Steven Shapin

Steven Shapin is an emeritus professor in the history of science at Harvard. His books include The Scientific Life, A Social History of Truth and Never Pure.

An Example of the Good Life: Michael Polanyi

Steven Shapin, 15 December 2011

Michael Polanyi lives on in the footnotes. If you want to invoke the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, Polanyi is your reference of choice. You’ll probably cite his major book Personal Knowledge (1958), maybe the earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum. We know how...

Gutted

Steven Shapin, 30 June 2011

Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his half-digested breakfast was pouring out of the wound from his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for.

What’s your dust worth? Corpses

Steven Shapin, 14 April 2011

When I was a boy – on this evidence, a miserable, maudlin sort of child – I used to kill time by calculating the value of a human life. Not the value of your soul or your contribution to civilisation or your lifetime earnings or your insurable value or the sums your heirs might realise in a wrongful death suit. I was interested in what a life’s worth when broken down into...

Good Housekeeping: William Petty

Steven Shapin, 20 January 2011

In 1667, the Royal Society’s first historian described the early Restoration as ‘this Age of Experiments’. He was advertising the society’s new scientific programme and he was making a joke. One of the society’s most prominent members had designed and built a new sort of ship – a ‘Double-Bottomed’ vessel, a kind of catamaran – intended to...

Uncle of the Bomb: The Oppenheimer Brothers

Steven Shapin, 23 September 2010

HUAC: Is your brother a member of the Communist Party?

Robert Oppenheimer: He is not a member of the Communist Party, to the best of my knowledge.

HUAC: Are you speaking as of the present time?

Robert Oppenheimer: I am, sir.

HUAC: Was he a member of the Communist Party in the past?

Robert Oppenheimer: Mr Chairman, I will answer the questions you put to me. I ask you not to press...

The Unpoetic Calorie: Food Made Flesh

Erin Maglaque, 21 November 2024

What is it about the body that resists plain description? When we discuss our bodies, we evoke other things: the body as machine, possibly malfunctioning; the body as computer, infinitely programmable....

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It’s like getting married: Academic v. Industrial Science

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, 12 February 2009

The practices of science, it appears, are increasingly industrial in location, corporate in organisation, and product and profit-minded in motivation. In the eyes of various commentators, these...

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You have to be educated to be educated

Adam Phillips, 3 April 1997

For the great majority of people, believing in the truths of science is unavoidably an act of faith. Most of us neither witness the successful experiments nor would be able to understand them if...

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Gentle Boyle

Keith Thomas, 22 September 1994

Most of what we know and think is secondhand. ‘Almost all the opinions we have are taken by authority and upon credit,’ wrote Montaigne, in an age when the sum of human knowledge was...

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Post-Scepticism

Richard Tuck, 19 February 1987

‘Scientists’ in our culture are (in many disciplines) people who perform ‘experiments’ in ‘laboratories’ and ‘testify’ about them to a wider...

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