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Nine Decades of Science in The New Yorker

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Close Tumblr Reddit Linked In Email Pinit 0 The New Yorker has been writing about science and technology for almost a century. In one of the magazines earliest science articles, Invention Factory, from 1931, the reporter Malcolm Ross visits Bell Telephone Laboratories, which occupies a ten-story building on the Hudson, at West and Bank Streets in the West Village. Ross tours the building, eager to see the research that, depression or not, the telephone company is funding to the tune of nineteen million dollars a year. On the roof, to test its durability, telephone equipment is being prematurely aged in the wind and rain; inside, technicians are working to find the combination of metals that will most efficiently carry a signal. In one lab, hundreds of researchers have been working to create an automated switchboard; in another, a hushed sanctum, mathematicians are exploring the relationship between population density and what wed now call bandwidth. For the past year, Ross writes, two airplanes have been flying around New Jersey, by day and by night, in the worst weather they can find, so that Bell Labss scientists can improve the radio systems that connect airports to pilots; related technologies are being developed for Hollywood, to help clean up the buzzing noise which is continually present in all talkies. Ross speaks to one scientist about the prospects for 3-D cinema but has sad news to report: its unlikely that movie heroines will soon appear on the screen with the rounded effect of your Uncle Stephens stereopticon collection of stage beauties. But theres better news in the ultraviolet photomicroscope lab, where a microscope Bell commissioned to look at metals is now being used to peer at chromosomes. Having finished his tour, Ross winds up his article with a surprisingly prescient statement about what Bell Labs may accomplish in the future. In recent years, he writes, scientists have come to the conclusion that all chemical actions are electrical. They have decided that atoms combine because their electrons find more stable configurations. When man, then, begins to control electrons he becomes a manipulator of nature on a competitive basis with time and chance. The tricks he has so far performed on her are as a childs experiments with a Christmas chemistry set. What he may do some day they will not talk about in West Street, but you carry away the impression that they wouldnt be surprised at anything. The questions implied by Rosss paragraph form the backdrop for much of the writing about science and technology that, over the following nine decades, has appeared in The New Yorker. What will we create next? Do we actually want to create those things? Is the technological future preordainedprinted in the circuits of todays technologyor will it surprise us? (If the latter: In a good or a bad way?) Finally, in experimenting with nature, how much are we actually experimenting with ourselves? How much of our lives do those busy, competent engineers, those mathematicians in their sanctum, really control? In a 2008 essay called Our Own Devices, Jill Lepore wrestles with the myth of technological determinism. At the bottom of a lot of writing about science, Lepore points out, theres the idea that we are what we build and what we use. In its purest form, she writes, technological determinism looks a lot like the nineteenth-century idea of progress:

[It] holds that machines are the most important force in human history, that they follow a fixed path through set stages, and that they bring about social, political, cultural, and economic change. The printing press led to the scientific revolution. The cotton gin carried slavery to the American West. The automobile drove city dwellers to the suburbs. The Pill gave birth to the sexual revolution. Surgical strikes numbed us to the agony of war. Reading through The New Yorkers archive, its easy to believe in technological determinism. You cant help but marvel at the long chains of causation that link todays world to the science of the past. In 1932s A Harvest of Inventions, for example, Gilbert Seldes meets with the inventor John Hays Hammond, Jr.; everything Hammond invents seems to prefigure our modern world. Hammond worked on a twenties version of satellite radio: a radio broadcast that could be decoded only by subscribers, allowing for programs supported by an annual tax, rather than by advertising. (The system ended up being used by Mussolini for secret communications.) And he was a pioneer in the field of radio control: he built a series of full-scale radio-controlled boats and torpedoes which allowed for combat at a distance, and were of great value to the Navy. Reading about Hammonds work, you cant help but think of our own drone warfare. Today, in 2013, our society seems profoundly surprised by drones; were just beginning to grapple with the moral and political implications of remote-controlled violence. And yet, a century ago, John Hays Hammond, Jr., was in his lab, plotting our present. The New Yorkers archive is full of stories that seem to fit squarely within a techno-determinist view of history, and they are a joy to read. (Another of my favorites is Runner-Up, a Talk story from 1958, in which a reporter visits the lab, at I.B.M.s midtown headquarters, where Alex Bernstein, a computer programmer, has created the first chess-playing computer program; it takes eight minutes to make a move and always loses, but you know there are great things to come.) Technological determinism is seductive, and not altogether untrue. Television (or ICBMs, or, who knows, but something else involving engineers), Lepore writes, probably did give us glasnost. But it also obscures as much as it reveals. For one thing, it diverts our attention from the way things might have gone, but, for contingent reasons, didnt, and in that way it distorts the historical record. For another, it undervalues the fact that, as Lepore puts it, machines arent something that happens to us; theyre something we make. Perhaps as a counterweight to all those march of technology stories, The New Yorker has devoted thousands of pages to Profiles of the people behind that science and technology. The magazine has profiled Alfred Nobel and Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke, Sylvia Earle and Emory Cook, and Buckminster Fuller and Robert Merton, along with dozens of others. By focussing on those who drive discovery and innovation, and on their motivations and life histories, the magazine has sought to show how technological progress proceeds not from some faceless process, but from the work of distinctive, memorable people. Emory Cook, for example, whose business, Cook Laboratories, sold the first stereo recordings, and whom many credit with helping to create audiophile or hi-fi culture, was a gifted engineer. But he was also motivated by an aesthetes love of music and sound, and by a soul-deep ceaseless discontent, which drove him to make ever more immaculate recordings of the sounds around him. Daniel Lang, who profiled Cook, writes about Rail Dynamics, one of Cook Laboratoriess early releases. Its essentially a record of train sounds, but the recording is so beautiful that, at the time The New Yorker profiled Cook, in 1956, it had sold fifty thousand copies. Yeseyes are useful, Cook tells Lang. But theres a time and a place for everything, and that includes sound. It takes a special kind of person, Lang suggests, to mount an earbased resistance to the televisual culture of his time. Thatnot the technologywas the real story. And some of the best science stories in The New Yorker are memoirs written by scientists. Often, they bring out the way that discovery and biography, invention and history, are mixed together. In 1979, the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a book-length memoir for the magazine, called Disturbing the Universe, which is as much about the history of the twentieth century as it is about physics. (Its one of a number of book-length science articles published serially in The New Yorker, including John McPhees Annals of the Former World and The Curve of Binding Energy, Lewis Mumfords The Megamachine, and Rachel Carsons Silent Spring.) In Enemy Alien, Max Perutz, a Nobel-winning chemist, recounts his experiences during the Second World War. As an Austrian scientist living in England, he was rounded up and put in an internment camp; later, he worked for the British government on the improbable Project Habakkuk, which aimed to build aircraft carriers out of giant icebergs. (They were called bergships; a prototype was built, using a special and effective reinforced ice, but proved impractical.) One of the most beautiful memoirs is Oliver Sackss Brilliant Light, about Sackss childhood fascination with chemistry. Many of my childhood memories are of metals, Sacks writes: They stood out, conspicuous against the heterogeneousness of the world, by their shining, gleaming quality, their silveriness, their smoothness and weight. They seemed cool to the touch, and they rang when they were struck.

The history of science and technology does have a clockwork element; each discovery does seem to lead on to the next. But there is nothing clockwork about Sackss mind and personality. In his memoir, you can see how the predictable and the personal, the universal and the unique, flow together. *** Its also true, of course, that The New Yorkers archive tells a high-altitude story about science and technology. Reading through it, you can see the concerns of each era rise to prominence and then fade away. In the forties and fifties, the magazine was interested in rockets and synthetic materials; in the sixties, it was drawn to the Green Revolution and the space program. During the Cold War, it was fascinated (and terrified) by nuclear war. Draw closer to the present, and youll see todays topics come over the horizon: medicine and biomedical science, computing and digital culture, climate change and Darwin, neuroscience and neuro-enhancement, the intersection of personal health and the market, and the business of innovation. In the last couple of decades, one of the big themes has been the way in which scientific, data-driven approaches can change the way we see everyday life. Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, and David Brooks, in Social Animal, have explored that idea. Its a long way from Ghost Hunt, a wildly entertaining 1936 Talk story about hunting for ghosts in Yorkville with the editor of Science & Mechanics magazine. But ghosts, too, were once a subject of interest; similarly, in the sixties, Kevin Wallace wrote a Reporter at Large about psychic phenomena. In 1996, when the historian of science Thomas Kuhn passed away, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about him in a short Talk story. Kuhn, in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had proposed a theory about the history of science: science advanced, he thought, not by smoothly unfurling, but by making hard-to-anticipate conceptual leaps, which he called paradigm shifts. Other historians and scientists lodged perfectly valid objections to his argument, but Kuhns idea struck a chord for simple, unassailable reasons. He taught, Gladwell writes, that the process of science was fundamentally human, that discoveries were the product not of some plodding, rational process but of human ingenuity intermingled with politics and personalitythat science was, in the end, a social process. Its fair to say that The New Yorkers approach to science and technology is Kuhnian, in this broad, social sense. Science is fascinating in itself. But it also fascinates us because of the way it fits into the world around itbecause of the way it responds to, and helps create, that world. Kuhn, writing in the sixties, used the metaphor of a revolution to describe the way that scientists swim in, and sometimes against, a social system. Times have changed, and, these days, it seems more natural to use an ecological metaphor. When you pick up any piece of this planet, Sylvia Earle, the oceanographer and marine biologist, says in her Profile, you find that, one way or another, its attached to everything elseif you jiggle over here, something is going to wiggle over there. We need this sense of the continuing interconnectedness of the system as part of [our] common knowledge. When she spoke those words, Earle was talking about the environment: about the oceans and the life they contain. But she was talking about science, too. Illustration by Glen Baxter. Keywords The New Yorker; elements; science; techpages 72
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