A History of Technoscience

Erasing the Boundaries between Science and Technology

David F. Channell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351977401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Are science and technology independent of one another? Is technology dependent upon science, and if so, how is it dependent? Is science dependent upon technology, and if so how is it dependent? Or, are science and technology becoming so interdependent that the line dividing them has become totally erased? This book charts the history of technoscience from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century and shows how the military–industrial–academic complex and big science combined to create new examples of technoscience in such areas as the nuclear arms race, the space race, the digital age, and the new worlds of nanotechnology and biotechnology.

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1 Introduction

Relationships between science and technology

In the twenty-first century science and technology are coming to be seen as indistinguishable activities, often referred to by the term technoscience. It is difficult to characterize many of the developments that have come to form the basis of the modern western world as either purely scientific or purely technological. Such important developments as nuclear weapons, nuclear power, space exploration, transistors, microchips, computers, the internet, lasers, missiles, communication satellites, biotechnology, the Human Genome Project, modern pharmaceuticals, MRIs, CT scanners, heart-lung machines, artificial organs, and nanotechnology cannot be understood as being the result of only science or only technology. Often articles and books about these developments will refer to them as great scientific achievements and at other times they might be labeled great technological or engineering achievements.

A further difficulty in being able to distinguish between science and technology arises from the fact that modern engineers, like scientists, are trained in universities and take many of the same courses in physics, chemistry, classical mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetic field theory, calculus and differential equations, that are taken by students majoring in the sciences. Once out of college, many science majors find themselves working in positions classified as engineering while many engineering majors are doing work that would be classified as science. Some recent Nobel Prizes in physics have recognized work that could be labeled engineering, such as the invention of the transistor and the integrated circuit, work in radio astronomy, and developments in superconductivity.¹

Much of the confusion over what is science and what is technology originated during World War II. Vannevar Bush, an engineer who directed U.S. wartime research and headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, said that when he came to discover that his British counterparts considered that “the engineer was a kind of second-class citizen compared to the scientist,” he decided to designate all wartime researchers working in the Office of Scientific Research and Development as scientists.² He noted that even after World War II the public was led to believe that such an achievement as the landing of the first astronauts on the moon was a great scientific achievement when in fact “it was a marvelously skillful engineering job.”³

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The erasure of the boundaries dividing science and technology arises from the fact that in the modern world science and technology have developed a symbiotic relationship with one another. It is usually assumed that all scientific developments will eventually lead to some new or improved technologies. It is also commonly assumed that successful developments of new technologies require some breakthrough or discovery in science. Also, many of the recent developments in high energy physics, astrophysics, space exploration, and the Human Genome Project – what has been labeled “big science” – could not exist without the development of new technologies such as particle accelerators, superconducting magnets, rockets, Martian explorers, radio telescopes, the Hubble telescope, and new computerized instruments and controls. This erasing of the distinctions between science and technology has led to the idea that science and technology have each been transformed into a concept labeled technoscience. The term has come to have a variety of meanings. For French critic Bruno Latour, who helped to popularize the term, technoscience represents the fact that science as a pure, ideal, disinterested activity no longer exists. Rather science has become a practical, technological-like activity that is shaped by social forces.⁴ For others, technoscience represents a new situation in which science cannot exist without technology and technology cannot exist without science.⁵

Some scholars have argued that the close linkage between science and technology is a defining characteristic of the modern world. Economist Nathan Rosenberg and legal scholar L.E. Birdzell, Jr. have claimed that the “Western miracle” – that during the last 200 years has led to a tenfold increase in per capita income, a significant decline in infant mortality, a decrease of plagues and famines, a dramatic shift in the working population away from farms and into cities, a rise in the standard of living with new products, transportations systems and methods of communications – was the result of a sustained and institutional interaction between science and technology.⁶ While non-western nations have made significant contributions to new developments in both science and technology, in many cases those nations do not link their scientific knowledge with their technology in ways that lead to new economic productivity or increases in standards of living.

Of course not all interactions between science and technology are beneficial. The symbiotic relationship between the two areas has also produced: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; global warming, ozone depletion and acid rains; disasters such as Chernobyl, Bhopal, Love Canal, and the Gulf oil spill; increased medical costs arising from high technology medicine; threats to privacy from computers and the internet; a flood of messages and advertisements from new communication systems; gridlock on highways and at airports because of new transportation developments and urbanization; new opportunities for terrorism; and social problems arising from increasing life spans. While we would not classify these developments as part of the “Western miracle,” they also have become defining elements of the modern world.

If many of the fundamental characteristics of the modern world depend upon the interaction between science and technology, it is of the utmost importance to be able to understand the nature of that relationship. Are technological advances dependent upon previous scientific advances, and if so, what aspects of science contribute most to new technologies? On the other hand, are scientific advances dependent upon developments in technology, and if so, what aspects of technology contribute most to science? Or, could it be that science and technology are so fundamentally different in their goals, methods, thinking, motivations, and final products that any interactions between them are only superficial and ultimately not terribly important? Or, is it possible that the boundaries between science and technology are becoming erased in such a way that ideas and methods continually flow from technology to science as much as they flow from science to technology, so that each area has been transformed into the single notion of what Bruno Latour has labeled “technoscience”?

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Terminology

In order to fully understand the relationship between science and technology and how it developed throughout history, we must also face the fact that the concepts and activities that we refer to as science and technology have undergone significant changes throughout history. In fact the terms science and technology, as we use them today, only go back to the nineteenth century. While both terms, or their Latin equivalents, can be found throughout history, the use of the terms “science” or “scientist,” to refer to a study of the physical world, only became widespread after William Whewell popularized the terms in the 1840s. Some credit the popularization of the term “technology” to Jacob Bigelow who used it in a series of lectures at Harvard and subsequently in the title of his book Elements of Technology (1829), but recently scholars such as Ruth Oldenziel have questioned that he was using the term in the modern sense and see the founding of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1861 as making the term more popular.⁷ Even then scholars, such as Eric Schatzberg, have argued that during the nineteenth century the word technology referred to a study of the practical arts and it was not until the early twentieth century that the term came to refer also to industrial processes or objects.⁸ Before the nineteenth century what we today call science was much more likely to be called natural philosophy and what we call technology was more commonly called the mechanical, practical or even the vulgar, arts. In one sense the interaction between science and technology began to increase in the nineteenth century because that is when the modern conception of science and technology began to emerge. But the terms science and technology are widely used today to refer to activities dealing with the natural and artificial worlds taking place throughout human history. What is commonly referred to as the history of science or the history of technology does not begin its coverage in the nineteenth century but they study all of human history. In any case, we must remember that when we use such terms as science and technology to refer to activities in the past they can take on meanings that are significantly different from the way the terms are used today.

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Throughout history the term science, or the activity that we would associate with the term science, has taken on a wide variety of meanings. Historian David Lindberg lists a number of ways in which the term science has been used throughout history.⁹ For example, science has been used to describe the manner in which humans exercise some control over their environment. According to this meaning the discovery of metals for making tools and the development of agriculture – activities that we would closely associate with technology – could be seen as scientific. Others have used the term science to refer to a theoretical body of knowledge. Such a body of knowledge is usually characterized by statements in the form of universal laws, many of which can be expressed as mathematical formulae or equations. For some, this theoretical body of knowledge is distinguished from, and even opposed to, any practical activity. Here science is restricted to the contents of such disciplinary studies as physics, chemistry, biology, botany, geology and astronomy. But for others such a theoretical body of knowledge may refer to the artificial or built environment as well as to the natural world. Some others focus on methodology rather than content. For them, science is characterized by the way in which it systematically studies a problem, usually through some set of experimental procedures. During the 1660s and 1670s there was a significant debate within the scientific community over the issue of experimentation.¹⁰ Supporters of the experimental method saw it as a new way of extending an investigation of the natural world by using experimentally created situations, such as a vacuum produced by an air pump. The opponents of an experimental definition of science saw experimental instruments as creating the exact opposite of what science should be investigating. Instead of observing the natural world directly and unencumbered, microscopes, telescopes and air pumps exaggerated and distorted the natural world, or they created totally artificial worlds. Finally, the term science, or scientia in Latin, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A History of Technoscience
• History and Philosophy of Technoscience
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Relationships between Science and Technology
• PART I The Roots of Technoscience
• PART II The Era of Technoscience
• Works Cited
• Index