Subcultures and Status

One of the subcultures I identify in my explanation (German technical me­chanics) belongs to the general field of technology, while the other (British mathematical physics) falls more comfortably under the rubric of science. My explanation therefore presupposes a society in which technological and sci­entific activity are understood to be different from one another. The picture is of culture with a division of labor in which the roles of technologist and scientist are treated as distinct or distinguishable. These labels are the catego­ries employed by the historical actors themselves. Their role in my analysis derives from their prior status as actors’ categories.15 Although the members of the two subcultures interact with one another, my data justify attributing a significant degree of independence to them. To speak of “subcultures” car­ries the implication that the practitioners within each respective subculture routinely draw upon the resources of their own traditions as they perform their work and confront new problems.16 A symmetrical stance requires that both science and technology be placed on a par with one another for the pur­poses of analysis. This injunction is directed at the analyst and is consistent with the historical actors themselves according a very different status to the two activities: for example, some of the actors may see science as having a higher status than technology. The point of the methodological injunction to be “symmetrical” is that it requires the analyst to ask why status is distributed in this particular way by the members of a group and to keep in mind that it could be distributed differently.17

Attributions of status can be expressed in subtle ways. They may take the form of assumptions (made by both actors and analysts) about the depen­dence of one body of knowledge on another. Is technology to be seen as the (mere) working out of the implications of science? Is the driving force of tech­nological innovation typically, or always, some prior scientific innovation?18 An inferior status may be indicated by an alleged epistemological dependence and a reluctance to impute agency and spontaneity to technology. The sym­metry postulate does not assert the truth or falsity of any specific thesis about dependency or independence, but it does require that such a thesis is not in­troduced into the analysis as an a priori assumption. At most the dependency of technology on science is merely one possible state of affairs among many other possibilities; for example, science may depend on technology rather than technology on science, or the two may be completely fused together or completely separate. The actual relation is to be established empirically for each episode under study. In the case of the theory of lift it is clear that the technologically important ideas worked out by Lanchester, Kutta, and Prandtl were not the result of new scientific developments. On the contrary, they exploited an old science and old results, namely, ideal fluid theory, the Euler equations of inviscid flow, and the Biot-Savart law. The shock engen­dered after the Great War by the belated British recognition of the success of this approach was not the shock of the new but the shock of the old.19 The science that was exploited was not only old; it was also discredited science— discredited, that is, in the eyes of Cambridge mathematical physicists pushing at the research front of viscous and turbulent flow.

The advocates of the circulatory theory of lift brought together the ap­parently useless results of classical hydrodynamics and the concrete prob­lems posed by the new technology of mechanical flight. The theory of lift in conjunction with the theory of stability constituted the new science of aero­nautics. Given the way that scientific knowledge was harnessed to techno­logical concerns, the new discipline might be called a technoscience. Some commentators have argued that “technoscience,” the fusing of science and technology, is a recent, indeed a “postmodern,” phenomenon, exemplified by the allegedly novel patterns of development shown in information tech­nology and computer science. Others have argued that, because the division of labor between science and technology is a relatively recent development, so their fusion into “technoscience” is, in fact, a return to the original con­dition of science.20 Did not science, in its early modern form, derive from a fusion of the work of the scholar and the craftsman?21 Whether or not this account of the origins of science is true, identifying early twentieth-century aerodynamics as an instance of technoscience would support the thesis that technoscience is not a novelty.

In the 1930s Hyman Levy, who had earlier coauthored Aeronautics in The­ory and Experiment, wrote a number of books of popular science. Along with Bernal, Blackett, J. B. S. Haldane, Hogben, and Zuckerman, Levy belonged to a remarkable group of scientists who played a significant role in British cultural and political life during the interwar years.22 One of Levy’s books was titled Modern Science: A Study of Physical Science in the World Today.23 Aero­dynamics was one of his main examples. He did not call it a technoscience, but he did offer it as an exemplary case of the unity of theory and practice. Writing from a Marxist standpoint, he cited the work of Prandtl and von Karman and offered the strange transitions from laminar to turbulent flow as evidence that nature embodied the laws of dialectics. While it is plausible to see the later developments of aerodynamics as moving toward a unification of theory and practice, the fact remains that in the early years there was a dis – cernable difference between the stance of the mathematical physicists and the engineers. The history of Levy’s contributions, and his own earlier, negative stance toward the circulation theory, underlines this point. When Levy was active in the field and working at the National Physical Laboratory, there was still a significant difference in approach between mathematical physicists and technologists—at least, between British mathematical physicists and German technologists.24 It is clear that behind the emerging “synthesis” of theory and practice, there still lay the “thesis” of mathematical physics and the “antith­esis” of engineering. Historical contingency rather than historical necessity determined the balance between them. I now look at one such contingency.