and "the cycle
of credit" - how many times they have been cited by others and how many
papers they have published. The role of other, 'accidental', variables
such as gender or ethnicity in this process was vigorously denied.
(However, one physicist did complain that while gender was not important
for internal relations, it nonetheless did seem to shape interactions
with some of those outside of the physics community, who often assumed
she was a secretary rather than one of the building staff.) There were
multiple explanations offered for the absence of racial minorities and
women among the staff, mostly focusing on differentials in secondary
education and the absence of role models, rather than policies of
recruitment and retention.
As was mentioned earlier, physics is an international
endeavour, and it would seem very unlikely that national cultures and
ideologies would not influence its practice. Most physicists felt that
cultural differences played a minor role in physical research - Europeans
might be more authoritarian in their teaching methods, Japanese might not
have the same "hands-on" approach to their instruments as Americans, the
Soviets might rule out certain explanations as being too 'idealistic' -
but they emphasized that these differences were indeed minor. After all,
physicists in Japan get the same results as physicists in America when
they run the same experiments, one physicist said. (But did they
interpret those results differently?) Only one of my respondents
concurred that culture did play a major role in the different
international physics communities. He concurred that differing notions of
space and time in different cultures might result in differences of
approaches to the phenomenological world. He said there was a great
divide between the way Europeans and Americans did science - a difference
that went well beyond formal procedure to expectations of outcome. This
difference extended to decisions regarding which areas were worthy of
investigation and a deeper concern over the philosophical and humanistic
implications of those areas. By and large this conforms to the norm
predominance of Continental rationalism over Ango-Saxon empiricism
commented on by other writers about European science.
PART III: MICROSOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE BLOOMBERG PHYSICS
COMMUNITY
The Social Processes of Knowledge Formation
There were several theoretical items in this area that I was
interested in examining. One was Andrew Pickering's thesis that some of
the entities of physics might be heuristic constructs - i.e. entities
"created" by the need to justify the continuation of a research programme
and an explanatory paradigm. Pickering felt that one or more of the
particles in the SU(5) - the so-called 'Standard Model' family - might
have been 'manufactured' in this way by adversaries of the other leading
model (the theories of 'rejaepoles' or 'particle democracy'.) Physicists
needed an additional quark - the so-called 'charm' - to fit their
calculations for the alternative models of 'guage theory' or 'symmetry
breaking.' And curiously enough, two teams of physicists found the charm
quark within weeks of each other during the "November Revolution" of
1974. This led Pickering to examine the ways in which what physicists
were looking for might be shaping the outcome of their
experiments[30]. One physicist in Bloomberg who was involved in
the events of 1974 described the process as "very political" and "full of
big egos," resulting in the "canonization" of the "Holy Grail" of modern
physics, SU (5).
Also, I was interested in how physicists formulated their
theories. How did they arrive at their ideas, and by what criteria did
they and others evaluate whether they were intellectually satisfying or
not? What properties - aesthetic, formal, etc. - separated "good"
theories from "bad" ones? And what images were drawn from popular culture
to provide the visualizations for these models? From a purely
'behaviorist' standpoint, one might ask what 'rewards' (personal or
social) physicists derive from their work, and how these in turn shape
their idea formations as much as the 'punishment' (i.e. criticism) from
their colleagues. Most of the physicists felt that popular culture and
imagination played a small role in formulating 'thought experiments,' but
that most said their ideas were created by a social process involving
discussions with colleagues and reading of current scientific journals.
As for which theories were most intellectually satisfying, they often
cited simplicity, 'elegance', intelligibility, and creativity as some of
the most important attributes. Many commentators of science have noted
that the "scientific temperament" involves a curious fusion of the
"meticulous precision of the engineer" with the "bold searching spirit of
the avant-garde artist." Hence, theories are expected to be both within
paradigm boundaries, but suggest new, bold areas of puzzle-solving and
filling-in of incomplete areas, in a Kuhnian sense.
Most of the survey respondents indicated that their leading
source of motivation and reward were a deep sense of personal
satisfaction from their work, and also a feeling of gameplaying or fun.
These tended to predominate over monetary or social rewards. "It's like
getting paid to do what I like to do," one said. Almost all indicated
that "knowledge (attainment of truth)" was a primary source of
motivation. (This is interesting in light of the fact that at least ever
since Karl Popper, many scientists have begun to suggest the relative
unattainability of truth and focus on the project for science as being
falsification.) Almost all rated "aesthetics (a sense of harmony)" as a
low motivating factor in their research. Many felt that the lack of
monetary and social rewards was actually negated by the presence of
awards such as the Nobel Prize, which promoted excellence; but almost all
felt that the importance and achievements of physics often went
underrecognized by society at large. Internal recognition - the cycle of
'credit' and the economy of citation - predominated over external
perception - such as how physicists were popularly perceived (as
"absent-minded" or "eggheads") by society.
Further, I was interested in validating Latour and Woolgar's
description of the process where observations move from nonfact to
contested fact to accepted fact[31]. How, I asked the physicists,
did a truly anomalous observation get a hearing in the scientific
community... how did it get from being just an 'anomaly' to the potential
basis for a new theory? Truly bold anomalies are often ignored
completely, one physicist told me. Whether or not the scientific
community paid attention to such anomalous observations was very
dependent on who made the observation, he said. Factors in evaluating
such an individual were age, reliability, and believability. If the
individual observer of the anomaly was too young or too old, he would be
dismissed as either 'wet behind the ears' or senile. Unless he or she had
published consistently good results and findings up until now, and had no
history of being associated with any kind of fudging, cheating, or
skewing of data, that person would also very likely be ignored. Name
recognition was important, also, because it was believed that a physicist
who had already made a reputation for themselves would not be likely to
seek additional fame and fortune. One main "no-no" was to take your
results to the media before having them published and reviewed: one of
the big problems with the scientific anomaly (currently non-fact) of cold
fusion, I was told. Physics assumes anomalies to be rare and places a
strong burden of proof on the observer of the anomaly - indeed, his or
her motivations are often scrutinized to a great degree: "did they see it
because they wanted to?" , although examination of psychological
motivation rarely takes place in 'normal science'. No one asks: "Did he
want the temperature of this sample to be so-and-so?"
Lastly, I was concerned about the ontological conclusions about
the physical world that one might be able to derive from the
peculiarities of the subatomic realm. Since it is one in which so many
paradoxical, non-classical, acausal, non-commonsensical events take
place, I was interested how the physicists living in "this" world (if it
is a different one) were able to discuss and comprehend "that" one, where
particles jump from place to place without covering the distance
in-between (quantum tunneling); where many particles have no truly fixed
position(uncertainty); where information can be communicated
instantaneously(nonlocality); where many entities have the properties of
both particles and waves(complementarity); and time appears to be fully
reversible (acausality)? In the particle 'zoo,' there are many seemingly
impossible objects - ones without mass (neutrinos), ones that go back in
time (tachyons), ones made of antimatter (positrons), and ones that are,
according to QED, not there but still fill 'empty' space('virtual'
particles.) Many non-naive realists have been led to ask: how real are
these things?[32] Are they as real as me or my table or a cell?
Can a quark, which can never be isolated, be said to really exist?
There were many responses by the physicists to the potential
cognitive dissonance of quantum mechanics. Many of them revolved around
the fact that 'quantum mechanics' was just a 'special case' of Newtonian
mechanics, which remained fully valid for macroscopic things like people.
Just as relativistic mechanics are a 'special case' of classical
mechanics which only become applicable at relativistic velocities, i.e.
those close to the speed of light. The bizarre properties of the
subatomic realm come from the fact that it is so small - according to
deBroglie, all matter has wave properties, but macroscopic matter is
just too big to display it. Others feel that the weird entities of high
energy physics are just 'residual' products of the incredibly huge
energies - our universe is too 'cool' for them to normally appear.
Nonetheless, some people still wonder how the things we can see and
behave in a deterministic way can possibly be made up of those things we
can't which don't. Many of the physicists felt that this is merely the
'law of averages' at work - the purely stochastic, random behavior of
quantum entities cancels out when they are combined into larger
structures, which display orderly, causal behavior.
In general, the most common response was pragmatic: so what?
So the particles in high energy physics do things we don't expect them
to: this is probably due to the limitations of our thinking, our
language, our technology, or the state of our science, not due to some
fundamental ontological property of the world. If we come up with better
ways of observing the phenomena and describing them, much of the
confusion and 'high strangeness' of the quantum field will be dispelled.
Most of the physicists did not feel questions like the relation of
consciousness to reality were worth discussing, because there was little
evidence available for that point of view (the so-called Copenhagen
Interpretation) or its refutation, so it was a non-scientific concern.
Physicists could read books of Eastern mysticism or anything else in
their 'private' lives to contemplate such questions, but it was not part
of physics-as-such.
The Organization of the Scientific Community
The primary division within Bloomberg is one that appears to be
on the basis of division of labor. Based on pure "lifetime" constraints,
as well as "beamtime," there are two classes of researchers. One theorist
told me that he is "paid to stare and sit at his ceiling," although
basically his real task appears to be working out complex mathematical
formulae on an erasable surface. In contrast, the experimentalists are in
charge of designing the controls, instrumentation, and design for
experiments to look for new particles. I was told that physics has become
so complex that no one individual could do both in an efficient manner.
So, how does Bloomberg break down, and how do these subgroups of
physicists interrelate? It turns out that the building is fairly close to
40% theorists, 60% experimentalists. By and large, each group deals with
its counterparts at other universities or intellectual institutions
moreso than with the other - a theorist probably talks to more theorists
at other colleges than to experimentalists next door. That does not mean
that the two subgroups do not interact - experimentalists could not know
what to look for without drawing from the latest musings in the
theoretical realm, and theorists would be spinning castles in the air if
they didn't keep up with the latest experiments. This form of social
division on the basis of theory and praxis is found in many other fields
- in biology, one can continue into applied medicine or into medical
research, though the division is not as 'hard and fast.'
Another way in which resources and power appear to be divided
within Bloomberg are on the basis of educational background. When I was
going around interviewing physicists on a particular day, one of them
irately told me that I should go ask my questions of "one of the PhD's
around here instead of me." Those who do not have doctorate of philosophy
degrees appear to not have the same authority and prestige as their
colleagues. This is not a novel observation - after all, who needs to be
reminded that getting one's PhD in physics is a long, arduous endeavor,
well worthy of recognition - but it was not immediately clear to me why
someone with only a Master's would not be as equally qualified to answer
my basic sociological inquiries, until it occurred to me that he would
not have spoken 'authoritatively'. Largely, there does seem to be a
belief among those without PhD's in Bloomberg that they are 'second-class
citizens.' One survey respondent who had only a Master's degree was also
the only one to indicate "educational background" as the most important
variable controlling one's social standing within the physics
community.
Contrary to what some ardent Traweekians might think, there
is no hard and fast division between "big" and "small" science in
Bloomberg[33]. Most experimentalists have been involved in both -
going from inexpensive experiments right in the lab that they complete in
a weekend to multimillion dollar SLAC experiments that take months to
produce results. As most said, "It all depends on what I'm working on."
But those who are working on "Big" science must form social networks of
incredible complexity. Many papers in physics now often contain the names
of 100 or more physicists from institutions all over the globe.
Generally, I was told that the 'communications revolution' - particularly
electronic mail and the fax - made such extensive collaborations
possible. But I was curious how conflict between differing agendas could
not possibly interfere - how all those researchers could be "kept on
track." Largely, it appears that part of the process, according to my
contacts, is the formation of 'teams' with team leaders at the various
research institutions. How formal or informal this leadership is varies,
but the main goal of these 'leaders' are to prevent falling behind on
timetables and schedules: these collaborations must be efficient if they
are to make the best possible use of their "beamtime."
One last phenomenon of note was the more invisible sources of
guidance within the lab. The Department Chair and other administrators
are largely in charge of bureaucratic internal affairs and external
relations with the rest of the university, but play little role in the
shaping of day-to-day life within the lab. I was told, however, that
there were what Edward T. Hall might be called "Hidden Pacemakers" within
the lab - certain individuals who set the rhythym and tempo of social
life within the building[34]. Following the procedure of anonymity
heretofore used in this paper, I won't name those individuals. But it
should be pointed out from casual observation that they did indeed
shape, in various informal ways, the mood and pace of other researchers -
when they were sluggish, so were others around them; and when they were
elated the atmosphere, at least on their floor, improved rapidly.
Weberian charisma does play some role in the social organization of the
lab, as much as bureaucratic authority.
The Ideological Aspects of Physics
It became fairly apparent to me that physics itself was freer of
ideology than other areas of research within the sciences. But, besides
normative structures, physics clearly involves, to a moderate extent,
some ideological aspects. Largely, these have to do with epistemological
presuppositions about physics itself. The very conception that the world
is physical in nature is not empirical in itself - Berkeley's "pure mind"
idealism was equally as logically consistent and as difficult to refute
as materialism - but ideality is not one of the guiding assumptions of
the mechanistic paradigm. Similarly, the assumption that the laws of the
universe are eternal, universal, omnipresent, and unchanging (i.e. the
gravitational constant will be the same 5 billion years, in another
galaxy, as it is now) is an ideological derivation from this paradigm.
Because if the laws of nature were not regular and universal, physics
would not be a useful activity - it could not have moved from description
to prediction, I was told, unless physicists believed that the place and
time of the experiment were independent of such matters of 'control' as
temperature and pressure, because that would mean "your" experiment could
never produce the same results as "mine."
The ideology that there are laws of nature lead physicists to
seek to normalize deviations rather than explain them in terms of new
paradigms. Francis Bacon complained that the rigors of experiment were
necessary because 'sloppy', messy nature would not guarantee repeatable
results of itself unless tightly controlled, and nature was inherently
capricious but could be 'tamed' into regularity. Much of the work in
chaos theory represents an unraveling of this determinist ideology, which
is why in popular culture the "ecopagans" have seized upon chaos as the
way to save Nature from science. Some other factors that other
sociologists have noted as being inherent in the ideology of science are:
reductionism, the belief that systems are best understood when
analyzed into their most elementary units; quantitativism, the
belief that the processes of nature are wholly quantifiable and best
described mathematically; gradualism, or the belief that the
process of change are continuous, linear, and uninterrupted (like science
itself!); and racionation, or the belief that only the
measurable and categorizable is meaningul.[35]
Many feminists have commented about the "gendering" of physics
and other sciences. Since women contribued so little to the
institutionalization of science that occurred during the Scientific
Revolution, many feminists have wondered aloud how many of the sciences
would have developed in a non-sexist or non-patriarchal society.
Fox-Keller and others have described the predominance of metaphors of the
visual over the tactile in the history of science. Many feminists feel
that a feminist physics would be more relational than absolute, more
concrete than abstract, more contextual than content-focused, and more
aesthetic than rationalist. Some have even suggested that it might invert
the priority of nature over culture (!) in the nature of scientific
description[36]. Few of the physicists I interviewed attributed
any ideology to science outside of restating the Mertonian norms, and
none really felt that there could be or one might desire a "regendering"
of physics, although they all agreed that it would be desirable on the
grounds of "pure diversity" to have more women in physics.
Relational Aspects of Bloomberg
It would be amiss to ignore the ways in which the activity in
Bloomberg is structured by the university as a whole. The physicists must
still teach their undergraduate classes and graduate seminars. Their work
"reflects on the university as a whole," and they are aware of that:
achievements like the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope are matters of pride
and prestige for the entire university. Further, physics, like all the
other arts and sciences at Hopkins, is shaped by the German research
model which the university was founded on at the turn of the century,
with its emphasis on "research excellence" and "self-directed education":
young physics students are expected to be self-motivated and not be
'wet-nursed' along the way by their teachers, and they must be socialized
into the 'sink or swim' , intellectually competitive world of physics.
(Like many other divisions, physics pays more attention to its graduate
students than undergraduates, and this is a frequent source of
complaint.) And, like any department of the Arts and Sciences, physics is
subject to the fiscal limitations created by the university's endowment
and economic situation, and departmental limitations created by academic
regulations. When the university is in fiscal trouble, the physics
deparment cannot help but be influenced in terms of being able to attract
faculty and maintain its staff. Bloomberg's social environment is in many
ways a microcosm of the "human climate," to borrow a phrase, of the
university as a whole. If cutthroat competitiveness is a feature of
academic life in general, then physics (like pre-medicine) will display
this predisposition doubly.
The two other institutions on campus with which Bloomberg
works closely are the Steven Muller Space Telescope Science Institute and
the Applied Physics Laboratory. The Space Telescope Institute basically
is in charge of monitoring and controlling the data generated by the
Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope. For many of
the space scientists and astrophysicists in Bloomberg, the STSI is an
invaluable source of data and a great place to chat about the latest
arguments in cosmology. Problems with the launch schedule of the Hubble -
an immense funds generator for the university - delayed the expansion of
the physics program which led to the department's relocation to Bloomerg;
and problems with the functioning of the Hubble have been a source of
consternation for the university ever since. Some of the Bloomberg space
physicists work in ongoing collaborations with STSI researchers; many of
the physicists, regardless of their fields, attend the "Open Nights" of
the STSI when it shows its latest amazing findings and pictures of the
cosmos with the community.
Bloomberg also shares data with some of the non-military
research projects - particularly in biophysical problems of biotechnology
- that are in progress at the Applied Physics Lab. The APL would have
been an amazing case study in itself- unfortunately there were various
obstacles to making it part of my ethnographic research- because it
accentuates certain problems that are only marginally apparent in
Bloomberg. I still wonder as to how the physicists at APL are successful
in reconciling their military-related work with possible moral or
philosophical dilemmas; perhaps they feel that values have no place in
science at all, which should be 'value-free', or they feel that the value
of promoting 'national security' outweighs the value of ending the danger
that their research may pose to the future of humanity. Perhaps the APL
researchers have the rationalization that they must "serve two masters":
if they do work for the Navy, they may also be able to get government
money to work on other civilian applied research such as biotechnology
and nautical engineering. Perhaps the APL physicists have found ways of
'patting the Bomb': after all, they claim, they "don't build anything
that goes boom," but just design the technologies which make sure the
things that do go boom get to their targets with greater speed and
accuracy. Much of APL's work has been criticized based on their
controversial research into potential "first-strike" guidance systems or
the so-called "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative which some people
felt made initiation of nuclear war more feasible and conceivable. APL is
just an exemplary case in the ways in which military research and
development priorities have begun to receive key attention on university
campuses nationwide - all part of the Bush Administration's initiative to
more closely link campuses with the Department of Defense's technological
'wish list.'
Most importantly, in many ways, APL represents a curious mirror
image to the high energy physics in Bloomberg. What lay within the
nucleus of the atom was a force which has helped to transform global
power relations perhaps for all time. Atomic weapons gave the two
superpowers (and some other nation-states desperate to catch up) an
incredible grip over the globe and "the Atomic Age" was one in which
faith in the power of science to transform the quality of life
irrevocably was confirmed, especially in the eyes of underdeveloped
nations. The pessimism created by technological threats to the
environment and the failures of nuclear power have yet to undo the
self-congratulation invoked by proponents of the use of "the peaceful
atom." Yet within the atom was also another world, the quantum world, one
in which at least some have seen hints of an ethic of interconnectedness
and interpenetration. As APL turns out its weapons guidance systems to
strengthen the power of the West over the rest of the globe, Bloomberg is
undermining some of the very fundamental cosmological and teleological
notions that undergird that "West," which is today more of a symbolic
than geographic construct. As APL creates the devices that extends our
control over the world, the high energy physicists are starting to
discover how slippery, emphemeral, and uncontrolled the world really is.
As APL helps to reinforce the technological advantage of the West and
bring other nations into its commercial and cultural orbit, Bloomberg
potentially reveals the possiblity of the equal validity of multiple
cultural perspectives on the world, because consciousness may well create
their realities . Like any mirror image, Bloomberg subverts its
own twin in subtle ways.
PART IV: 'PSYCHOLOGICAL' ASPECTS OF PHYSICS
Physics and the Mertonian Norms
But the question remains: while all the physicists at one point
or another expressed verbal affirmation of one or more of the Mertonian
norms, did they really obey them? While the physicists insisted that
physics was a universal discipline, one could not help but note how that
belief belied the facts: why is it, then, that there are so few
physicists per capita in non-Western nations, and in the Western nations,
why it was that the only non-underrepresented ethnicities were Jewish and
Asian? Where were the black and women physicists, the Zairean and
Uruguayan physicists? No one, especially me, believed that there any
putative 'racial' differences that prevented such people from mastering
physics. The general obstacles invoked by the physicists were
sociological: undereducation, class position, underdevelopment of
nations, etc. But they were not willing to consider the possibility that:
1) there might be various informal mechanisms within physics itself
that discouraged their participation (the high dropout rate of minority
or women physicists suggests a hostile climate) or 2) there might be
cultural differences in their worldview which were not conducive to the
model of physical investigation devised in the West in and for its own
context. While physics is supposed to transcend the boundaries of
nations, many of the physicists still expressed feelings such as anger
(or envy) at Japan for 'stealing' and capitalizing on the work done by
physicists here in the U.S., or saw no problem in doing physics for the
"national interest," such as working on national defense or reinforcing
the national ideology.
The norm of communalism of intellectual property, consonant
with the first, appears to be very significant in the physicists' ethos.
The main reason why many of them expressed disapproval over others
working on projects for national defense was that such projects were
often Top Secret - meaning that their findings could not be shared and
reviewed by other researchers in the civilian sector. "Those guys over at
APL" were seen as "not being real physicists" because everything they did
for the government was not shared with other scientists. Nonetheless,
this norm is not completely applicable either. Many of the physicists had
'pet' projects that they worked on on their own without telling anybody
else - which, of course, did not mean of itself that they wished to
withhold what they discovered, but in at least one case a physicist
expressed a desire to patent this process. This norm in science has been
unraveling in many areas - witness the conflict over the patenting of
human genome sequences and new AIDS drugs - and it also appears to be
doing so to a lesser degree in physics, whose discoveries may not be as
commercially or rapidly marketable.
The norm of disinterestedness plays an important regulative
function, but few physicists really "bought" it in its entirety.
Theoretically, a scientist was to try and be as free as possible of
subjective biases as possible, as this might lead him to force facts into
fitting theories: an open, inductivist mind which drew conclusions from
facts was more desirable. But most of the Bloomberg physicists agreed
that they came into an experiment with many expectations, perceptions,
and preconceptions established: you couldn't do the experiment unless you
at least had an inkling of what to look for, they said. If you didn't
have a guiding paradigm, there was no way to interpret your results: a
narrative has to emerge from the 'raw' data somehow. Every physicist
seemed to think that it was highly unlikely that any researcher had no
enthusiasm or passion for their work: imagination, forethought, and
creativity were said to be important elements in physics - perhaps even
more important than being able to follow a mechanical routine/procedure
methodically and precisely. A sense of humor was as important as
detachment and focus.
There was a definite resolute commitment on the part of the
physicists to organized skepticism. Nothing was to be accepted which
could not be rigorously proven, and nothing was to be taken on anyone's
word which could not be demonstrated in experience. The need for this
norm was based on a belief on the potential culpability and vulnerabilty
of physicists to violating the norm of disinterestedness and therefore
'cheating' in ways which transgressed against the scientific method by
inserting their own biases. Whole fields of science - parapsychology,
etc. - have been anathematized for being fundamentally unable to practice
organized scepticism. But as important as the "critical method," it was
clear that there were other parts of the story - the reverence for the
Great Men of physics such as Feynman, the authoritativeness of certain
texts, and the judgement of lack of inherent belieavability against
certain researchers - which were as important as empirical demonstration
in the practice of criticism.
One physicist put it succinctly: "physicists are as human as
anybody else and just as subject to human failings." Individual
physicists, as human beings, cannot help but feel particularist
attachments, egoity or selfishness toward achievements and honors,
subjective biases, and suspension of their critical or skeptical faculty
in certain areas. The norm structure of physics as a professional
discipline is supposed to counteract these human failings. Particularism
is to be worn down at international conferences; selfishness is to be
eliminated by working in large collaborative teams; subjectivity
countered by the processes of result publication; and lack of criticality
by the use of outside groups (who do not know the researcher personally)
to perform peer review and experimental reduplication. Nonetheless, even
within its structure, there is both explicit and implicit norm violation.
Physicists complain about the more clear norm violations - plagiarism,
'fudging' of results, fraud, self-deception, etc. But little is done
about those that are more difficult to 'pin down' - favoritism, nepotism,
'old boy' networks, cliquishness, careerism, and elitism. Physics wants
to profess certain norms that make it a unique enterprise, just as any
professionalized discipline attempts to do, and make inculcation of those
norms a part of accreditation. Whether it can ever live up to these norms
completely is an entirely separate question. It might be argued that,
since no one can ever be free of culture unless they are born in the wild
without language, positing a norm of transculturality is unrealistic. Of
course, some might dismiss such an idea as unnecessarily pessimistic or
relativistic: can we not discover universal truths such as human rights
that are applicable to all humans? I would suggest the answer may not be
as easy as most people think.
Math and Magic, the Rational and the Irrational
In describing physics as a rational activity, we must realize
that this definition only becomes meaningful through what Levi-Strauss
would call negation. Rational activities can only be defined as such in
opposition to "the irrational" - the fact that there is madness and
irrationality makes rationality possible; it could not be describable
otherwise. Foucault suggests that part of the episteme of the Age of
Reason was the banishment and rationalization of madness, which had to be
consigned to the asylum[37]; in previous ages, madmen or "holy
fools" were believed to have a deeper connection to the hidden,
subterranean aspects of reality - they were "touched," presumably by the
hand of the Divine. This notion had been inverted by Freud, who in his
psychology of mysticism presumed that the shaman of primitive tribes was
really suffering from psychosis, and that people allowed him to indulge
in his hocus-pocus out of pity for his condition. Before the Age of
Reason, what was outside of reason was not necessarily inferior to
reason: some cultures would accept the validity of knowledge attained
through what we might today call revelation, intuition, "faith", or even
madness. Logic leads to contradictions, said Aquinas, which only things
beyond logic can resolve. That does not mean that the only pre-scientific
forms of knowledge were "religious," in the sense of passivity to some
external source of enlightenment. Some might be charitably called
"right-brain" approaches to knowledge as opposed to "left-brain." But the
opening move in the gambit of the Age of Reason was to constitute and
banish the irrational. What came before our age were the daydreams of the
childhood of humanity, said the encyclopedists of the Enlightenment; with
reason it will attain to its adulthood.
The other revolutions of the 20th century have undone this
gambit. The mind turned upon itself discovered the unconscious; language
turned upon itself discovered the ambiguities of meaning in literature
and other discourse; and reason discovered that rationality might be
multiple. There could be other kinds of reason in other cultures since
these might in turn have different rationales . Cognition in
practice might be more 'irrational' in day-to-day life than we realize
from an abstract perspective, while some seemingly 'irrational' behaviors
might have their own rationality. Economists talk about "rational
self-interest" while geneticists suggest from another point of view that
"rationality" from the gene's point of view might involve altruism, at
least to kin. At its own irrational extreme, rationality may become
rationalization - such as the fox who comes up with a reasonable
explanation for not wanting the grapes to persuade himself this is the
case, even though he really does want them.
Still, we have not left the Age of Reason, where the judgement
of something as 'irrational' is a value judgement: whether one is using
it to describe terrorism or religion, the implicit judgement is that the
phenomenon is dangerous and destructive. Most rationalists point to the
Nazi regime as an example of what happens when irrationality takes over a
society; yet the Nazi corporate state was the inheritor of the supreme
rationality of the German mind. Nazi eugenecists compiled geneaologies of
great complexity; Nazi doctors performed experiments which were for
'rational' purposes (can you transplant skin? This is a worthwhile
question, after all) even though they were extraordinarily inhumane; Nazi
bureaucrats made sure the trains to the concentration camps ran on time
and the genocide campaign ran promptly on schedule; Nazi science, while
very ideological, did produce the V2 and provided the basis for future
rocket science. The Nazi state was supremely efficient, coordinated, and
organized - the perfect rational state - but its rationality was a tool
to an end which could be called irrational, though I prefer to call it
inhuman, since rationality can serve inhuman ends. The point is,
rationality depends on frame of reference . The arms race is perfectly
rational from one perspective: we must develop weapon X before the other
side does to prevent them from using it; yet clearly from another it is
irrational, since it leads to a never-ending escalation and an
ever-increasing threat.
This digression is not accidental. Sal P. Restivo[38]
writes that the two are deeply connected. In Pythagoreanism, the
precursor of many forms of mysticism as well as modern science, there is
a sense of the mystical priority of number and the essential numericality
of the cosmos. To me, the presence of the 'irrational' in the most
rational of sciences is not unexpected. One physicist kept a journal
entitled "Eschatology," in which he used Dyson's calculations to work out
the fate of conscious life in the universe. I was not surprised to
discover what one might call deep 'religious' or 'mystical' impulses
behind physics, nor the way in which physics so easily appropriated the
language of Eastern philosophy and mysticism: the Tao of physics, the
Dance of Shiva. Yet most of the physicists wanted to avoid, even
exorcise, the irrational. A scientist's interest in mysticism was often
taken to mean that he just couldn't "cut it" in dealing with the material
world, or was a bit dotty and not to be trusted. An interest in
'irrational' phenomena such as UFOs, parapsychology, or the so-called
'paranormal' was met with extreme irate rejection: such things were for
feeble or deranged minds.
Yet physics has begun to enter domains where reason is sorely
challenged. Can there be anything before the beginning of the universe?
Can time itself have an origin? What lies "beyond" the boundary of the
universe? Are there other forms of life in the universe? Ones that are
conscious like us? (One physicist told me 'exobiology' - the study of
extraterrestrials - would be the 'next anthropology.') Are all the forces
we study aspects of one unbroken 'superforce'? Many physicists are
looking for Theories of Everything (TOEs) and Grand Unified Theories
(GUTs) that will unite all of physics under one mathematical formulation.
The impulse behind many of these questions is more than reason, as many
of the physicists admitted themselves. As physics enters the
counter-rational world within the atom, where causality becomes
meaningless and actuality becomes potentiality, the trajectory of the
irrational once again enters the Age of Reason. We have found the most
fundamental units of being, and they are not there.
PART V: CONCLUSIONS
If there was a point to this whole project, it was to place
physics in context. The physicists wanted to see physics as context-free,
as self-driven by its own 'hermetically sealed' goals, as autonomous from
culture. But my investigation revealed to me that this is not true at any
level. The enterprise of physics at Bloomberg is directed by various
external social forces, ranging from shifts in global markets to
government policy to changes in popular culture. It is also directed by
the social life of Bloomberg itself, which is shaped both by larger
social forces and internal dynamics. The very nature of the insitution
itself, in spatial, temporal, and semiotic terms, expresses cultural and
ideological values. And the activity of Bloomberg is patterned by the
belief systems of its residents, who are both norm-obedient and
norm-violating; those belief systems are a combination of what one might
call the Enlightenment episteme and , in looser terms, 'modernity', with
other idiosyncratic elements, the 'irrational' flotsam of culture.
If there was something I set out to prove, it was the validity of
the social formation of knowledge. Nature does not speak personally to
these physicists and offer her wares. They talk to their colleagues and
to people outside their scientific community. Before they arrive at
theories, they have pre-existing expectations, socializations, cultural
'imprints', worldviews, opinions, paradigm choices. I prefer to say that
the physicists are uncovering "consensus reality" rather than "objective
reality." What they are looking for determines what they find .
What 'canonizes' one physical model over another is agreement, whether
attained through logical argument, gentle persuasion, or brute political
force: and to see changes in the paradigms of physics one cannot ignore
the utilization of all three techniques, nor the importance of
sociolcultural factors behind (and resulting from) new paradigm
choices.
As Foucault points out, knowledge and power are inextricably
connected. Knowledge may provide power, but more importantly, much of the
sociology of knowledge has ignored the question of how what types of
knowledge exist and are expressed also determine who is in power in a
society. The narrative of knowledge, as any narrative, contains various
silences: the question of power arises in that we must ask who decides
where it is silent. So we must ask: where is physics silent? It refuses
to admit that it determines and is determined by society. So we must ask:
in whose interest is it to make this denial? The inauguration of
modernity was brought about, as I suggested, by people who wanted to
derive their authority from reason rather than tradition. Hence they
sought their legitimation from experience and science rather than
hermeneutics and religion. Their goal was to 'rationalize' the world:
whether it meant to 'more scientifically manage' labor production or
'more efficiently' extract resources from Nature. This process, which
Weber calls the 'de-enchantment' of the world, had multiple effects,
including the creation of a sense of rootlessness and alienation as part
and parcel of modernity, is a result of the growth in the west of the
Protestant Ethic, from which the scientific, capitalist, and industrial
revolutions sprang.
There is a current of thought which suggests that the problems
of modernity - environmental, social, etc. - can be solved by science-
more 'efficiency' in use of resources and the planning of growth. The
world needs to be more rationalized, not less. But beginning with
Nietzsche and culminating in Deep Ecology, there are rumblings of a
countervalue, which says that we may not be able to solve the problems of
modernity within the framework of modernity itself. Science may be part
of the problem, not the solution, due to its presence at the nexus of
modernity itself. Modern physics, in an ironic way, has begun to undo
itself, by negating the classical, deterministic, and absolute principles
of the mechanistic paradigm which gave birth to it. In a dialectical
sense, physics may contain within itself contradictions which will give
birth to a new historical formation of cognition. I cannot predict what
that formation will be, but I believe that glimpses of it can be found in
the 'holographic paradigm' which is in vogue in the neural sciences: that
the universe is a hologram and what we see depends on where we look at it
from. Its counterpart in the social sciences is the constructivist theory
of knowledge: we construct reality, we do not discover it. The new social
formations that will result from such a paradigm change will be as bold
and striking as the collapse of institutions that occurred in the wake of
Colombus and Copernicus.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Collins, Harry M. The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. The
Mendip Press, Bath, Avon, 1982.
- Jevons, F. R. Science Observed: Science as a social and
intellectual activity. Crane, Russak & Company, New York, 1973.
- Moyer, Albert E. The History of Modern Physics 1800-1950.
Tomash Publishers, San Francisco, 1983.
- Roche, John. Physicists Look Back. Adam Hilger, New York,
1990.
- Gilbert, G. Nigel, and Mulkay, Michael. Opening Pandora's Box: A
sociological analysis of scientists' discourse. Cambridge University
Press, Sydney, 1984.
- Blissett, Marlan. Politics in Science. Little, Brown, and Co.,
Boston, 1972.
- Barnes, Barry. Scientific knowledge and sociological theory.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston, 1974.
- Traweek, Sharon. Beamtimes and Lifetimes. Harvard University
Press, London, 1988.
- Feyerabend, Paul. Science in a Free Society, Lowe & Brydone,
Ltd., Thetford, 1978.
- Eds., Restivo, Sal P. and Vanderpool, Christopher K. Comparative
Studies in Science and Society. Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co.,
Colombus, 1974.
FOOTNOTES
- Collins, Harry M. Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. p.
2
- See particularly Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology, and
Society in 17th Century England.
- Merton's basis was in Max Weber's work The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism.
- Much of this analysis comes from Iain Cameron and David Edge,
Scientific Images and their Social Uses. , p. 15-18.
- Their arguments can be found in Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, and in Paul Feyerabend's Science in
a Free Society.
- John Roche, Physicists Look Back. p. 78-80
- See in this regard Monod, Chance and Necessity
- See Bacon's chief work The Novum Organum. Many
environmentalists have seen connections between the sinfulness of nature
in Protestantism and Bacon's call for its effective 'conquest'.
- See David Apter's article, "The Role of the Scientific Elite and
Scientific Ideology in Modernization," in Restivo and Vanderpool, Eds.,
Comparative Studies in Science and Society, p. 398-408
- Sal. P. Restivo, "The Ideology of Basic Science", in Ibid., p.334-352
- Taken from Albert E. Moyer, A History of Modern Physics,
p. 47-62
- Lysenkoism used the same arguments to dismiss genes as 'ideal',
abstract entities: see in this vein David Joravsky's The Lysenko
Affair.
- See Michael Talbot, Beyond the Quantum, p. 108-117
- Some physicists, like Jack Sarfatti, John Wheeler, and Fritjof Capra,
have assumed this position. Others, like Fred Alan Wolf and Stephen
Hawking lean toward the Many-Worlds theory. Most physicists are not in
either camp.
- This is stated in Karl Popper's Logic of Scientific
Discovery quite explicitly.
- Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks, p. 6-8. He also
says that "physicists know as much about the physical method as fish know
about hydrodynamics."
- Festinger explored this phenomenon among flying-saucer cults. See his
book, When Prophecy Fails , p. 223
- See Restivo and Vanderpool, p. 25-31
- See Edward L. Cochran and Carl O. Bostrom, APL: The First Forty
Years. This is an "insider's" history and does not discuss more
controversial aspects of the lab.
- Cameron and Edge, p.3. This also comes out in Foucault's theory of
discourse, particularly as it appears in his Archaeology of the
Sciences.
- Gilbert and Mulkay's Opening Pandora's Box is
particularly illuminative in this regard, especially p. 6-9
- See Barry Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological
Theory, p. 35-38
- This is discussed in F.R. Jevon's Science Observed.,
particularly p. 97-105
- In their book they have a whole long elaborate chapter on jokes in
science. The fact that this chapter appears itself to be a joke (either
on the publisher or us) is all part of the quirky self-consciousness of
the book.
- See Edward Degler, In Search of Human Nature, and also
Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man.
- Marlan Blissett, Politics in Science, p. 43
- The seminal work in this area is James Gleick's book
Chaos.
- This is noted in The Disarmer's Handbook by Andrew
Wilson, p. 20-23
- Jevons, p. 107.
- It is also the basis for Pickering's work, Constructing
Quarks.
- As discussed in Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life.
- Including Robert Anton Wlson in his great book Cosmic
Trigger. This book may eliminate several consensus realities and
tends to be habit-forming.
- The reference is to, of course, Sharon Traweek's Beamtimes and
Lifetimes.
- The concept of hidden pacemakers is elaborated in Edward T. Hall's
book The Hidden Dimension.
- Moyer, p. 40-46
- French Lacanian feminism has often taken this step.
- See Foucault's essay on madness in Power/Knowledge., p.
61
- See Restivo, The Social Relations of Mathematics and
Mysticism, p. 2-4
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