Once the war had ended, Conant assembled a team of research and teaching assistants to scour the archives and write, sometimes for the first time in English, definitive accounts of major episodes in scientific history. Phlogiston, the purported substance inherent to combustible bodies that made them flammable, got a chapter. So did the history of the atom, and the calorie, and electric charge. “I believe,” Conant said, “that the case-history method is the nearest we can come to the more ideal procedure of having every leading citizen spend a year or two looking over the shoulders of research men in various kinds of laboratories.”2
Conant’s project is an example of what I call naive history of science. Naive history of science comes from the belief that science is a linear march of progress, an ever-growing stack of giants standing on each other’s shoulders, and that by studying how this process played out in the past, we can ensure that it continues into the future. It assumes that by understanding the science of simpler times, we can gain insight into our over-complex present.
As an undergraduate student in mathematics and physics, I was a believer in naive history of science. I knew that every equation in physics represented decades of fighting among scientists — each derivation a museum of passion projects — but this backstory was never revealed to me. I thought the only way to truly understand the textbook physics of the present was to unearth the physics of the past, working our way up from simplicity to complexity.
I assumed that the place to go if I wanted to acquire this knowledge was graduate school in the history of science. Surely if anywhere was going to teach me the arc of scientific progress in its totality, this was it.
This wasn’t it.
I was surprised to learn that the history of science involves almost no learning about science. Today, the field is interested in situating science in its political, economic, and cultural context, rather than explaining how anyone actually figured anything out. The product I was seeking had been discontinued for 75 years.
This was, in large part, because naive history of science failed as a pedagogical and a philosophical approach. It failed because teaching people the history of chemistry did not make them more skilled chemists, policy-makers, or citizens. It failed because the science of the past isn’t simpler than the science of the present, and because naive history of science depended on a view of science the American public came to resent.
The story that follows is an inquiry into naive history of science, what replaced it, and how the field called “history of science” has changed since Conant’s day. Several years into graduate training, I no longer believe in the naive approach I once sought; I now view it as one among many possible uses of history — to inspire, to educate, to critique, to deconstruct, to expand the imagination. We ignore the lessons of history at our own peril: so too the lessons of writing history.
