About
I am Gustav Holmberg, a historian of science specializing in history of astronomy and the history of food related research and technology. Technology and science, skills, research organization, research policy, science and the media are some areas I’m interested in.
Despite being a historian, I am also curious about the goings on in modern science. One way to learn more about that is to spend some time reading science magazines, blogs and so on. The Trading Zone is my notebook from that exploration, containing links, quotes, comments collected and written along the way.
The title comes from Peter Galison’s work in the recent history of science. A trading zone develops when scientists from different scientific subcultures meet to exchange and try to work together, even though they might have radically different backgrounds.
It is Galison’s way of saying that a for example a scientific discipline at the same time can consist of radically different groups, and have some kind of coherence. Or, in his own words: “sharply different global meanings can nonetheless come to (even very complex) coordination in specific contexts. Such a partial sharing of meanings became salient at many points in the history of laboratory practice and the material culture of physics.” (Peter L. Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, Chicago University Press, 1997, p. 804.)
I find that a rather telling metaphor for what’s going on in some parts of the scientific world.