22 - Comments on Accelerators, Detectors, and Laboratories

Summary

The most striking thing about the papers presented in this session is that, aside from Sharon Traweek, the speakers have tended to gloss over or to ignore completely the presence of controversy and conflict in the treatment of their topics.

Of course, it is always dangerous for an historian to draw attention to this dimension of the way scientists present the past. We lay ourselves open to two kinds of charges. First, that we are simply interested in muckraking, in giving physicists a bad press, in seeking to wash dirty linen in public so as to create a sensation and to boost our own visibility. Second, while physicists admit that they do sometimes disagree, they also insist that the community rapidly converges on a shared understanding of events. Historians who stress controversy are simply exaggerating, blowing up out of proportion what are simply normal, unimportant differences of opinion between rational human beings.

For my part let me say at once that yes, we do perhaps have a tendency to concentrate on controversy. Writing history would be pretty boring otherwise! On the other hand, this is done not to titillate, but with far more important aims in mind. Indeed it amounts to a very different way of dealing with the past than that conventionally favored by scientists themselves.

Put crudely, scientists reflecting on their own history tend to start from the present and to cast their eyes back over the past, identifying highlights and allocating credit.