Science policy is rarely considered part of the core of the science system, but is seen as peripheral, providing a framework for establishing priorities and allocating research funds, setting up institutional structures within which research programs can proceed with a continuous, predictable level of funding, and providing incentives for the wider transfer of knowledge and for the utilization of research results – usually for the benefit of the national economy. The various models of science policy are closely related to the profiles of national institutions and to the specific instruments of policy-making available to obtain their objectives.

Many observers agree that science policy in the highly industrialized countries has moved through distinct phases or “eras” since the end of World War II. These phases differ in the underlying patterns of scientific and technological change, in the issues on research agendas, in the preferred instruments for decision-making, in the modes of funding, and in the modes of research. It is also said that, in the use and regulation of science as a source of strategic opportunities, science policy is undergoing a process of internationalization, in that international cooperation is being promoted (Ruivo, 1994).

Other science policy analysts diagnose an increasing “denationalization of science”, evidenced by growth of trans-national research cooperation, even in less cost-intensive areas, the shift from public to private funding, and the regionalization of research (Crawford et al.91992). But international cooperation on one level does not necessarily preclude competition on another. The globalization of the economy, the wider geographical distribution of the sources of scientific and technological knowledge, and growing interdependenciesmake it clear that the configurations of cooperation and competition are not fixed, but fluid.

Many observers agree that science is currently passing through a period of dramatic transformation. At the end of his lucid analysis of science in a dynamic steady state, John Ziman concludes that there is no way back to the traditional habits of managing research, but there is also no obvious path forward to a cultural plateau of comparable stability.

We believe that the emergence of HTS sheds light on what these forces are and how they interact. In the beginning of this book, we compared the effects of the discovery of HTS on the research system to a building tested by being subjected to a transient load which reveals otherwise hidden strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, HTS can be seen as a case that shows how complex and fluid the present situation has become. Researchers can no longer expect to find an environment hospitable to their work, but are compelled to create one. We have seen that it takes extraordinary effort, time, and energy to set up the conditions under which research programs can run for a predictable period. Such efforts are no longer external to, but have become an integral feature of scientists' work. Nor are they limited to the small research group institutionally at home at the university.

The situation is also extremely fluid on the level of policy-making.

One of the most striking features of the establishment of HTS as a research field is that – at least in the crucial first phase – negotiations expanded beyond the narrow realm of policy expertise into the public arena. The exceptional breakthrough was greeted by the media with great enthusiasm and was judged as newsworthy for a considerable time. Though not actively participating, the public came to play an important role as enthusiastic supporters or critical observers of the field's evolution and as allies in developing an extensive rhetoric about the significance of the field's potential technological applications.

A trend toward increasing the degree of public staging of science and technology issues has become more and more visible in the course of the second half of the 20th century. Dorothy Nelkin argues that this is closely linked to the fact that the societies we live in are increasingly shaped by science and technology. Members of these societies are thus:

Indeed, press reports described the intense excitement gripping scientists and science policy-makers alike in these first months following the breakthrough in HTS, and they elaborated spectacular scenarios of future applications. The media eagerly seized on the notion of competition for technological and commercial advantage, playing up the potentially crucial role of the new materials in the development of an as yet unimaginable technology.

Discovered in 1911 at temperatures near absolute zero, superconductivity is the loss of resistance to electrical current some materials display when cooled below a “critical temperature”. The phenomenon was confined to scientific laboratories until the late 1950s, when first technological applications became feasible. It also took nearly half a century before a theoretical explanation of the phenomena – the BCS theory – was formulated. In the following two decades, numerous researchers contributed to the field, but no materials were found with critical temperatures higher than 23 Kelvin (–250° Celsius). By the mid 1980s, the scientific community had reached the consensus that superconductivity was a closed field, and that the dream of room-temperature superconductors should be abandoned.

But the year 1986 changed this situation dramatically. Two researchers at the International Business Machines (IBM) lab near Zurich, Switzerland, discovered a new class of materials among the ceramic oxides that display superconductivity at temperatures far higher than previously observed.

High-temperature superconductivity was born.

A surprising discovery and its consequences

Like a minor earthquake, the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in late 1986 sent a shock wave through the research systems of the industrialized countries, exciting scientists, policy-makers, and the lay public alike. We followed the course of the discovery, intrigued to observe and analyze what the tremor revealed: which structures of the system of science and research proved robust and resistant, and what gave way, crumbling under the unexpected shake-up?

But above all, we wanted to investigate what researchers, science policymakers, industry, the media – and through them the general public – would make of the event.

The discovery of materials that become superconducting at temperatures higher than previously observed or thought possible opened up a new research field. This chapter examines the individual, scientific, and institutional background of the discovery by Georg Müller and Alex Bednorz at IBM's Rüschlikon Laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland. The first section places the discovery in the context of the evolution, organization, and salient characteristics of the multidisciplinary field of materials science. Section 2.2 examines the industrial connection in an earlier period of technological optimism. We compare current hopes and efforts connected with the technological potential of HTS with the bright outlook for conventional or low-temperature superconductivity (LTS) in the 1960s and early 1970s. Few LTS applications materialized and only one proved commercially viable. What were the main reasons for the decline of the LTS field?

The third section presents a brief historical account of the study of conventional superconductivity and analyzes some of the factors that contributed to the new discovery, which was unexpected in terms of the discoverers themselves, the site, and the conventional wisdom refuted. Section 2.4 deals with the scientific community's reactions to the Zurich discovery. This highly unusual and intense period engendered some unconventional behavior in participants. Scientific excitement was flanked by passionate accounts in the media, which fueled public expectations about the technological and commercial significance of the breakthrough. Finally we describe the inevitable cooling-down phase that prepared the way for the establishment of national research programs.

Materials science as a research field

Individual scientists dominate the story of the discovery of HTS, but the initial event took place in the scientific and technological context of the field of materials science.

The emergence of HTS as a research field is an example of how positing a situation can make it real. Discourse and beliefs, rhetoric and persuasion, and a vision of a bright technological future – hardly supported by reliable facts at the time – acted as a catalyst. As the concept of “windows of opportunities” suggests, when new technologies appear on the market, new opportunities suddenly seem to exist, but the period in which they can be realized and exploited is brief (Perez, 1983; 1989). In the end, unsurprisingly, there are winners and losers. But while institutions maintained their structural grip and while path dependence and varying degrees of preparedness had their effects, for a short, compressed time, scientists' vision and rhetoric, policy constructs and persuasion succeeded in collusively reshuffling some of the more inert parts of the science system, before they resettled into the familiar pattern of institutional stability.

The emergence of a new research field underscores that the science system is not set once and for all; knowledge of its history is thus an essential prerequisite for understanding it: “The passage of time, and changes it brings in the factors and phenomena that interest us, are our single best resource” (MacKenzie, 1990: 7). The study of a process of change is hardly in danger of mistaking a moment for an eternal condition. But it is difficult to distinguish a unique event from more enduring developments that permit generalization. The participants we interviewed, the institutions we visited, the situations and choices reported to us, and above all the state of scientific and technological knowledge continue to change.

Now I shall try to give you an idea of the way in which physicists at present endeavour to overcome this failure. One might term it an ‘emergency exit’, though it was not intended as such, but as a new theory. I mean, of course, wave mechanics. (Edding-ton called it ‘not a physical theory but a dodge— and a very good dodge too’.)

The situation is about as follows. The observed facts (about particles and light and all sorts of radiation and their mutual interaction) appear to be repugnant to the classical ideal of a continuous description in space and time. (Let me explain myself to the physicist by hinting at one example: Bohr's famous theory of spectral lines in 1913 had to assume that the atom makes a sudden transition from one state into another state, and that in doing so it emits a train of light waves several feet long, containing hundreds of thousands of waves and requiring for its formation a considerable time. No information about the atom during this transition can be offered.)

So the facts of observation are irreconcilable with a continuous description in space and time; it just seems impossible, at least in many cases. On the other hand, from an incomplete description—from a picture with gaps in space and time—one cannot draw clear and unambiguous conclusions; it leads to hazy, arbitrary, unclear thinking—and that is the thing we must avoid at all costs! What is to be done?

On p. 12 I briefly touched upon that old crux, the apparent contradiction between the deterministic view about material events and what is called in Latin liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, in modern language free will. I suppose you all know what I mean: since my mental life is obviously bound up very closely with the physiological goings on in my body, more especially in my brain, then, if the latter are strictly and uniquely determined by physical and chemical natural laws, what about my inalienable feeling that I take decisions to act in this or that way, what about my feeling responsibility for the decision I actually do take? Is not everything I do mechanically determined in advance by the material state of affairs in my brain, including modifications caused by external bodies, and is not my feeling of liberty and responsibility deceptive?

This does strike us as a true aporia, which occurred for the first time to Democritus, who realised it fully —but left it alone; very wisely, I think. He fully realised it. While he adhered to his ‘atoms and the void’ as the only reasonable way of understanding objective nature, we have some definite utterances of his preserved, to the effect that he also realised that this whole picture of the atoms and the void was formed by the human mind on the evidence of sense perceptions, and nothing else; and other utterances where he states, almost in the words of Kant, that we know nothing about what any thing really is in itself, the ultimate truth remaining deeply in the dark.

The short passage from Burnet and the longer one quoted from Gomperz at the end of the last chapter form the selected ‘text’, as it were, of this little book. We shall return to them later, when we shall try to answer the question: what is, then, that Greek way of thinking about the world? What are those peculiar traits, in our present scientific world view, that originated from the Greeks, whose special inventions they were, that are thus not necessary but artificial, being only historically produced and thus capable of change or modification, and which we, by ingrained habit, are liable to regard as natural and inalienable, as the only possible way of looking at the world?

However, at the moment we shall not yet enter on this main question. Rather, by way of preparing the answer, I wish to introduce the reader to parts of ancient Greek thought which I consider relevant in our context. In this I shall not adopt a chronological arrangement. For I am neither willing nor competent to write a brief history of Greek philosophy, there being so many good, modern and attractive ones (particularly Bertrand Russell's and Benjamin Farrington's) at the disposal of the reader. Instead of following the order in time let us be guided by the intrinsic connexion of the subjects. This will bring together various thinkers' ideas on the same problem rather than the attitude of a single philosopher, or of a group of sages, towards the most various questions.

These are four public lectures which were delivered under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at University College Dublin in February, 1950 under the title ‘Science as a Constituent of Humanism’. Neither this nor the abbreviated title chosen here adequately covers the whole, but rather the first sections only. In the remaining part, from p. 11 onward, I intend to depict the present situation in physics as it has gradually developed in the current century; to depict it from the point of view expressed in the title and in the earlier part, thus giving, as it were, an example of how I am looking on scientific effort: as forming part of man's endeavour to grasp the human situation.

My thanks are due to the Cambridge University Press for the rapid production of this booklet and to Miss Mary Houston from the Dublin Institute for designing the figures and reading the proofs.

Is the ancient atomic theory, which is attached to the names of Leucippus and Democritus (born around 460 B.C.), the true forerunner of the modern one? This question has often been asked and very different opinions about it are on record. Gomperz, Cournot, Bertrand Russell, J. Burnet say: Yes. Benjamin Farrington says that it is, ‘in a way’, and that the two have a lot in common. Charles Sherrington says: No, pointing to the purely qualitative character of ancient atomism and to the fact that its basic idea, embodied in the word ‘atom’ (uncuttable or indivisible), has made this very name a misnomer. I am not aware that the negative verdict has ever passed the lips of a classical scholar. And when it comes from a scientist, he always shows by some remark that he regards chemistry—not physics—as the proper domain of the notions of atoms and molecules. He will mention the name of Dalton (born 1766) and omit, in this context, the name of Gassendi (born 1592). It was the latter who definitively reintroduced atomism into modern science, and he came to it after studying the fairly substantial extant writings of Epicurus (born around 341 B.C.), who had taken up the theory of Democritus, of which only scarce original fragments have come down to us.

The two great men of whom I wish to tell in this section have this in common, that they both give you the impression of walkers-alone—deep original thinkers, influenced by others, but not pledged to any ‘school’. The most probable period for Xenophanes' life is the century after about 565 B.C. At the age of ninety-two he describes himself as having wandered through the Greek countries (including, of course, Magna Graecia) for the last sixty-seven years. He was a poet, and the fragments of his fine verse that have come down to us make one deeply regret that his, as well as Empedocles' and Parmenides', hexameters and elegiacs were mostly lost, while the war-songs of the Iliad were preserved. Even so, what is extant of all these philosophical poems would in my opinion make a more interesting, a worthier and a more suitable subject for our school reading than the Wrath of Achilles (if you think what it is about). According to Wilamowitz, Xenophanes ‘upheld the only real monotheism that has ever existed upon earth’.

He was the same who discovered and correctly interpreted fossils in the rocks of south Italy—in the sixth century B.C.! I wish to quote here some of his famous fragments that give us an idea of the attitude of the advanced thinkers of that period towards religion and superstition.