Nuclear fusion has always oscillated between being represented as a “perfect” source of energy on the verge of definitive success and as a “forever future” technology, long prophesied yet never realized. This study focuses on how this negative perception has consolidated through the decades. Indeed, the reputation of fusion energy as being “always 30 years away” can itself be historicized: how has it emerged over time? What has contributed to its crystallization, and why? The article traces the history of scandals and reputational crises endured by fusion research since the 1950s. It does so by analyzing primary/secondary literature and insiders’ accounts of major historical events that have led to the long-lasting perception of fusion as being unachievable anytime soon. Although insiders may dismiss these “past futures” and debacles as ugly tales to be forgotten, they remain significant for interpreting today’s discourses around fusion due to their “hauntology” and “institutional afterlife.”
We seek a new historiographical perspective on attempts to understand and improve the performance of the telescope in the first half of the seventeenth century. The invention of the telescope in the early seventeenth century presented natural philosophers, mathematicians, and practitioners with opportunities and a significant challenge. Examining contributions ranging from Galileo to Christoph Scheiner, we argue that their work exhibits different responses to the difficulty of rendering the telescope reliable, controllable, and capable of improvement despite the absence of a shared theoretical understanding of the instrument. Our paper then is a study in the dynamics of practice and theory. Throughout this period, a persistent tension existed between perspectival optics and workshop practice. Geometrical relations increasingly served as operative means for regulating and improving telescope performance as well as for explaining optical behavior. This instrumental orientation was articulated explicitly by Carlo Antonio Manzini, whose retrospective account of telescope-making procedures throws into relief the practical domain on which future physical theories of optical instruments would be based.
Among the many twentieth-century authors who have been inspired by developments in science, the American novelist and poet John Updike stands out as a fascinating example. Interested in science and its history, he was well informed by his reading of popular science books and journals. From where did he get his information? How did scientists respond to his literary works referring to science, if at all? This paper offers a critical survey of Updike’s science-related writings from the mid-1950s to his death in 2009. Rather than adopting a literary-critical approach, its focus is on the scientific aspects and in particular on those related to physics, astronomy, and cosmology. Although these themes were not essential to Updike’s literary works, neither were they merely ornamental. By locating his writings in the context of history of science they will be provided with an additional dimension not sufficiently appreciated by literary scholars.
