The Universality of Science

My example of trailing vortices depended for its force on the difference be­tween the understanding of two groups of agents, the scientists and the pilots—the one group believing that trailing vortices had no practical sig­nificance, the other group knowing in a tacit and practical way that they did. What happens to the arguments for relativism when all parties know the same thing? This question is important because the universality of scientific under­standing is often taken to provide an adequate response to relativism. There is only one real world; the laws of nature are the same in London and Berlin; a true theory applies everywhere, and science knows no bounds of nation or race. “It is transnational and, despite what sociologists claim, independent of cultural milieu.”86 If science is independent of cultural milieu, then it cannot be relative to cultural milieu. Granted the premise, the conclusion follows, but my case study shows that the premise is false. The understanding of the phenomenon of lift was not the same in London and Berlin or Cambridge and Gottingen.

Such a response, based upon mere historical fact, is unlikely to satisfy the critics of relativism. It will be said that my study deals with a passing phase. Isn’t the important thing what happened after the episode that I described— when the truth emerged? The transnational character of science may take time to reveal itself, and progress may be inhibited by unfavorable social con­ditions, but universality triumphs in the end. It will be insufficient for the relativist to object that the antirelativist has shifted the discussion from what was the case to what ought to be the case or to what will be the case. The pic­ture of universal knowledge has force because there is, here and now, much science that is indeed transnational. This fact cannot be denied, so what can the relativist say?

Frank argued that relativism is consistent with universality. He said that the conditions leading to the spread of scientific knowledge were the very ones that ought to encourage a healthy relativism. As experience is broad­ened, the tendency to treat a belief as absolute will be undermined. Dogmati­cally held theories will encounter challenges, and a growing appreciation of the complexity of the world will undermine their apparently absolute status. Absolutism is parochialism—the cognitive equivalent of parish-pump pa­triotism. But the central reason why universalism is no threat to relativism is that the extent of a cultural milieu is purely contingent. In principle, a culture could be worldwide. The universal acceptance of a body of knowledge could only serve as a counterexample to relativism if universality indicates, or re­quires, absolute truth.

Let me explain this by an example. By the early 1930s Hermann Glauert had become a fellow of the Royal Society and the head of the Aerodynamics Department at Farnborough. He was at the height of his powers and had just finished a lengthy contribution on the theory of the propeller for William Durand’s multivolume synthesis of modern aerodynamic knowledge. Then tragedy struck. On August 4, 1934, a Saturday, Glauert took his three chil­dren for a walk across Laffan’s plain near Farnborough. The party stopped to watch some soldiers who were arranging an explosive charge to blow up a tree stump. The party stood, as required, at a safe distance some two hundred feet away, but the instructions they had been given were based on a misjudg – ment. Glauert was struck by a piece of debris from the explosion. No one else was hit, and his children were unhurt, but Glauert died instantly.87 In a dignified letter to Theodore von Karman, who had now moved from Aachen to the California Institute of Technology, Glauert’s wife (Muriel Barker) re­called the last time she and her husband had met von Karman. Along with G. I. Taylor they had all sat together, in the garden of Taylor’s Cambridge house, having tea and making plans for the future.88 Von Karman replied, in English: “The few people really interested in theoretical aerodynamics always felt as one family, and I am very proud to say that I had the feeling that your late husband and I were really friends, also beyond the common scientific interests.”89 Von Karman’s metaphor of the “family” to describe the relation­ship between leading members of the profession is striking. It resonates with, and lends support to, the theme of the transnational or universal character of science, though of course allowance must be made for the circumstances in which the expression was used. Perhaps it is the exchange of letters itself, rather than any particular choice of words, that should be considered the salient point. Former enemies in a bitter war are now consoling one another and affirming their solidarity. This epitomizes the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of the scientist’s world, at least as it was emerging, in the interwar years, in the field of aerodynamics.90

How is this emergence of a transnational science to be interpreted? There is a methodological choice to be made. In framing a response the choice lies between (1) invoking some form of inner necessity governing scientific progress and (2) settling for mere contingency. On the first approach it will be tacitly supposed that a “natural tendency” or telos is at work guiding the development. This idea will not recommend itself to an empirically minded analyst, who would therefore choose the second approach. Internationalism is to be analyzed strategically, not teleologically. The relevant comparisons are with the globalization of markets or the spread of the arms race.

Any move toward transnational knowledge should be interpreted in a wholly matter-of-fact manner. Sometimes scientists will reach out across na­tional boundaries, and sometimes they will not. It will depend on opportuni­ties and on perceived advantages and disadvantages and will vary with time and circumstance. (Recall Prandtl’s ambivalent reaction to cooperation in the immediate postwar years.) There will be no inner necessity at work, and references to the “transnational” character of science should not be accompa­nied by starry-eyed sentiments about Universal Truth. Why was von Karman in the United States? What was he doing at Caltech, and who was support­ing his research? 91 Each case needs to be examined by the historian for its particular features and causal structure. Thus in my study I found there was a phase when the reports of German work prepared for the Advisory Com­mittee for Aeronautics lay gathering dust, and there was another phase when copies of the Technische Berichte were sought with urgency. Both should be counted as equally natural. The universality of science and technology, or the absence of universality, depends on familiar, human realities. Some of these will be the brutal realities of war, power politics, and military and diplomatic strategy. Others will be the softer and more agreeable realities of the kind recalled in the exchange between Glauert’s young widow and von Karman— such as taking tea on a Cambridge lawn. These two levels, so different and yet so intimately connected, need to be brought together and linked to the calculations and experiments carried out at the research front. This is what I have sought to do.92