In conversations about the sad state of science literacy in America, Sputnik usually comes up. (It's not at Godwin's Law status yet, but it's close.) The argument is that we either are in a "Sputnik moment" that researchers can use to make the case for greater investment in science, or that we need such an event to reinforce the importance of science in this country.
The problem is, as David Goldston pointed out in this week's issue of Nature, that the story isn't so simple. America was not a scientific backwater at the time of the launch of Sputnik, and (as is often the case with events said to spark revolutions or renaissance) science spending was already on the increase beforehand. Sputnik may have placed a little more emphasis on technological development, but the change it spurred in science was not as dramatic, instantaneous, or sweeping as people seem to believe.
Our affinity for simple, heroic stories of triumph and progress might even hinder present efforts to gain more support for science because we are hoping for something unrealistic. As Goldston concludes;
As George Orwell put it, whoever controls the past controls the future. The stories we tell about the past influence how we go about building the future and how we respond to political obstacles today. The Sputnik itself was benign, but the heroic tale that it spawned can cause real damage. Scientists present the story as a heartening and apolitical Aesopian fable: science is first ignored, then the need for it is recognized by all, and then it rides singlehandedly to the rescue of the nation. That has left the scientific community far too easily discouraged when it confronts the real political world and needlessly short of stories to deploy on its own behalf.
Over the past year I have taken a much greater interest in the history of science, and it is surprising how often laments of the past mirror those made by scientists today. The problem is that too many scientists want to appeal to history for guidance but don't know how to separate favorite stories from real history. There has always been a struggle to improve science education and gain more funding for research, and some periods are more lean than others, but we do a disservice to ourselves if we continue to believe that science can be catapulted to the forefront if we make the situation sound dire enough.
- Log in to post comments
The story in microcosm:
Isaac Asimov wrote on several occasions that it was Sputnik which motivated him to become a full-time science writer and work for the education of the country. (He was happy to see his books translated into Russian, too.) However, he had been writing both science fiction and straight-up science for years before Sputnik; what changed was not so much his career but rather his emphasis and proportion.
So the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study was not established in response to Sputnik, as Ronald R. Numbers states in "The Creationists" (new edition, p. 264-265)?
Blake; Good analogy.
Michael; I actually don't have that book. (It's on my list, though.) There were some changes in response to Sputnik, and perhaps that was one, but the point I was making was that it wasn't as enormous a change as we are often told. The reaction to Sputnik did not instantly "save science."
I've actually been meaning to look at the response to Sputnik in more detail because I've been a little skeptical of the treatment I have heard it get, but perhaps Numbers is correct in terms of the BSCS. It definitely merits some investigation.
The establishment of new educational standards is important, but it's not exactly a cultural shift or an overnight tectonic displacement of the Zeitgeist!
If you want to pinpoint an event which transformed science itself, rather than science education or the public perception of it, I'd go twelve years earlier to the explosions of the first atomic bombs. These definitely had a cultural impact (and I use the word impact advisedly), but they also changed the way the scientific enterprise was organized: one factoid I recall from James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman was that before the bomb, only one-sixth of scientific research funding came from the government, while after the bomb, one-sixth came from all non-government sources combined. To put the matter a little simplistically and over-dramatically, the modern grant system was forged in the firestorm of Hiroshima.
Damn, I must have eaten a Purple Prose Pill with breakfast this morning. . . .
Before the effects wear off, Blake, write something up about it. Seriously. :)
This actually feeds into an essay I've been contemplating for a while, on why I find most of the talk about "paradigms" and such rather dissatisfying. (Whether the typical view espoused about "the nature of scientific revolutions" is an accurate representation of Kuhn's ideas is a different question. I could accuse myself of attacking a straw man, but in this case, I think the straw man is alive and wandering the streets.) I tend to ponder over my arguments while walking to work and the like, so remarks like those above come out naturally. Unfortunately, I'm already so far behind on writing things I've promised people — book reviews and so forth — that I'm trying very hard not to start anything new before I've cleared the queue of items currently pending.
Sputnick occurred while I was an undergraduate. It did stir up interest and concern in the public about the state of American science. It is my recollection, possibly faulty, that the BSCS curriculum was one of the responses.