The process of dismantling scientific facilities is an area that I find increasingly interesting. Historians of science are prone to look at the constructive phases: who built what research facilities and when, how where difficulties ovecome in actually getting the complicated scientific instruments working. I am, of course, no exception; in my PhD dissertation, I studied how astronomy in Sweden changed as photography, spectroscopy, and similar technologies were introduced, and in my latest publication - just finished proofreading a book chapter on Swedish solar science in the post-war period - I study Yngve Öhman, whose work very much was about inventing and introducing new stuff; early in his career, together with Bernard Lyot, he invented the so-called Lyot-Öhman filter, used at every solar observatory, and then a steady stream of instruments and new things and observing stations and methods flowed from his fertile imagination. A cynic could construe it as a lingering whigism in the field of history of science - but that is perhaps a bit harsh - or it could be seen as a natural outcome of the historian’s interest in change over time; anyway: we tend to study new things.
It’s a bit like in the history of technology, that often studies new technologies rather than looking at mature and even old technologies, a critique discussed in The shock of the old by David Edgerton and Svante Lindqvist, “Changes in the Technological Landscape: The Temporal Dimension in the Growth and Decline of Large Technological Systems” in Granstrand ed., Economics of Technology (Amsterdam, 1994).
So, I have the idea of actually doing some work on dismantling science (as opposed to just being interested in the phenomenon in a general and vague way); what will come out of it I don’t know: yet another entry in my list of unrealized ideas, materialized by yet another box of xerox copies of source materials and printouts of unfinished, unpolished and unpublished manuscrips on my shelf; a conference presentation; a published paper; a large-ish research project or even a book. We will see. But what I do know is that I will post fieldnotes along the way here on Imaginary magnitude. Howard S. Becker writes about how he talked “to anyone who would listen” about what was about to become his next paper, long before he even began writing (Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your thesis, book, or article (Chicago, 1986), 100f). Perhaps blogging can work in the same way. I don’t know, but perhaps after a number of blog posts the threshold to actually writing something and sending it off to an editor somewhere is overcome.
So expect every once in a while to find links and snippets of text here. And, oh, I have a slightly grandiose suggestion for a name of this endeavour: “Shutting down science: the politics and practice of dismantling research infrastructure”.
Let’s start with today’s issue of Nature, where it is reported that European astronomy is working on a plan to prioritize among astronomy projects; the Astronet infrastructure roadmap is compared, by Nature, with the long-established surveys of US astronomy made every decade.
Astronet’s priority, the European Extremely Large Telescope - if you’re not following astronomy closely, let me remind you that there is a Very Large Telescope in actual existence and an Overwhelmingly Large Telescope in the project design stage; astronomers are currently running out of superlatives to describe their projects - will cost €1 billion.
So shutting down some existing facilities could free up resources that could be pooled to the 40 metre giant that is Astronet’s goal. Therefore the organization “is already reviewing the roles of some smaller, two- to four-metre European telescopes in an attempt to eliminate research overlap”, Nature observes and notes that in the future similar reviews of telescopes in the eight-metre class could come.
So one large telescope, correction: an extremely large telescope, is pitted against smaller telescopes, cutting edge during the 1980’s but nowadays left behind in a race to bigger telescopes where Europe risks being outrun by the US.
What the Nature piece does not dwell on is who might speak for the smaller telescopes. There ought to be some scientific reasons for the continued operation of at least a number of telescopes in the two to four metre class. With a very big telescope, one can observe things impossible to see with smaller telescopes but use of such giant telescopes will be oversubscribed; typically observers on it will get small slots of telescope time. This type of instrument is not geared to doing time-consuming survey projects. Some types of objects that need to be monitored for longer periods of time can be studied by such smaller telescopes that are proposed for shutdown.
I am curious if the harmony in the European astronomical community implied in the Nature article is real, or if there are groups of the community that rather would keep a larger group of telescopes working. I really don’t know.
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