03 Nov 2018 01:30 PM - 03:45 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T133020181103T1545America/VancouverUsable Pasts: Historical Memory in Modern Science
Historical memory has served as an important analytical category in social and political history. In contests over the meaning and memorialization of war, genocide, revolution, and national identity, rival groups have often constructed versions of history to advance competing agendas. Collective stories about the past are an essential part of modern politics. What role have they played in modern science? This panel asks whether and how historical memory might be a useful concept for the history of science. Why have some narratives and interpretations become lodged in the collective consciousness of science, but not others? How has context interacted with and shaped the ways that scientific biographies, events, and fields have been remembered by scientists—and by historians of science? How has memory been cultivated and maintained over time? What are the political and moral dimensions of the social memory of modern science?
The panel’s four papers explore these questions in different fields, moments, and national contexts. They demonstrate some of the diverse ends to which evidence and narrative have been mobilized: tarnishing unsavory views about postwar German nuclear armament with the stain of National Socialism; soothing anxiety over physicists’ participation in the Cold War nuclear competition; fashioning an (allegedly) anti-racist politics from the “fact” of a common African ancestry; and flattening the disciplinary history of the history of science itself. The papers suggest that in the history of science, too, we should bear in mind the medieval scholar Patrick Geary’s suggestion that collective memory is always “memory for something.”
Co-organized by Ryan Dahn (University of Chicago) and Benjamin Wilson (Harvard University)
...Ravenna C, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
Historical memory has served as an important analytical category in social and political history. In contests over the meaning and memorialization of war, genocide, revolution, and national identity, rival groups have often constructed versions of history to advance competing agendas. Collective stories about the past are an essential part of modern politics. What role have they played in modern science? This panel asks whether and how historical memory might be a useful concept for the history of science. Why have some narratives and interpretations become lodged in the collective consciousness of science, but not others? How has context interacted with and shaped the ways that scientific biographies, events, and fields have been remembered by scientists—and by historians of science? How has memory been cultivated and maintained over time? What are the political and moral dimensions of the social memory of modern science?
The panel’s four papers explore these questions in different fields, moments, and national contexts. They demonstrate some of the diverse ends to which evidence and narrative have been mobilized: tarnishing unsavory views about postwar German nuclear armament with the stain of National Socialism; soothing anxiety over physicists’ participation in the Cold War nuclear competition; fashioning an (allegedly) anti-racist politics from the “fact” of a common African ancestry; and flattening the disciplinary history of the history of science itself. The papers suggest that in the history of science, too, we should bear in mind the medieval scholar Patrick Geary’s suggestion that collective memory is always “memory for something.”
Co-organized by Ryan Dahn (University of Chicago) and Benjamin Wilson (Harvard University)
Norton Wise (Commentator)
The History of Science and the Many Worlds of Nikolai VavilovView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography01:30 PM - 02:03 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 20:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC
The Second International Congress of the History of Science, held in London in 1931, is chiefly remembered for the surprise appearance of the Soviet delegation and the lasting imprint that Boris Hessen’s Marxist reading of Newton’s Principia has left on the history of social constructivist thought in science studies and the history of science. This paper will revisit the story of the Congress, taking the history of this event out of the disciplinary historiography of the history of science and considering the preoccupations of its participants with the unity of knowledge articulated by international scholars in Europe, the US, and post-revolutionary Russia, driven by a spectrum of political and epistemic commitments. The paper will focus, in particular, on the least noticed member of the Soviet delegation, Nikolai Vavilov, whose work, in the view of the Congress’ participants, has bridged the gaping divides between written history and that of the unscripted era, between human history and geohistory, and between the historians and the scientists. Paradoxically, the collective memories of the Congress as the turning point in historiography of science, as well as those of Nikolai Vavilov as a martyr of genetics and the founder of biodiversity research, have reproduced the very disciplinary divisions that many Congress’s organizers and participants sought to dissolve.
Elena Aronova University Of California, Santa Barbara
Pascual Jordan, the Cold War, and Remembrance of Nazi PastsView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography02:03 PM - 02:36 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC
Few topics in history of science have attracted as much scholarship as the birth of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Yet despite the near-obsession with all things quantum, one of the major architects of this famous theory is largely forgotten: the brilliant German mathematical physicist Pascual Jordan (1902–1980), who in collaboration with Werner Heisenberg and Max Born, outlined the fundamentals of quantum theory. The reason Jordan is rarely remembered today is commonly attributed to his Nazi-era writings that praised Hitler’s regime; an unrepentant fascist hardly fits into the usual heroic narrative of scientific triumph.
This paper delves into the question of Jordan’s remembrance, and argues that Jordan has gone down in historical memory as a villain not, as has been thought, exclusively because of his pro-Nazi statements during the Third Reich, but in large part due to his decision to reenter politics in the late 1950s. It was only then that Jordan viciously attacked colleagues in physics who spoke out against possible West German nuclear armament, deriding them as naïve fools. Stridently supporting Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union, Jordan was elected to the West German parliament. Yet his colleagues responded by unearthing and disseminating Jordan’s writings from the Nazi period, exposing them to a new postwar audience. Without relativizing Jordan’s decisions and writings during the Third Reich, I demonstrate that actions taken long after Hitler’s death have often dictated who is collectively remembered as an “unapologetic Nazi.”
We Have Never Been AfricanView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography02:36 PM - 03:09 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC
This paper argues that the out of Africa hypothesis is an expression of Euro-American cultural beliefs that are, paradoxically, anti-social. These commitments can be traced back to the influence of Christian scholasticism on early modern naturalist thinking, where reverence for order and God's impersonal design took precedent over our obligation toward the lives of created things.
Revisiting Darwin’s defense of monogenism, the UNESCO Statements on Race, and the emergence of the Out of Africa hypothesis in population genetics I show how these scientific claims are not oriented toward the social other or inculcating an ethical obligation to living things. Instead, “We are all African” celebrates the ability of science to render the human a natural object anchored to a stable (which is to say "asocial") biological order.
“Black Lives Matter” and “We are all African” are therefore not commensurable truth claims. The latter is a type of knowing believed to occupy space outside the influence of religion, belief, historical precedent, and political commitments. The former is shaped by political, social obligations secondary to the more important task of locating black life within the larger biological system that governs the species homo.
Terence Keel University Of California, Los Angeles
Hans Bethe, Nuclear ModelView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHistoriography03:09 PM - 03:42 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:42:00 UTC
In a version of history told by Hans Bethe, scientists in the nuclear age had a dual obligation to serve the state and to inform the public about government policy, especially when policy had become unwise or dangerous. Bethe himself seemed to model these principles. A leader on the Manhattan Project, he had supported the international control of atomic energy and a nuclear test ban in the postwar years. This paper revisits historical memory of the social responsibility of science, using Bethe’s Cold War engagement with the issue of ballistic missile defense as a study of the mismatch between memory and reality. In the late 1960s, Bethe solidified his reputation as an outspoken insider critic when he published a detailed critique (with fellow physicist Richard Garwin) of the proposed U.S. Anti-Ballistic Missile system. What historians have never discussed, however, is the fact that while Bethe counseled nuclear restraint on prominent advisory positions and in public, he quietly worked as a highly paid consultant to industrial contractors designing and developing the system (as well as on countermeasures to overcome missile defense). Bethe pursued incongruous private and public roles that seemed to present, for him, no apparent contradiction. The paper explores the relationship and tensions between Bethe’s classified work and the maintenance of his public image.
