Oral History of British Science

BBC World Service 'Discovery' tapes

The British Library's Oral History collections include a number of collections relating to science and technology which compliment the Oral History of British Science project.  An overview of the collections can be found on the oral history collection webpages.

One recently catalogued collection is the BBC World Service 'Discovery' tapes. The collection comprises over 360 open reels of 'insert' tapes recorded for the BBC World Service "Discovery" programme between 1971 and 1981; there are around 700 individual interviews within the collection, covering subjects within natural science, applied science, physical science and cognitive science, and include interviews with some of the scientists recorded for An Oral History of British Science.  The collection can be browsed by visiting the collection entry on the Sound & Moving Image Catalogue, and by clicking on the collection name, or alternatively by searching the catalogue using the reference number C540.

The collection was catalogued by Dean Annison during an internship between May and September (2012) which he undertook whilst completing an MA in Archives & Records Management at UCL.

Life story oral history at the Brain Observatory

Paul Merchant, interviewer for A Changing Planet, writes:

‘All in the Mind’ on Radio 4 today featured an interview with Jacopo Annese, head of the San Diego Brain Observatory.  Annese discusses a feature of his work that is not evident from the Brain Observatory’s website - the collection of life stories alongside the collection of brains.  The Observatory, he explained, was established to,

‘collect and preserve brains of individuals and collect their life histories together with the brains so we create an archive for the future that will contain anatomical information and also biographical information and essentially a...neurological portrait of as many individuals as possible to understand the relationship between the brain and who we are.’

These life histories, where possible, are collected through interviews with brain donors (there are no details of the character of these interviews on the Observatory’s website).  Annese hopes to link personalities, talents and preferences with the microscopic structure of sliced up brains.  Life stories and brains are viewed together so that,

‘we can start understanding the relationship between the brain and people’s behaviour, people’s attitude and personality...the autopsy is really just sort of the last chapter of a very long narrative that we create now with our donors.’

He speculates that future work might establish that poets and painters, say, have particular brain structures, or structures with particular features.  Aspects of personalities, even ways of talking autobiographically about love, might have some sort of physical trace in brain matter.  He is interested in collecting the brains of people with ‘interesting [life] stories’, for example ‘the first woman pilot’.   

We might like to protest that this is reductionist, that people are formed through relations with things outside of themselves and that individual autobiographical accounts contain features that are communal and symbolic.  But I suspect Jacopo Annese’s response would push us to consider scientific observations of the future, in which imaging is so penetrating that even a person’s tendency to tell certain kinds of stories, or to establish certain kinds of relations with things beyond themselves, could be read off from brain material. 

Visit the 'All in the Mind' BBC website within the next few days for the Listen Again.  

Tom at talkfest 2012

Tom recently spoke at the 2012 Talkfest (Sounds of Science) organised by the Biochemical Society, which celebrated the aural qualities of science!  A podcast is available on talkfest's soundcloud page.

Scientists in retirement

Dr Paul Merchant, interviewer for A Changing Planet, writes:

Life story interviews do not stop at official retirement ages, or peter out once the scientist leaves their university department, government research establishment or private laboratory. Scientists are followed into retirement. 

Some scientists stop observing and experimenting, but continue to read about developments in their fields.  Others continue to work in laboratories at home.  Richard West explains why his particular form of Quaternary geology could be pursued independently of the University of Cambridge:  

‘And what has been the effect of not having access to...university equipment...?

It’s made no difference at all to me.  I can do all this at very low cost, I don’t need a grant, I can do it all at home; I call it kitchen science. ...No, I think normally if you’re in post...so much of your university time is taken up with committee work, going to meetings, teaching, trying to get money for research, but I can do all the things I need to do with the aid of a low power microscope and these measuring cylinders for sorting out sediment.’ [Richard West, C1379/34, track 14, 45:09 – 46:34]

For scientists whose research depends upon the use of instruments not easily set up at home, such as mass spectrometers, the internet has offered a form of remote control.  Stephen Moorbath continues to work in the isotopic dating of rocks through email exchanges with former colleagues running laboratories:

‘I don’t know how I’d manage without computers.  I’m glad I got into it, because I know one or two old colleagues who never got into it and they’re just isolated.  So it’s part and parcel of my life and it’s helped me to carry on.’ [Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36, track 11, 49:32 – 49:52]

Ann Wintle describes the use of email and Skype messaging to conduct research in luminescence dating, at a distance:

‘...when you’re wanting to have a detailed discussion with somebody equivalent to having a discussion with them in the room...the Skype comes in and then you’re – you can do instant texting...you can almost type as fast as you can talk.  ...And then we send – we’re still sending emails with files on if we want to know – you know, “well, what does that dataset look like” and, “ooh, go check your email box, I’ve just sent it to you.”  So you can get that and then you can look at it and then you can both talk about it.  ...I can see why in the past some people might have either gone very solitary when they retired or they disengaged totally from their academic field because they didn’t have any interactions....in this way...   Now you’ve got the communication...you can discuss things with anybody anywhere, so you’ve I think probably got more chance of staying involved with your research ideas.  Though you don’t have the equipment to do it yourself you’ve still got the ideas and if you hit it right you can persuade somebody to do the experiment you would do if you were there.’ [Ann Wintle, C1379/57 track 11, 13:57-15:37]

In contrast, other scientists experience retirement as a break with the past.  Desmond King-Hele wrote a poem about his retirement from the Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1988:

            ‘Escape:

After 50 years in institutions where my life was sheltered and sure

             I’ve come out for community care

For a course of kill or cure

Life’s a joke that’s just begun

At the tender age of 61’ [Desmond King-Hele, C1379/13, track 16, 1:27 - 1:47]

He explains that there was no wish to continue on an existing orbit:

‘I could see that the work that I had done had been extremely sort of … innovative in a way to start with, and then as time went on it became more routine but we were still contributing quite considerably to knowledge...about the shape of the Earth and the upper atmosphere, but there was no enthusiasm for the work from the RAE as you know, and it...was...obvious that all the new things that were coming in, like laser tracking...were going to lead to…much more accurate knowledge of the Earth in both respects....  And so I could foresee that the work was not going to continue to be, if you like, top class...so I was in a way quite content to allow it to cease rather than, like some academics do, continue on with their own line after they retire.  And I realised that what I wanted to do was to retire and do something different, like history of science; writing about Erasmus Darwin.’ [Desmond King-Hele, C1379/13, track 16, 3:02 – 4:30]

As the number of interviews complete or in-progress for An Oral History of British Science passes 60, a full spectrum of scientific retirements is becoming available at http://sounds.bl.uk.

Science and religion (1)

Paul Merchant, interviewer for A Changing Planet writes:

God appears in various forms in life story interviews with Earth scientists - as the Creator of an intriguing planet, as a guiding hand helping experiments along, as a fiction dismissed in childhood, as a dangerous lie responsible for blotting out sensible appraisals of Earth’s history. 

Does it matter whether or not these scientists believe that God created the Earth?

In the second half of the twentieth century, Earth scientists spent a lot of time using instruments to ‘record’ aspects of the Earth and its atmosphere.  Magnetometers.  Radiometers.  Seismometers. Spectrometers.  Gravimeters.  The use of these and other instruments tended to result in a line on a chart, or a number, or a series of numbers. 

Does it matter whether or not individual scientists see God in the lines and numbers?  Either way, they’re still the same lines and numbers to be argued over, calculated with and presented as evidence.  The Earth measures-up the same, whether it’s a Creation, or the debris of an unexplained, intention-less beginning.   

The stuff that engineering is made of

Tom Lean, interviewer for 'Made in Britain' writes:

After spending most of the last year interviewing engineers I've started to begin to scope out the material sciences, and it's presenting a few interesting challenges.  Like pretty much everything else we're trying to cover, the area of interest is rather large. Material science takes in metallurgy, nanotechnology, carbon-fibre, composites, polymers, semi-conductors, smart materials, fabrics, ceramics and so on... Part of my thinking at the moment as I enter this area is how best to consider these various fields and who to interview?

Materials may be an applied science, but they are fundamental to much of engineering, and perhaps this would be a good way of starting to cover the area, by picking up on those material science developments which underlay the work of the engineers I've been talking to so far.  Developments in semi-conductors, for example, led to the replacement of bulky thermionic valves with transistors and integrated circuits. This allowed computer designers to build more powerful and reliable computers in smaller and cheaper packages.  Developments in metallurgy gave aeronautical engineers metals which could withstand higher temperatures and increased stresses, allowing aircraft to fly faster propelled by more powerful, hotter running, jet engines.

By starting on those areas of material science which relate to those engineering topics we've already covered, we'd also be increasing the overlaps between our interviews, building up a more linked up picture of British science and technology and relating interviews back to the overall strand theme of Made in Britain.

The New Men

Paul Merchant, interviewer for A Changing Planet writes:

This post is addressed to fellow ‘An Oral History of British Science’ interviewer, Tom Lean.  In CP Snow’s novel ‘The New Men’ (1954), the central character and narrator, Lewis Elliot, discourses on linked intellectual and political differences between physicists and engineers:

The engineers...the people who make the hardware, who used existing knowledge to make something go, were, in nine cases out of ten, conservatives in politics, acceptant of any regime in which they found themselves, interested in making their machine work, indifferent to long-term social guesses.  Whereas the physicists, whose intellectual life was spent in seeking new truths, found it uncongenial to stop seeking when they had a look at society.  They were rebellious, questioning, protestant, curious for the future and unable to resist shaping it.’ (p.136-137)

At least two questions follow.  Is this distinction between the scientific work of physicists and engineers valid?  If so, are these different ways of thinking scientifically expressed in political thought and action? 

Evocative objects

Thomas Söderqvist reviews three recent collections by Sherry Turkle on the relationship between objects, technology and the self in the September 2010 issue of the British Journal for the History of Science doi:10.1017/S0007087410001226. These are:

• Evocative objects: Things we Think With. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007.
• Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008.
• The Inner History of Devices. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008.

This is a great combination of reviewer and reviewed in reference to life stories, objects and archives. Söderqvist's Science as autobiography: the troubled life of Niels Jerne, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 arises from the author's engagement with the immunologist Jerne's archive (as well as Jerne himself); and gives the sense of the 'materiality' of the archive as an autobiographical tool as well as a tool for constructing scientific theories. (Jerne won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 with Georges J.S. Kohler and Cesar Milstein: 'For theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies' .)

Professor in social studies of science and technology at MIT, Turkle's Evocative Objects gets scholars to reflect on objects in their current life or past, and how these interact with memory. From my point of view the most evocative object is an architect's account of the Melbourne train. Growing up in country Victoria, Australia, the Melbourne train thundered through daily, a symbol of the metropolitan and intellectual worlds beyond a childhood in country Australia, as well as link to memories of parents and place. As Geoffrey Blainey showed in the Tyranny of Distance (Sun Books: Melbourne, Victoria, 1966), technology both connects to a sense of wider cultural community as well as a underlines the specificity (including emotion) of disconnected or remote experiences or places.

Söderqvist praises Turkle for emphasising the importance of physical objects, linking this to the 'material turn' in the humanities and social sciences. Having among other things researched computer interaction and internet identities: 'She argues that we are far too distracted by our digital dreams and that we should instead pay more attention to developing our passionate relationship with material things, be they everyday, scientific or technological objects - not least for educational reasons' (507). One concern in science education is the lack of knowledge children (and adults) have about today's technological objects and how they work; and the possible effects this might have on public understanding of science as well as inspiring and training the next generation of researchers (see Tom Lean's earlier post on Meccano).

However, Söderqvist criticizes Turkle's collections as being unreflective about the nature of memory as personal and cultural narratives that may often be retrospective, leading him to question to authors' connections with real material objects in the first place. What is the link between memories of early material curiosity (e.g. wanting to see inside things) and later scientific careers?

This review of Turkle by Söderqvist makes me wonder about the complexity of our endeavour to interview scientists in the presence of instruments (or evocative places, and to add another layer of complexity, archives). What kind of a relationship between the story, the object, the document and their digital representation and interpretation would best communicate a historical experience in science?

 

 

A history of climate models

Posted by Katrina Dean

The AHRC research network 'Data landscapes: toward an art of environmental change' met recently at the University of Westminster. The workshop was on climate data and how this is handled from various angles: scientific, historical and artistic. In my presentation on a history of climate models I reviewed some past models of climate and visualisations of climate data. Examples include the work of Aristotle, Edmond Halley, Gilbert White, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Lyell, James Croll and Thomas Griffith Taylor.

Above: An entry by Gilbert White in the 'the Naturalist's Journal', British Library Add Ms 31846

I drew attention to three kinds of relationships between climate models and history:

• climate as a form of historical explanation
• history and in particular archival research and research from 'proxy archives' (e.g. sediments, ice cores) as a methodology for uncovering knowledge about past climate
• a recent scientific development whose history is unwritten.

The last one in particular concerns an Oral History of British Science. To document the theme of 'A Changing Planet' members of the project team are through interviews reconstructing the history of a family of disciplines in the earth and related sciences. We also want to document connections between individual scientists and different disciplines to show how research about the oceans, atmosphere, weather, ice sheets, earth's crust and past climate have all been brought together to establish knowledge about climate change. One key development is the climate model, but how did this come about?

One of the origins of climate models is in numerical weather prediction, which applied computing techniques to atmospheric models to produce short-term weather forecasts. These models were tested on past weather events to see if they could produce the weather actually experienced. The analogies with modelling past climate are clear.

To date, this is mainly an American (and Scandinavian) story in which numerical weather prediction was developed by the Weather Bureau and military weather services using early electronic, digital computers.

By interviewing atmospheric scientists, meteorologists, oceanographers and palaeoclimatologists it will be interesting to learn how these techniques were developed, especially in Britain and Europe. How did climate models come to address more than atmospheric phenomena to include for example ocean circulation and other forms of historical and proxy data? How have computer models become one of the dominant mediums for discovering and expressing knowledge about past climate and for making predictions about the future?

One interesting aspect of the Data Landscapes workshop is how models conceal the material, human and technological processes of collecting, compiling and analysing data before it is modelled. Interviews with those who collect this data will contribute to revealing these processes and addressing some of the issues concerning uncertainty in climate model predictions. Unless we know how we know something, it may sometimes be difficult to grasp the basis on which expert knowledge is established and the substance underlying competing claims.

Drawing on the British Library's collections to review past ideas about climate and attempts to collect data and visualise these ideas and data reminded me that we have plenty of past examples to draw on. Contemporary history presents us with the challenge of analysing our current predicaments with historical tools; and oral history is probably one of the most challenging and rewarding tools available. Thanks to the network convenor Tom Corby for organising the workshop and to Paul Merchant 'A Changing Planet' oral history interviewer for his background research on the history of palaeoclimatology, which will inform some important interviews.

Science's sense of self

Posted on behalf of Paul Merchant, interviewer for 'A Changing Planet'

It would be unwise, for all sorts of intellectual, logical and philosophical reasons, to assume that we know what something called 'British science' is before we set out to study it.  However, we're not interviewing golfers or carpenters - we're picking scientists.  We think we know where to look: universities, the Royal Society, government laboratories and so on.  There is a danger, then, that An Oral History of British Science will help to constitute British science, to mark it out, rather than allow it to reveal itself. 

One way round this pesky issue is to explore, in interviews, what might be thought of as science's sense of self.  How, according to interviewees, are practices made scientific?  How do disciplines distinguish themselves from each other?  What kinds of femininity or masculinity are implied by particular scientific practices?  Where do interviewees draw lines between the scientific and the non-scientific in recalling their own lives?