Although they were not pacifists, Kuhn, Price, and Merton, like Einstein and Popper, avoided bearing arms during times of conflict. In the Second World War, Kuhn and Price, duly certified with an undergraduate degree in physics, carried out technical research – Price with South-West Essex’s Principal Harry Lowery (1896–1967, an expert in musical acoustics) on the optics of hot metals, Kuhn in the American-British Laboratory of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Merton worked on military-related propaganda and psychological profiles in Columbia University’s Office of Radio Research and its successor institute, the Bureau of Applied Social Research.
Each master rose to the summit of the academic world after a short period of ministering in partes infidelium. Kuhn arrived at Berkeley in 1956 when the university there was still in the process of overcoming its provincial heritage. Merton left a lectureship at Harvard to become professor of sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans, from which he fled to Columbia in 1941. A postdoctoral Commonwealth Fund fellowship allowed Price to study theoretical physics at the universities of Pittsburgh and Princeton. From 1947 to 1950 the newly married physicist taught applied mathematics at Raffles College in Singapore, where he was briefly the colleague of the historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993).
Parkinson is famous for studying the flow of people at cocktail parties and for proposing laws regulating bureaucracies, for example, ‘work expands to fill the time available for it’. Parkinson’s search for social laws and mechanisms finds a counterpart in the life work of Kuhn, Price, and Merton. Kuhn’s description of scientific revolutions as an abrupt change from one worldview to another has brought the word paradigm (proposed earlier by Merton) to nearly the same level of recognition as Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) repression and Einstein’s relativity.3 Price’s revival of the term invisible college (first used to describe a group of seventeenth-century natural philosophers) and his discussion of exponential growth (known to historian Henry Adams [1838–1918] around 1900) have led to a large industry involved with quantifying scientific achievement.4 Merton’s elaboration of scientific norms and accumulated advantage (the Matthew Effect), his analysis of anomie in working-class America, and his pioneering development of such notions as the focus group, have made him the most widely known sociological thinker of our century.
One question attracted the interest of the three masters in the 1950s. This was the extent to which science depended on the unique contributions of isolated geniuses. They delved deeply into the phenomenon of simultaneous and multiple discoveries. A persuasive argument in favour of a social history of science would stem from the contention that notions or ideas were independent of the personal circumstances of a researcher, that particular interpretations of nature were in some sense the product of their time. The historical evidence the three men had assembled by the early 1960s demonstrated just this contention. The confluence of learned opinion, noted in Price’s book Little Science, Big Science, marks a turning point in the discipline of history of science.5
By the late 1960s, the search for a general understanding of science, stimulated by the work of Kuhn, Price, and Merton, led to renewed interest in quantitative measurement and close scrutiny of scientific institutions and specialties. What were the pathways of authority in diverse disciplines located in special cultural settings? Did all disciplines and technologies function in one way? What were the practical conditions for consolidating a new discipline? How did the constraints on and opportunities for funding generate new research programmes? Do civil unrest and war stimulate or retard the generation of new ideas? Who is qualified as a researcher in science? How have educational institutions set the pattern for scientific research? Careful attention to these questions produced scores of sophisticated analyses and monographs. As the decade of the 1960s closed, history of science, as a learned enterprise, achieved an intellectual vitality envied by many and diverse commentators.6
In Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of science, major changes can occur within a particular discipline. That is, new visions of the world do not necessarily destroy the social structures that may have nurtured them. Kuhn also wrote about how disciplines change form, capturing problem areas from neighbouring fields of study and abandoning special pursuits to a new group of researchers. The late twentieth century has witnessed unusual ferment in the evolving taxonomy of scientific disciplines. New disciplines like computing and cognition have taken away large areas of mathematics and psychology. Physicists lament hard times much as classicists complained about declining interest in their discipline a century ago. Most of all, we see the proliferation of an astonishing variety of technical discipline, complete with trade journals and academic programmes. Science is not a victim of its own success, as has been claimed; rather, the times promote technology.
Today science is threatened with absorption by technology, in the way that Hellenistic learning eroded under Roman domination. Roman architects and administrators used existing knowledge to produce monuments of temporal authority – roads, aqueducts, markets, and public buildings. The durable monuments of Roman civilization, however, were its laws. Romans used what worked to establish what was right. Abstract truth was an affair for Greek tutors.
The early twentieth-century desire to establish truth was an outcome of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, which led into modern times. But today, echoing Roman sentiment, morality is the watchword. Public servants, for example, are castigated for failing one or another standard of ethical purity. However, since we have no universally accepted notion of goodness, we are surrounded by an appeal to eclectic principles and credos. Eclecticism appears in architecture, with whimsical adornments alluding to diverse precedent. Eclecticism is revealed in the way that orchestras focus on compositions before around 1960, largely bypassing living composers. In the world of letters, all expressions have been called into question. The evidence suggests that we have gone beyond the modern.
The ‘postmodern’ approach to ideas has extended to science. In postmodernist quarters, it is sufficient to assert that all ideas are expressions of power relations. In the view of postmodernist commentators, scientific writings are merely codes for reinforcing the authority of people in charge. Knowledge, according to Michel Foucault (1926–1984), is ‘not made for understanding – instead it is made for cutting’.7 For Foucault, knowledge is about commanding people incisively. It is about separating things. It concerns morality and values. But it has no privileged claim to truth.
Historian of technology Leo Marx locates postmodernism in the political pessimism of the 1970s. In his view, postmodernists