Accounts of the relationship between eighteenth century artisanal practice and the development of modern scientific practice and culture have produced an influential range of concepts that have aided historical and sociological accounts of contemporary scientific practice: invisible technicians, tacit knowledge and artisanal thriftiness have all served as tools to understanding the integration, processes and development of more contemporary scientific practice. However, despite the seemingly apparent evocation of artisanal practice as something related to—but eventually “less than”—scientific practice in terms of authority, resources and geographical reach, concepts alluding to smallness has been frequently evoked but received little attention as an analytical category tool in its right. This paper will offer two case studies to interrogate the relationship between “smallness” and practice with an emphasis on counterposing actor’s categories with the social relations of knowledge/technical production. The first case explores the relations between the London clock and watch making community and the (human) computers and calculators employed by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The second traces and analyses the development of quantum technologies in Europe in the twenty-first century. By analysing the different uses and meanings of “smallness” in these two contexts, this paper will highlight the strategies, intentions and debates within techno-scientific and artisanal groups and point to the different ways in which “smallness” operates. This paper will suggest that through paying attention to “smallness,” concepts such as experience and feeling may offer a useful way into thinking about issues of scale and development in contemporary science.
Plant breeding is one of the main factors sustaining the increase in agricultural productivity over the past two centuries. Despite some methodological obstacles to historical research, there is already extensive knowledge about the origins and early development of plant breeding in most European countries, the US, and East Asia. Portugal is absent from the international literature on this subject, and the existing studies focus mainly on the period from the 1930s onwards, connecting plant breeding to the establishment of the dictatorship and its goals of food self-sufficiency. The aim of this article is to analyse the origins and early stages of plant breeding in Portugal and placing them in the international context of this subject. Based on a wide range of sources, this study concludes that plant breeding began in Portugal in the second half of the nineteenth century and became reasonably well established by the early twentieth century, with the development of “Portuguese” hybrid varieties that were distributed to farmers.
Given that issues of scale and size are commonly used in characterizations of small science, this paper explores their possible relationship with the prevalence of scientific misconduct. The study is based on a detailed review of recent empirical work addressing, both directly and indirectly, different aspects of scale in relation to questionable scientific practices. First, we discuss some problems in conceptualising scientific misconduct. Second, we examine the historical evolution of scientific misconduct, from traditional “epistemological” manipulation to contemporary “post-production” cheating and link it to deeper structural changes in science. Third, we review papers that have examined associations between the size of research groups and projects and other issues of scale, and the risk of misconduct. We conclude that there is substantial evidence that small-scale science affords valuable protection against threats to the values traditionally associated with scientific integrity and research ethics.
The emerging discourse on “small science” and “slow science” broadens the scope of the STS scholarship by problematizing the question of scale in doing science. It claims that small science is not only about doing things at a small scale, but also about doing different things. The scholarship shares space with the emerging frugal innovation scholarship, which advocates for humane technologies with a greater degree of simplicity, decentralised control, greater customisation possibilities, and participation of “laypeople” in the making of these technologies. However, these innovations are, at times, criticised for not being based on (idealised) “science.” We draw upon philosophical, and historical studies on scientific methods to relook at the claim of absent science in jugaad. We take a scaled up jugaad transportation technology developed by laypeople in the informal economy in the city of Delhi for the analysis. We find that jugaad is an outcome of a carefully designed search process, aided by alertness of mind, knowledge about immediate material and knowledge environment, and a preference for accessibility and affordability in creating new technologies. It involves reuse, repurposing, and improvisation. The paper raises broad questions about how jugaad operates, achieves legitimacy, and survives public scrutiny, to create a space for, a more human-centred, “jugaad-science”.
This paper argues that the application of the notion of cargo cults to science provides a valuable heuristic for revisiting the dichotomy between big and small science. By considering the use of the notion both by Cold War physicist and by anthropologists interpreting Melanese rituals, we suggest that cargo cult is better adapted (and adaptable) to small than to big science. We simultaneously understand small science as mimicry developed in a context of dependence upon big science and as a form of agency useful to counteract asymmetries of power in a world dominated by hierarchical forms of doing science.
In this paper, we are looking at the British expeditions that observed the 1919 total solar eclipse in Sobral (Brazil) and Príncipe island as scientific practice embedded in their geographical, social, and world-political context. This fresh look makes steps towards a “global history” of this eclipse, and reports on contextual elements of the expeditions that have been hitherto “eclipsed” in the narratives that concentrated on the exchange of scientific arguments in a “world of ideas.” What it may mean to think of the globality of the 1919 eclipse is presented followed by an analysis of four main dimensions of this globality that include actors in context, observing totality, the eclipse lineage, and eclipse on paper.
Eclipse reckoning constituted a significant component of the Indian astronomical tradition and was underpinned by a sophisticated interplay between mathematical theory, observational data, and visual practices. This paper focuses specifically on the diagrammatic dimensions of eclipse computations as articulated in classical Sanskrit treatises. By closely examining two distinctive passages drawn from the astronomical texts Siddhāntaśekhara and Uparāgakriyākrama, composed over the course of the second millennium CE, we investigate how Indian astronomers employed graphical methods to visually represent eclipse phenomena. These diagrammatic constructions reveal a nuanced understanding of eclipse occurrences. Our analysis highlights key features of these procedures, including the geometric frameworks, instruments, and terminologies employed. We also consider how these visual methods evolved across different texts, noting both similarities and differences in their presentation and underlying rationale. In doing so, we demonstrate how theoretical formulations and empirical observations were integrated within these visual methods, shedding light on how theory and observation informed practice and how these complex astronomical events were made accessible to broader audiences.
In this paper I argue that at the heart of the genesis of Thomas S. Kuhn’s landmark ideas in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) lies a complex interplay between two strands of early twentiethcentury philosophy at Harvard: the critical realism of Arthur O. Lovejoy (including its European antecedents) and the neo-realism associated with Bertrand Russell. By drawing on unpublished archival materials at MIT—lectures, syllabi, examination questions, and correspondence—I trace Kuhn’s intellectual trajectory from his adoption of Lovejoy’s historiographic method to rejection of Russell’s purely logical methodology to reconstruct a previously neglected lineage in Thomas Kuhn’s philosophical development. My central claim is that Structure represents the culmination of Kuhn’s Harvard background, his intensive engagement with Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being and his resolute critique of Russell’s logical schema. I further argue that Kuhn’s pre-Structure views—in addition to their adherence to Lovejoy’s historical methods—displays strong similarities with Lovejoy’s philosophy and his critical realism’s commonsense naturalism. In conclusion, I will try to show that Kuhn’s pre-Structure affinities with Harvard critical realism anticipate important issues such as the notions of paradigm, theory-ladenness, underdetermination, incommensurability, scientific communities and normal science, that arise from a fertile “Harvard Hub”.
The path of eclipse totality across North America, Spain, and Northern Africa on 18 July 1860 was accessible to a wide range of observers in diverse geographical and socio-political contexts, the infrastructures of which shaped individual expedition logistics. This joint paper combines in a single frame of reference accounts from British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Algerian, and North American expedition parties. A focus on the scientific objectives of these observers with varied circumstances, institutions, and funding sources raises the question of a global approach to the history of observing the total solar eclipse in 1860.
Since Paul Crutzen introduced the term Anthropocene twenty-five years ago, it has become conflated with the concept of anthropogenic impact, which is globally diachronous. Crutzen introduced the term as a geological epoch to reflect the altered state of the Earth System, however, signifying an end to the Holocene Epoch whose relative stability fostered the evolution of human culture. The culmination of a fifteen-year effort to formally define the Anthropocene as an epoch was the proposal of a “golden spike” in sediments from a small Canadian lake in a conservation area near Toronto. Several episodes of anthropogenic impact are recorded in its annually laminated sediments in addition to the signature of the Great Acceleration of the mid-twentieth century. Evidence of the rapid increase in fossil fuel consumption, industrial production and human population can be precisely dated in the varved sediment of this unique lake, and the sharp increase in radionuclides with the introduction of the H-bomb allows the use of the anthropogenic isotope plutonium-239 as a globally synchronous marker of the base of the proposed Anthropocene epoch. The International Union of Geological Sciences rejected adding the Anthropocene to the Geological Time Scale, rejecting the idea that human activities have shifted the planetary system away from Holocene norms. Arguably, ignoring evidence that Anthropos has altered how the atmosphere, biosphere, and other components of the Earth System interact is at least as political as adding the Anthropocene to the Geologic Time Scale, impeding scientific communication efforts to deal with the climate crisis.
Guinea-Bissau has a chronically underperforming electricity sector that fails to provide most of the population outside of the capital, Bissau, with access to electricity – nowadays considered a basic human need. Little is known about the evolution of this large socio-technical system. Archival research reveals the conditions under which the electricity supply and distribution system was set up. Between the 1930s and 1950s, a system of isolated mini-grids was established in the capital, Bissau, and the towns of the interior. It was expanded in the 1960s and adapted to military needs during the Bissau-Guinean war of independence (1963-1974). Maintenance was a major challenge for the colonial administration. The systems of isolated mini-grids suffered from poor technical quality of the installations, poor maintenance, lack of administrative management capacity, and consumers not paying for their consumption. Post-colonial Guinea-Bissau inherited an electricity sector with systemic challenges that persist to this day.
In 1958, botanist-biologist Professor Reginald Gates conducted biometric and anthropometric “race crossing” studies on populations spanning Australia and Papua New Guinea. Gates is largely remembered as an anachronistic conservative whose opposition to interracial marriage and belief in race theory ostracised him from the post-war Anglo-American scientific mainstream. Paradoxically, the article aims to investigate the more positive responses that Gates, funded by segregationist American benefactors, received from Australian anthropologists interested in aiding his research. It argues Gates’ activity throughout the Global South, and the methodological overlap and collaboration he experienced with Australian anthropologists, further complicates and decentres North Atlantic facing understandings of the decline of racial thinking after 1945. Gates resurrected the legacy of the abortive Harvard-Adelaide “race-crossing” study (1938-39), in order to manufacture a tranche of data that would help serve his scientific insurgency against the UNESCO statements on racial equality (1950). Leaning on reminiscences of Harvard-Adelaide anthropologists Joseph Birdsell and Norman Tindale, Gates determined that by re-treading their footsteps, he could buttress his thesis that “races” were segregated by nature. The article demonstrates that using Australian fieldwork, he advanced his regressive political agenda that population groups, in the United States and elsewhere, should be segregated by political design. As an associate editor of the scientific racist Mankind Quarterly journal, Gates bypassed mainstream channels to disseminate his miscegenation research.
This essay explores the tension that existed between empiricism and the metaphysical underpinnings of Aristotelian natural philosophy in Spain during the sixteenth century. This tension was most apparent in the range of science practitioners described in this essay as “Doers” and “Thinkers.” Using the figures of cosmographer Andrés García de Céspedes, architect Juan de Herrera, and theologians Benito Arias Montano and Francisco Suárez, this essay explains how they engaged with the limitations, but also the strengths of pre-Galilean natural philosophy.
