Sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology (UC Berkeley)
And the History of Health Sciences Program (UCSF)
Naomi Oreskes
UC San Diego
-
A Context of Motivation: From Hydrophone and Hydrogen Bombs to Hydrothermal Vents
In the 1980s, historians Daniel Kevles and Paul Forman had a widely-noted debate about the impact of military sponsorship on American science in the Cold War period. Forman argued, essentially, that military priorities and direction had distorted American physics; Kevles argued that physics "is what physicists do" and "distortion" implied a kind of Platonic essentialism inappropriate for historians.
This paper engages this debate in terms of the history of oceanography, through the lens of one of the most significant developments of the period: the discovery of sea-floor hydrothermal vents supporting complex and diverse biotic communities in environments entirely devoid of life. The discovery emerged from an explicitly military context, in which an enabling technology-the submersible vessel, Alvin-was built for a specific military use-the inspection of hydrophones used for underwater acoustic surveillance-and then applied to "basic" scientific exploration. In part, the story supports the "dual use" thesis of David DeVorkin and others, that Cold war technologies served both military and civilian scientific purposes. On the other hand, delving into further detail, we find that numerous ideas to use Alvin for scientific investigations were rejected because they did not fit the military's "mission profile", and that Alvin was very nearly mothballed when it finished that mission, before completing any major scientific work.
I suggest, therefore, that neither Kevles' nor Forman's position captures the complexities of military-sponsored Cold War research. Instead, I introduce the analytical framework of a context of motivation, and suggest that the Cold War context helped to motivate both the technologies that were built and some of the investigations that were pursued, but at the same tightly framed, and constrained, what investigations were possible.
4:00PM
Monday, May 8, 2006
140 Barrows Hall
UC Berkeley
Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: diana@berkeley.edu
