JSTOR

HISTORY OF SCIENCE is more than the history of scientists: it is also the history of what “science” and “nature” mean to each one of us. For too many generations, the professional scientific community has slighted the significance of what happens outside the temple of science, in large part preferring to delegate contact with the public to others because they judge that engagement with nonprofessionals holds little value for practitioners. Nonetheless, when they do encounter science in the everyday world, scientists have been repeatedly dissatisfied to find that what happens in the public sphere is not simply a replication of their own priorities, interests, and values; they have been hard-pressed to understand “the public mind,” which at times can seem to them childish, shallow, superficial, emotional, irrational, and subjective—hardly a world to take seriously. From this standpoint, the idea that the public might be a partner in the scientific community seems an unlikely prospect. Taking cues from professional scientists, many generations of historians of science also considered science in popular culture to be too trivial a matter for highly trained researchers to take seriously: why would any ambitious scholar study what is a mere sideshow to the main event?

These attitudes have had serious consequences, including a disrespect for our fellow citizens. They have also prevented scientists and historians alike from understanding what the making and interpretation of natural knowledge looks like when it occurs “flat on its belly in the middle of experience,” outside the confines of professional science, where investigations can be disciplined, standardized, and studied under controlled conditions.1 Science as it occurs within popular culture is not simply a more dilute, less sophisticated, error-plagued imitation of “real” science: it, too, is “real” science, in the encompassing sense that the “scientific imagination” belongs not only to scientists and their realms of expertise but (much like C. Wright Mills's “sociological imagination”) also to ordinary people and everyday circumstances.2

Likewise, when historians and scientists alike categorize as scientific participants only those who make a living as professionals, we miss the “unofficial” experiences of “science in the vernacular,” which have consequences that reverberate in individual lives as well as throughout the wider culture.3 These experiences include such seemingly trivial and ephemeral activities as puzzling over the view through a kaleidoscope and making pilgrimages to natural history museums and aquaria; watching Bill Nye, the Science Guy and Japanese monster movies; observing the proliferation of forensic scientists on television and significantly revised displays of dinosaur skeletons in natural history museums; or having conversations (in school classrooms, around dinner tables, and on internet blogs) about what we think might be “out there” when we gaze into the night sky.

Understanding how knowledge-making happens in these contexts, what it means, and what the consequences are can help us grapple more effectively with the challenges presented by science in public—challenges such as tension over the right relationship between scientific elites and the wider polity, or how religion is characterized in the mainstream media as being “at war” with evolutionary science, or the politics of debates over global climate change or stem-cell research, or why a junior high school student decides that he or she is—or is not—a “science person.” The consequences of these discussions and experiences receive wider attention when they have broader policy implications—as when the local school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, presented evolution as “just a theory” in its biology curriculum. But there is a much wider field of resonances within which these “sensational” events are embedded, and to ignore the field and focus only sporadically on the flashpoints gives one limited traction in working with the dynamics involved.

What is typically characterized as “science and popular culture” is often given only superficial attention by both scientists and historians because it is presumed to be inconsequential in the production of knowledge.4 A still-dominant picture of knowledge production in the history of science fits what Stephen Hilgartner has termed the “two-stage model”: first scientists create genuine knowledge; then popularizers disseminate a watered-down version to a “sponge-like,” passive public. Science studies scholars tagged this presumed dynamic and its variants with several names—such as the “diffusionist model” and the “deficit model”—and have shown how (as Hilgartner originally argued) “this view of popularization grants scientists broad authority to determine which simplifications are ‘appropriate’ (and therefore usable) and which are distortions (and therefore useless—or worse!).”5 As Nancy Tomes has recently argued, “policymakers and historians tend to ignore trends in popular culture as annoying or irrational distractions, yet these trends constitute a powerful source of information” about how different publics constitute natural knowledge.6

That said, the history of science and popular culture is far from virgin scholarly territory—starting in about 1980, a growing number of historians of science have taken on the task of identifying, hypothesizing, analyzing, and debating the features that make up the contours of the field. The gathering of a critical mass was given wider notice roughly a half-generation ago, with Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey's 1994 review article “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture.” In their painstaking survey of the contemporary currents of scholarship in this area, Cooter and Pumfrey argued that there had been many false starts but that much had been achieved in terms of the development of case studies and of a greater awareness of the complexities of the questions involved. Even still, they acknowledged, “once we leave the well-charted areas of learned science for popular science we are without a map.” Cooter and Pumfrey argued that historians of science needed to address more carefully the uses of scientific popularizations by varied audiences, for “‘popular science’ may diverge from ‘learned science,’” they suggested, “not because the latter is poorly understood, but because it is developed by its recipients for different purposes.”7

Starting from the premise that the interests of the scientific community and the investigations of historians of science and popular culture converge around issues of communication and the circulation of knowledge, we suggest that ignorance of what happens within the public sphere perpetuates exclusionary habits of mind that short-circuit engagement with science's most important epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical challenges and thereby limit the effectiveness of scientists as participants in public debates. We propose that by studying a community of scientific imagination that is larger and more diverse and that carries within it a wider body of experience than it has been traditional to consider, historians of science in popular culture could offer new ways of conceiving what “science for the people” might look like.8 By bringing into focus real-world paths between science and popular culture that have existed and exploring the rationales, ramifications, and cultural linkages that made traffic along them possible, historians of science can move beyond the often speculative information gleaned from what Jane Gregory and Steve Miller describe as “the much wielded but in some ways rather blunt instrument, the quantitative social survey.”9

Humanistic inquiry—in the form of investigations into popular science from historical, literary, and philosophical perspectives—is imperative, if the stories and events that make up the sphere of popular culture are to be made accessible for discussion. Ultimately, we argue, what we stand to gain in traveling these paths and bringing our best analytical skills and investigative tools to bear on these journeys is not simply the possibility of scholarly enlightenment, but also the positive transformation of relations between expert scientific practitioners and nonexpert public science participants. Such histories would allow for a firmer grasp of what is needed for a freer exchange of ideas; for ways to realize greater accountability and thus the establishment of real bases for trust; and, ultimately, for more creative and meaningful explorations of the natural world.

By way of examples, we offer three areas of particular interest. First, we turn to what has become a foundational area of scholarship—the field of Victorian studies of science and popular culture—where a critical mass of research on print popularization has clarified our understanding of the “birth” of both professional science and the popularization of science. Here also, we see the powerful effects that resulted from popularizers' literary strategies for communicating ideas about nature both to specialists and to lay readers. We also point out areas where questions that are just beginning to be asked introduce topics that deserve greater attention from practitioners and policy makers. One such area is that of science on display in museums. We suggest that studying emergent institutional practices at large, complex sites, including those such as late twentieth-century science museums, shows promise for clarifying the relationship between the medium and the message of popular science, especially with regard to science education. Finally, moving from site-specific material to theme-specific material, we consider how attending to seemingly two-dimensional portrayals of science in popular culture can provide critical insights about exchanges across the scientist/nonscientist divide—and how if scientists ignore the arguments to be found there they exacerbate a sense of disenfranchisement on the part of the public in regard to science.

VICTORIAN STUDIES OF SCIENCE AND POPULAR CULTURE

For anyone interested in questions about the nature of science and popular culture, it should not be surprising that those who study the past would suggest: start at the beginning. For our purpose, “the beginning” means the nineteenth century.10 It is true that in previous centuries the work of natural philosophers was embedded within a nexus that included high and low culture, that literary treatments of matters of natural philosophy had found a welcome place in the domain of polite culture (the drawing rooms and salons of the wealthy and learned elites of the Western world), and that discussions of scientific principles could be found in practical works. But there was nothing in previous centuries that could match the scale of the nineteenth century's proliferation of forms of scientific life.11 Whether measured in terms of the increasing pace and fecundity of scientific activity, the numbers of people devoted to its development, or the creation of new possibilities for widespread readerships on scientific topics—due to increases in literacy and decreases in publishing costs in the steam age, which made books, magazines, and other printed matter available in ways never before possible—the nineteenth century was a watershed. The professional world of science and the popularization of science to a variety of publics emerged together within this common environment; before 1900 there was no professional science from which we would distinguish popular science.12

In the Victorian period—as today—both popular media outlets and media literacy were undergoing unprecedented explosions: the nineteenth century's new pamphlets and newspapers have given way to the twenty-first century's Web sites and internet blogs. Indeed, the nineteenth century experienced a communications revolution of the same intensity as the communications revolution we are now undergoing as a result of the computer. Increased engagement with—rather than dismissal of—these developments might encourage scientists to see how making their knowledge of nature accessible to a broader range of stakeholders could both increase science literacy on the part of the public and lead to a better understanding of the public on the part of scientists.

Take, for example, the cultural commotion caused by the appearance of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, an anonymous popular work on evolution that appeared fifteen years before Darwin's Origin of Species. During the twentieth century the existence of Vestiges was mostly a matter for footnotes within historical scholarship, despite the shock waves the book had sent out in its historical era, both for the evolutionary sentiments it espoused and for the fact that it dared to bring scientific knowledge outside of specialist domains and into the public sphere. James Secord, in Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, gave this emergent episode in popular science its due some 150 years later, drawing kudos from scientists and historians for taking popular culture seriously. Secord described his own book as “an experiment in a different kind of history.” By focusing on the reception and the various readings of Robert Chambers's popular book on evolution, this experiment demonstrated the efficacy of recasting science's intellectual history “by looking at the basic material products of cultural life and drawing upon techniques developed for studying ordinary action.”13 In placing analysis of the scientific reception of Chambers's book on a par with analysis of its popular reception (accessed through circulation and sales records, as well as accounts from archives, newspapers, and memoirs of personal “encounters” with the book), Secord made explicit the mutual permeability of “scientific knowledge” and “popular knowledge.”14

Secord's insistence that “mundane considerations … need to become the bedrock for literary and intellectual history” implies that even “the most abstract ideas about nature”—such as evolution—should be reexamined from the perspective of communication: where, how, and why knowledge of ideas about nature was conveyed and circulated. “What once made sense as ‘the Darwinian Revolution,’” Secord writes in Victorian Sensation, “must be recast as an episode in the industrialization of communication and the transformation of reading audiences.” Elaborating later on this same argument, he suggested that

Thus while historians of science might take from Secord's work an imperative to pay attention to the readers (as well as the writers) of scientific books, another lesson suggested by his retelling of the Vestiges episode—and one arguably of greater importance for scientists—is that laboratory specialists could better communicate the key ideas of their research with their publics if they attended as carefully to the relationship between form and content in their public interventions as did the earlier popularizers.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century the then-anonymous author of Vestiges, and the thousands of readers who responded to the book, put the question of “Who speaks for science?” forthrightly on the public agenda. This question continued to resonate as a new generation of scientific practitioners began to create professional spaces for what we would come to know as the scientific enterprise. Scientists argued that it was professionals who spoke for science, as a matter of right born of expertise. But many other Victorian authors believed that what constituted “the scientific community” consisted of more than professionals, and that this rightly should be understood in liberal rather than constricted terms, and they set out precisely to push back at the boundaries being set by professionals. As Bernard Lightman argues in his essay “‘The Voices of Nature’: Popularizing Victorian Science,” popularizers responded to the kind of interest in the natural world demonstrated by the public that engaged with Vestiges by creating numerous works that “continued to give the public a sense that they participated in the production of knowledge. The publishing success of popularizers indicates that there was resistance to the claims of professional scientists to provide the only legitimate voice of nature and to their attempt to secularize science.” To see that success, consider the following startling statistic comparing two works in natural history, the first from 1858, the second from 1859: in its first ten years of being a best-seller, J. G. Wood's Common Objects of the Country sold close to sixty-four thousand copies; Darwin's Origin of Species, in comparison, sold ten thousand within that same span of time.16

Where Secord displayed the benefit of excavating the range of relations that radiated from one popular sensation, Lightman has taken on the examination of more than thirty popularizers and their diverse efforts to reach a public audience, providing a radically different picture of the “history of science” than has been conveyed through looking at professional scientists alone. Lightman's research demonstrates that “the popularizers of Victorian science not only provided alternate voices to be heard by the reading public, but also offered different ways of speaking about nature,” and it is in these different ways that lessons in communication might be most straightforwardly understood by present-day scientists as well as historians. In Lightman's view, what distinguished the successful popularizers is that they were storytellers who devised compelling narratives that allowed them to expound on the larger philosophical questions embedded within scientific discoveries. They worked especially with the “traditions of natural history, with its emphasis on the anecdote, on observation, and on the experiences of the observer.” They experimented with formats, such as the “narrative of common things” where the everyday was revealed in all its fascination (as with Wood's Common Objects), or the “evolutionary epic”—the style pioneered by Chambers in Vestiges—which “allowed popularizers to range across astronomy, geology, biology, and many other sciences, [and where] the idea of evolution became the key to finding the connections between the various branches of scientific knowledge.”17 Popularizers provided syntheses, synoptic overviews, and more: at heart, as storytellers who engaged with questions of meaning as well as providing information, they brought the larger public into communication with the search for natural knowledge by incorporating their hopes and dreams and fears and speaking directly to their experiences.18 Popularizers were part of an ongoing cultural critique in which the question of “Who speaks for science?” was answered: “All of us.” Contemporary scientists interested in engaging their various publics thus have much to learn from histories showing how narrative strategies can shape both understanding of and enfranchisement in the scientific enterprise. Given the trends toward increasing specialization and multidisciplinary collaborations in the laboratory, this lesson in communication is as pertinent to experts who need to reach out to other nonexpert scientists as it is to scientists who seek to reach out to lay publics.

SCIENCE ON DISPLAY: POPULARIZING NATURE IN MUSEUMS

Another area that has been claimed by historians of science but not fully explored for its potential to illuminate popular science is the study of science museums. As Samuel Alberti has noted, the many histories of science in museums produced in the last two decades draw on “richly detailed histories of specific institutions [that] have been supplemented by broader studies of the museum's role in society.” These accounts have been invaluable for understanding the ambitions and achievements of particular scientists working in museums, as well as how museums more generally have come to be at the contemporary cultural crossroads of scientific and public interests. At the same time, because they often ignore the educational functions of so-called new museums—functions identified as fundamental for the last hundred years by stakeholders as varied as scientists, elementary school teachers, parents, and education policy makers—historians of science have missed an important chance to understand how these complex institutions are important, if contested, sites for communicating ideas about nature and the process of science to diverse publics.19

Of special interest is how heated conversations about the relative role of public education and research in American science museums became in the years between 1940 and 1970.20 Two competing models emerged during this period, best epitomized by the views of Bradford Washburn, longtime director of the Boston Museum of Science (1939–1980), and Frank Oppenheimer, founder and director of San Francisco's Exploratorium (1968–1984). Washburn, a nature photographer and explorer, initially undertook a mission to transform a dusty, unpopular museum of natural history into a modern science center—as he put it in many annual reports, to create “a museum for everybody.” In the process he crafted a series of new displays at the Museum of Science around a simple educational philosophy: “Exposure is the important thing!” By increasing the number of interactive displays and committing to rotating displays that highlighted current advances in all the sciences, Washburn believed he could teach visitors to be inspired by science and technology. Later, in the wake of Sputnik, he further suggested that exposure of young children to science through science museums could work to “create an attitude of appreciation and understanding of science” that would help the United States overcome any future scientific manpower issues.21

The physicist Frank Oppenheimer turned to museums from a second career in high school science education because he saw “an increasing need to develop public understanding of science and technology … to bridge the gap between the experts and the layman.” Oppenheimer argued that achieving this goal would be possible only in a physical place (apart from the classroom) with what he called “a laboratory atmosphere”—a place where people of all ages, from all walks of life, could enter and “become familiar with science and technology and gain understanding by controlling its props.” “Explaining science and technology without props,” Oppenheimer wrote in 1968, “can resemble an attempt to tell what it is like to swim without ever letting a person near the water.” Displays at his Exploratorium epitomized the ideal that genuine scientific education could come only through “non-coerced” experiment (see Figure 1). Oppenheimer argued in a 1972 American Journal of Physics essay that the Exploratorium was a “playful museum”; his institution would “respond to the criticisms and the tenor of its times” by providing opportunities for its visitors to “become involved in their own [science] education process [in ways] that are difficult to achieve in school classrooms or through books, films, or t.v. programs.” This “everyman his own scientist” pedagogical philosophy manifested itself at the Exploratorium in two ways: in exhibits with which visitors could easily interact and conduct miniexperiments and in a nonlinear exhibit arrangement that encouraged free choice about how to move through the museum (Oppenheimer talked not of making visitors “behave” but of designing the space in ways that “relieve the visitor” of any “obligations”).22

Debates over what constituted effective science museum displays in this period thus both reflected and contributed to ongoing cultural conversations about the role museums would play in shaping relations between sciences and their publics. While American citizens increasingly frequented science museums, leaders and policy makers asked whether and how these institutions could be held accountable for their public role: should they be responsible for recruiting a new generation of scientists and engineers, or were their missions better conceived in terms of directly training a scientifically literate citizenry in knowledge of natural phenomena? Reconstructing this conversation provides a deeper understanding of the problem of popular science in museums—because Washburn's and Oppenheimer's models each conceived of what counted as “doing” science differently, each created a different array of possible relations between scientific practitioners and their publics. For the historian of science, the complex interaction of forces responsible for the realization of science museum displays suggests that it will not be enough to tell the story of how particular museums functioned as institutions of science. Rather, we need (to paraphrase Secord) analyses of the science museum that reflect its role as both the medium and the message of popular science. For contemporary scientists, such historical awareness would provide new tools for thinking about what constitutes meaningful public engagement through museums. More nuanced understanding of these complex historical sites will surely be important for practicing scientists, whose partnerships with museums continue to increase.23

THE “INTELLECTUAL COMMONS” OF POPULAR CULTURE: LISTENING TO THE PUBLIC

Moving beyond models, looking more closely to the history of how knowledge about nature has actually circulated among various publics and various professional worlds is equally essential for those scientists interested in developing practices that have the goal of engaging a participant public. A different approach from the deficit or diffusion models would be to take the sphere of popular culture as constituting an “intellectual commons” where something much more like multisided conversations about scientific topics take place, even if they do not proceed in the orderly, organized fashion of the specialized norms of professional discourse. Marked instead by heterogeneity, dispersion, and contradictions, this intellectual commons represents a means by which various publics can, in their turn, seek to engage scientific professionals in conversation—even if such unauthorized discourse has largely been disregarded by experts as having little meaning (or as being at worst in error and at best distressingly incomplete).

In fact, one of the most frequently occurring themes expressed within popular culture is unease with the idea of scientific elites withdrawing to private spaces beyond public contact. This theme is one that hearkens back to the formative period of professionalization that scholars of Victorian science have studied—think of the warning notes struck by such figures as Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, or Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll, or H. G. Wells's pair of doctors from The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau—and continues on today in a variety of literary and cinematic genres in which the “mad scientist” image still resonates. What has been less well attended to are those instances where popular culture has offered suggestions for corrective measures—not necessarily through direct argument but, rather, by providing counternarratives that draw on images that are just as familiar as the cautionary ones. One example is the creation, circulation, and validation of ideal images of “the intimate scientist” to offset conventional images of the disciplined objectivity of the detached and neutral scientific worker who exists only within the confines of the laboratory.

Here, someone like the American horticulturist Luther Burbank (1849–1926) figures into a reconstruction of a forgotten legacy of counternarratives: Burbank is little noted today, yet for several generations, beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, he was one of the most famous scientific figures in the United States (and known throughout the world). Among the most resonant aspects of the Burbank stories that were carried in newspapers and mass-market magazines were the facts that he was a scientist who worked at home (his plant experiments took place on his own grounds), that he was accessible to the ordinary people who beat a path to his door, and that he was held to have become “a partner of Nature”—that is, one whose investigations had all led him “away from the idea of a dead, material universe … to that of a universe which is absolutely all force, life, soul, or thought, or whatever name we may choose to call it.”24

Burbank's potency as an image of the intimate scientist began to lessen by the 1950s, but new media variants arose to carry that image forward. One example appeared on American television screens on 20 March 1957 in the form of “Dr. Research,” a character created by renowned film director Frank Capra as the star of Hemo the Magnificent, a science documentary on the physiology of blood. Capra expressly stated to his sponsors at Bell Telephone that “one of the objectives of this program is to show that science is an integral part of the lives of everybody, and not just an esoteric pursuit of a select few in ivory towers who are indifferent to the laws of God and country.”25 Dr. Research was meant to personify just this sentiment: played by Frank C. Baxter, a University of Southern California English professor who was known to the television-viewing public through his popular programs on Shakespeare and English literature, he is an affable, grandfatherly guide who is as relaxed in speaking with nature itself—in the form of a set of whimsical cartoon characters—as he is in communicating with the viewing audience (see Figure 2).26 This feat is even more notable given that a major thread of the cinematic conversation is about what we would see today as an incendiary topic: the relation of science and religion. Attentive and patient with the questions that were posed by his cartoon figures about the origins of life, Dr. Research reveals that he has little use for a merely materialistic universe, even as he has the utmost respect for the pursuit of scientific knowledge. The focal sequence in Hemo is Dr. Research's tracing of the evolution of life forms from the first one-celled creatures in the sea to more advanced animals emerging from the ocean onto the land, until humans themselves evolved. He assuredly touches on the connections between evolutionary science and a divine plan: the composition of our life-sustaining blood, the professor explains, is essentially the same as that of the primeval sea that first sustained life in its simplest form. Thus, through Capra's storytelling expertise, Dr. Research offers an interpretation of hard scientific facts that offers room for spiritual mystery and wonder, presenting (in comparison with earlier Victorian archetypes) another exemplar of a scientist who is “a partner of Nature.” The experiential, epistemological, and metaphysical values carried by such depictions can be powerful precisely because they subvert more disciplined and restrictive images of science simultaneously circulating within the intellectual commons of the vernacular.