Simon Schaffer

SIMON SCHAFFER : THREE INERVIEW-SESSIONS WITH ALAN MACFARLANE FROM 27 JUNE TO 2 JULY 2008

AM

It's a great pleasure to have a chance to talk with an old friend, Simon Schaffer. Simon, when and where were you born?

SS

I was born in Southampton in 1955 on New Year's Day and apparently, I think this may or may not have affected me, the first question my mother asked the nurses when she came to was what the cricket score was because England were playing Australia on the other side of the world. She was far more interested in that than this child that had just appeared.

AM

Were you the first child?

SS

I was the first and the only child and within less than 10 months we left for Australia, not just to watch cricket but my father was teaching in political science at Southampton University and my mother was working as a trainee librarian, she'd been a civil servant before then. And for reasons it's interesting, I guess, to think back to, to do with what must have seemed to that generation, a very clever, London, Jewish, left wing, LSE trained couple with major political, scientific, cultural interests, a provincial British University in the middle of the 1950s would have seemed and must have seemed unpromising and depressing. So they became what's known in the trade as “£10 poms”, that's to say they got an assisted passage to Australia on a rather unpromising ocean liner called the 'Himalaya' and the voyage in those days would have taken six weeks through the canal. So just before the Suez Crisis, this is 1955, this is the late 55s and Nasser is about to nationalise the Canal. And this for a post that my father got in political science at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, and I spent the next decade in Brisbane. My mother became a librarian at the University and my father became a professor in political science and in the nascent discipline of development studies. So he did a lot of work in New Guinea, in the Highlands and elsewhere in the South Pacific, but mainly in New Guinea. And I remember extremely well going to what obviously then was a terribly exciting place, Brisbane Airport, late 1950s, watching my father fly off to the unknown North and coming back with souvenirs and objects and maps and pictures of the most extraordinary other world. Penis sheaths and amazingly carved spears, amazing, of which we've still got some, and a deep suntan, the knee-high white socks, the beard that of course goes along with that sort of fieldwork at that sort of time. But this is not anthropology, though there were lots of anthropologists around in those days. It was very much political science turning itself into a kind of development studies, and I guess even for a child that was an interesting question. This was during the period of transition, that's to say this was an Australian administered territory, PNG, at this period. And there was a lot of cricket and there was a lot of swimming and there was always a cricket match on Christmas Day in temperatures of slightly over 95 degrees Fahrenheit. There had to be Christmas pudding.

AM

And Father Christmas?

SS

And Father Christmas. And the dog, because we always had a dog, was always the wicket keeper. Rather ineffective but still pretty good. By this stage we're in the late 50s, early 60s, so about four or five years old. They built their own house on what was then the outskirts of Brisbane, a clearing in the bush with gum trees as far as the eye could see and a creek ran through it. And goannas, big lizards, lived next to the creek. And no main drainage, so a septic tank which was fantastic because you could grow papyrus in the septic tank. And I remember trying to make paper out of the papyrus and cutting it down and pasting it out and putting it in the sun to dry. And that was my first experience of re-enactment. And really a halcyon period. I think if you're a relatively active child, suburban white Brisbane in the period of the Cold War was as near heaven as you were likely to get. Looking back on it, there were all sorts of blindnesses. There was a complete blindness, and my mother and I have much spoken about this, about Aboriginal society. I'm probably wrong about this, but I think that at this stage, for example, Aborigines were not allowed to live north of the Brisbane River. There's this very large river that flows through the city and divides it in two. And it was essentially like Alabama. I mean there was internal control of that sort. There was a Salvation Army school next to my primary school which had some Aboriginal children in it, and they came to our school. But they were very tightly controlled. And the quotidian racism of the society went from the white point of view absolutely unmarked. So in every other respect, I was brought up in a socialist household, and this was invisible. In retrospect that's very, very interesting. The other thing that's quite striking perhaps is how little one travelled. This was still a world of immense distance. So you got from Australia to Britain on a boat, of course. When we came back, we came on a P&O boat, again through the canal. And since we were obviously the storm crows of world politics, this was one of the last boats through the canal before the '67 war. We couldn't land in Aden in '65 because of the fighting in Aden that culminated with the British being thrown out. So that meant we had longer in Egypt, so we were able to go to the pyramids and so on. It was a world which still looked in all sorts of ways colonial, of course. And the waiters on the boats were from Goa. As I said, there was Christmas pudding at Christmas because it was Christmas, even though meteorologically this was a complete disaster. If you went to Sydney, you went on the train, amazingly. And the gauge changes at the border between Queensland and New South Wales, and I remember very well these midnight unpleasantnesses of getting out of your sleeper and walking across the platform at Armidale or somewhere, so you can get on another train with a slightly broader gauge because the guys in New South Wales had broad gauge trains and so on. So a world now immemorially ancient, after all. And I think that also is quite important to think about, that very recent history, and certainly very recent in terms of generations, can take you to a place where technology and culture and expectation and assumption are utterly alien. A good L.P. Hartley thought, right, they do things differently there. But on the whole, absolutely blissful childhood, nothing to complain about, except the mosquitoes, which I hated, and the fact that primary education in Cold War Queensland was entirely 19th century, as I now realise. One was taught copper plate with a nib pen and ink wells, good solid dark blue Indian ink. And I hated that every Monday night because I'd blot my homework and mum and dad had to kind of console me when I had to write it all out again. There was a lot of mental arithmetic and learning by rote. There was a lot of colonial history learned. We learnt more about the Wars of the Roses than we did in Brisbane in 1958 than we did, let's say, about what archaeologists were finding about the human history of Australia. Australian history, as far as we were taught, began in 1788 with this little prelude with Cook, but essentially the arrival of the First Fleet in January of 1788 was the beginning of history for us. And then there was this other stuff that happened in Europe and that was it. And the primary school was divided into houses, of course, and each house was named after a heroic Australian explorer, Cook, Flinders, Oxley, Sturt, people like that, who had opened up this unknown world. So that was the vision. And then every, I guess, Thursday evening, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which was our sole source of news really, there was no television in my house.

AM

There weren't many televisions in anyone's house at that time.

SS

I can remember our first telly, it would be in the mid-60s. ABC would broadcast a short program called 'Window on the West', with appropriate music underneath, which was entirely oriented towards what was obviously beginning to affect us more and more. I can remember Dag Hammarskjöld's death being reported in the Congo. I can remember the beginning of the Vietnam War and the Australians were going to enter the war on the American side. And I can remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of '62. But absolutely oriented towards a kind of Anglo-American world, not, as it were, towards where Australia is. It was a Commonwealth world view.

AM

Can I just go back a little bit? Some people go back beyond their parents to grandparents and where they came from. Is it worth saying that in your case? Did know your grandparents?

SS

I knew my mother's parents. I mean, that's a sadness about the family, which is that both my father's parents died while we were in Australia, so that I never met them. I mean, obviously I met them when I was less than one. And in that sense, my father's side of the family was kind of unknown. On the other hand, he had two sisters, one of whom is very much still with us, who were my closest relatives when we returned to Britain, and very important for me.

AM

What sort of family?

SS

These are, I mean, these were good, solid London, lower middle class Jewish family.

AM

Originally from?

SS

Originally from Lithuania, mainly, and Vilna. So their parents had left around about the time of the 1905 revolution and the pogroms of that period.

AM

It's the same background as Sidney Brennan and Aaron Klug.

SS

This is the standard story. I was told, I feel, I may be wrong about this, comparatively little to nothing whatsoever about all this. There had been family in the Netherlands, most of whom had been murdered by the Nazis, though some had survived and we met them and they're very dear to us. There was obviously a very extended family in North London who looked after us when we came back to England for the first time, who were very close cousins and so on. My sense was that my father was treated as the absolutely delightful, entirely eccentric, often inexplicably intellectual member of an otherwise very, very solid family, that every generation one had to produce, what in Yiddish is called a hashem, which comes from the Hebrew word for learned, but it has that nuance of cannot tie up his shoelaces or indeed navigate his way around the world. Yiddish has many words for that character for obvious reasons. Melammed and Nebbish, Shlemiel and so on. What's the difference between a Nebbish and a Shlemiel? When a Shlemiel drops his toast it always lands on the buttered side and a Nebbish butters both sides. So you might bring these disasters upon yourself but in general they happen to you. Nevertheless, given how Jewish, especially Ashkenazi Jewish culture had developed, there was a very strong sense that you had to have such a person around, that there had to be at least one clever boy in the family and I think there was some kind of expectation that that was going to be me.

AM

And your mother's side?

SS

Mum's father was a shoe salesman and a very, very good one, who was from South London and therefore a Surrey supporter, unlike the rest of the family, that was a source of some tension. And he was an adorable man whom I miss enormously, who was one of the most benevolent people I've ever seen or met. Everything was fine. He was brilliant at selling shoes evidently and he retired long before I met him. And his wife, my mother's mother, also absolutely delightful. They moved to, essentially been evacuated to Torquay during the war, which is where my mum grew up and where she went to secondary school. Torquay Grammar School for Girls. So that had sort of taken them into a different world, right, and they'd retired to Bournemouth, not London, right, and that seemed pretty exotic, right, for the family, I think. We used to travel to Bournemouth to visit them at regular intervals.

AM

I sometimes pick up things out of sequence and quite a lot of, well, a certain amount of this has been about your Jewish background and I've been watching a series on television about Jews. It might be nice just to reflect if you had anything more to say about whether that, in what ways, apart from being expected to be the clever one, what other ways it might have influenced you.

SS

Yeah, I've thought about that a bit. I mean, certainly I would say at least these two things. One is the sense of observing things from the side, of being absolutely assimilated without being a member, of trying to think of a slightly different perspective, of noticing perhaps a little more, only a little more quickly what's being taken for granted here, right, because if one almost by definition doesn't share quite all the assumptions of the group, which you are nevertheless completely absorbed with it, right. It's why, you know, I mean I wouldn't dare, wouldn't dream of claiming the equivalent role that say cricket plays for C.L.R. James, right, but it's obvious that there's a relation between, you know, in what I'm reminiscing about, between cricket and Judaism in this very interesting way. Absolutely absorbed, absolutely not, right, looking at things slightly from one side but being completely assimilated within a culture. These are assimilated and essentially secularised. There is no religious observance. There is religious observance but this is a culture and many people have commented on this, which can be entirely observant in religious terms. There are rabbis in my ancestry, some very eminent ones, without actually having as it were belief.

AM

Church of England and all that.

SS

Exactly. The old Christopher Hill anecdote. Is it Christopher Hill I think? “Sarge, there's a guy here who says he's an atheist, I'll put him down C of E”. It's a bit like that. So a family life absolutely absorbed by the synagogue, by bar mitzvahs, I was bar mitzvahed, by all sorts of rituals, the Passover dinner and so on, without it ever seem to me having any or at least hardly any correlative belief in anything of the theological or spiritual kind. I mean this was absolutely phenomenological Judaism and I think that's a very dominant pattern indeed because maintaining the culture is maintaining the faith. So there's that. And then I think the other thing I've said is an expectation, perhaps in my case a slightly resigned expectation directed towards me that this one is going to be the incompetent and the clever one. The sense that literary, intellectual, scientific life is indispensable and that a very important element of the culture and the family is maintained through that. And that's a very familiar point about that kind of group I think. So this kind of I think very interesting balance between membership and alienation because this was an extraordinarily assimilated generation. And on the other hand a sense that the life of the mind was absolutely legitimate, probably indispensable but for the minority. Not everyone was going to do that, not everyone was going to go to university, not everyone was going to get a university job but I was a campus brat anyway so it kind of followed.

AM

I mean there has been a great deal of speculation as to why a much larger than predicted percentage of Jewish people are represented in the sciences particularly and in the arts and so on in this country and all sorts of theories are put forward. That sounds part of the answer that there's always one or two who are in a sense pushed forward to do that. Are there other reasons?

SS

And also I do want to emphasise this, that strange sociological mixture of pride and resigned tolerance. This is not a culture that heroises learning and the intellectual. On the contrary, I mean a lot of the humour is entirely about the complete uselessness, incompetence and general catastrophe of intellectuals as any worthy members of society. That's one of the spines of Jewish wit. On the other hand a sense that this is potentially a way up and out. So again there's this rather interesting tension between absolute membership and slight alienation that one accepts the idea that pursuing the intellectual career is one of the noblest things you can do but it's a way out from the culture that is validating it. This is how you get out of the ghetto after all. This isn't how you stay within the ghetto. Not everybody can be a rabbi. So I find that quite interesting. It's a ticket out of a culture that demands that you do this. So there's something very complicated and interesting going on there I think.

AM

What about the whole idea of the ghetto in the sense that it's sometimes alleged that the push towards intellectual activities is partly because many other things are...

SS

forbidden...

AM

...or you can't join the army or you can't do this and that.

SS

I mean I think historically that must be right and that's clearly an absolutely crucial factor across a vast range of activities. But for the moment that we're thinking about now that isn't in operation. Rather the other way around. Of course there'll never be, one might have said, a captain of the England cricket team who's Jewish because we actually don't know how to hold a ball. This physical incompetence is really important. Obviously I'm clinging to that as a kind of defence mechanism. But I do think it plays a role. It's also, to generalise wildly, it's also notoriously associated with the incredible tensions around Zionism.

AM

Around Zionism?

SS

Yes. That were in play and remain, if not massively, more in play. My parents were always ambivalent at a period when I didn't know anyone in the family was about the Zionist project. The identification between, as it were, Jewish intellectual and social life and support for Israel was unquestioned except in our part of the family. And that became more and more complicated I think as the 60s and 70s went on. I went to Israel in what would now be known as my gap year to the Hebrew University and it was an amazing and eye-opening experience both ways. Both in terms of I think becoming better informed about what was happening in the Middle East at that period but also completely disillusioned, permanently frankly, about the Zionist project. So the reason I'm mentioning that is partly because Zionism in interesting ways after all notoriously wanted to break a certain kind of stereotype around the Jewish figure and to replace it with a more physical, more athletic, more militant, more virile image. That was part of the point. That was what Herzl was after in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. And that was obviously massively in tension with an image of urbanity and of the life of the mind. I mean there was a huge tension there within the formation of Zionism and its various iconographies. And the idea of working on a kibbutz did not ever appeal it has to be said. Not for ideological reasons at that stage but just because I couldn't imagine anything worse than getting up at five in the morning and picking oranges.

AM

Which you never did.

SS

Which I never did, no. And lots of people did. Lots and lots. Including non-Jewish people one should remember. I mean in the '60s through to the Yom Kippur War of '72, one could imagine idealistic volunteers from Europe going to Israel to work on a kibbutz. Whether they were Jewish or not. That's a very interesting thing again to remember. All that is gone.

AM

That was one of my plans when I left university. Fish farming on a kibbutz. Just two further things about that very early period. One is you've spoken warmly about your grandparents on one side anyway. What about the personalities of your parents? How did they, do you think that shaped, I mean did they encourage you very much in reading or?

SS

Oh yes. I mean they're the most important people in my life. And my father who died in 1984 was very careful. They both were very careful not to be seen actively to direct me. Yet always to provide any resources that I needed. I was a ridiculously spoiled child. I mean ridiculously so. And I was the only child and so on. And certainly the assumption that the good life consisted of music, books, long walks and serious conversation was just absolutely taken for granted, completely pervasive. And one was treated like a grown up from the get go. So that, and my mother still I think is extraordinary in this respect that she is no respecter of rank or person and simply treats everyone in the same way, whoever they are. And that was a fundamental idea. And I hope I learned from that. I think I did learn from that. I mean I don't think I followed it but I certainly learned from it. So that interesting mixture of a kind of unmarked literary intellectual culture, not saying this is how we live, not how they live, but this is how everyone lives. And a deeply principled egalitarianism. I mean the snobbishness was the thing they loathed the most I think, more than anything else. And that in turn obviously related to lots of other issues like trying to see things from other people's points of view. I think I must seem to them. So most of this implicit, as I guess it is for most people, but absolutely indispensable, as I guess it is for most people too.

AM

The second thing is about the first school. You said it was very out of date and lots of copying and splotching of ink and things like that. Were there any teachers or anyone, even at that stage, who were beginning to...

SS

That's a very interesting question, isn't it. I liked my teachers and they were very good at their job. It's just that in retrospect I think it was the wrong job. And I can remember them all pretty well. In particular one primary school teacher, Mrs. Flynn, the daughter of a flying doctor from Central Australia. Initial T, that's T for trouble. And they were anything but inspirational. It was very clear that they were not teaching these children so that these children would become like them. They were teaching these children in a very rigid and very robust curriculum and then send them on to other things. That was a primary school. In 1965 we came back to Britain, a different universe and a very different school in fact. So what should one say about that?

AM

What was the school?

SS

Well, before I get on to the school, I guess one has to think about why we came back. We have the Robbins Report, the expansion of British universities, the coming to power of the Labour government in 1964. And I think again, much of this is in retrospect, the very remarkable return to or arrival in Britain of a very significant cohort of formerly expatriate intellectuals. So one of the new universities was Sussex. Sussex set up an institute of development studies. They offered a job to my father. He took it, we moved to Brighton and they stayed in Brighton from then on and that's where I went to secondary school. Unrecognisably different experience of course, starting with the fact that the beach had no sand. That was the first thing, if you'll pardon the expression, that hit me to such an extent that I thought the English must have dumped vast amounts of pebbles for no obvious reason on this beach. And the usual remarks about the weather and so on. Living in a rather chilly house before we moved into a proper one and opposite the secondary school. We came back then when I was 10. Still had the 11 plus regime in Brighton. So this was the summer of 1965 and I was therefore 10 and a half. Question. Should I go to primary school and then take the 11 plus or should I go straight to secondary school? So I was taken to an educational psychologist who asked me the usual questions about, you're provided with three pint pots and a quart of water. How do you get four and a quarter pints? And so on. And apparently I answered all those questions correctly and was sent straight to grammar school. Varndeen Grammar School for Boys as it then was. So a single sex school.

AM

What's it called?

SS

V-A-R-N-D-E-A-N. The only distinguished old boys are Paul Schofield and Steve Ovett, who was a contemporary of mine and a brilliant athlete, otherwise not a very nice man.

AM

Is that to go on the internet?

SS

Why not? And Natasha Koplinsky, who was there long after me. And it was a very good grammar school. It was ridiculously selective. It was single sex. One wore ferociously policed uniforms, including caps. There were prefects, there were houses, there were gowns for the teachers. There was Latin. There was amazingly intense teaching of, I realise, a very high order indeed. And we lived opposite the school. So I thought that was great. So from a rather early age I could come home for lunch since that meant avoiding school dinners, which was one of the great victories of my life. And these were semolina and... And I was accelerated through the school so I missed out the fifth form. So I took O levels as they then were when I was 14 and A levels when I was 16. And what should one say about that? Severall of the teachers were completely inspirational for me. Especially the teacher of mathematics, Ron Woolner, whom I wish here to commemorate, who was a descendant of Thomas Woolner, the great Victorian artist and sculptor who painted 'The Last of England'. Or who rather is in 'The Last of England'. He didn't paint it. And whom I subsequently discovered has a bust of Whewell in Trinity. Anyway, his descendant taught me mathematics and he was fantastic. I mean he absolutely inspired me. And a remark that one might want to think about there. I thought myself correctly very bad at arithmetic. And he sat me down one day and said, mathematics is not arithmetic. And he talked to me for about half an hour on my own about the difference between mathematics in terms of these elegant and beautiful manipulations of signs and arithmetic, which is two times four. And the fact that I was rather bad at sums had nothing to do with whether I was going to be any good as a mathematician. And that was completely amazing. I mean no one had ever said that or spent that much time saying that with me before. Similarly I have to say the English teacher, Mr. Hunningham, was magnificent in the way that really good English teachers can be. That is to say, letting people work at their own speed and level, but spotting people who could read quite fast and not exactly ordering them to read stuff, but as it were laying out in front of them the lily pads for them to jump on. He was really good at that. And he encouraged us to start our own drama club independently of the rather formal classical school drama club. So alongside the annual play, almost always either Shakespeare or something, we could do other things. Plays by John Arden for example, I mean 60s playwrights in other words, that was great. But all of this happening in once again an institution entirely out of time after all. This is the late 60s in Brighton. This is the Who. The Isle of Wight Festival happens when I'm 13 and I knew lots of people were hitching from Brighton to the Isle of Wight to see Hendrix or whatever. And that was light years from the world of this very conservative, but I think brilliantly administered and taught Grammar school. I mean there was a real sense of two worlds with almost nothing to do with each other. And I left when I was 16. The other aspect of it which is important to this story is that with my father's rather special and enthusiastic support, I did science. So for my O-Levels I did the O-Levels in subjects I wasn't going to go on with. And then I did A-Levels in physics and chemistry and maths in the sixth form. And my father was delighted by this because he was an unquestioning admirer of the sciences, was delighted that his son was going to be a scientist and would therefore escape all the problems of humanities and social knowledge and so on and learn how to make true discoveries about true facts of reliable and useful kind, unlike the stuff that he was doing. So I didn't realise that at the time, I didn't realise how much enthusiasm there was for this course that I was taking. But in retrospect I realised when they were over the moon that I was actually going to do science.

AM

Were there, you've mentioned that you're not very good with catching balls and things like this, but were there any kind of more outdoor activities?

SS

Well I played hockey for the school and was a pretty good defender, because being sort of squat and fairly strong around the shoulders I guess, I was very good at that. Until I got a hockey stick between the eyes, and many stitches, and that sort of damaged my confidence a bit about going into a tackle. My mother remembers the horror with which she was phoned up from school and told Simon's in hospital and he has blood pouring from a gash over his nose, that was a rather bad moment. And there was a lot of swimming, because I was from Australia and you swim, much more than English people do. And there was chess, lots of chess, which is not really a physical sport but you have to be able to move the pieces around.

AM

Do you still play it?

SS

Yeah. And there was...

AM

How good are you?

SS

Not that good, right.

AM

Swinerton Dyer was very good at whatever it was that he played of that kind.

SS

Yeah, no I lost it completely I think. And there was a lot of music, flute, guitar, that sort of thing.

AM

You played those?

SS

Yeah. But all rather kind of inconsequentially, right, it was just fun. And it was a way of meeting people, right. It breaks the ice at parties I think.

AM

Has music meant much to you in your life?

SS

Yes, enormously, right. I mean in various ways, because, you know, it's just, it's the thing that brings tears to my eyes, right, still. And it's, I think, you know, one of the few ways, I mean live music is one of the few ways in which I think we really and truly get together in groups to do something that's really meaningful and actually has really strong aesthetic effects. And it's also been very interesting to think with. It's a source of metaphor I think that we perhaps don't use enough in my part of the world. Collaboration, collective playing, to follow a score, to think about how composition works. These have been actually quite important themes for me to reflect on when I'm trying to think about where creativity comes from or how a discovery is made or what it is to work in a group. I'm thinking about music quite often when I'm thinking about that.

AM

Are you listening to music?

SS

Yeah, all the time. It drives my partner completely crazy. She doesn't understand how anyone can do that. So when I'm writing or reading, I have to have sound and typically it has to be music, right. I find silence very disturbing.

AM

What music is it?

SS

Oh, almost any kind. It's absurdly eclectic, right. It's often now, as I've got old, autobiographical, so it's music that has a particular association. It's another thing one might say about music, that it brings memory to presence more effectively than anything else. So I like listening to tracks that remind me of a place I was when I first heard that or when I last heard it. So yeah, I mean I can't work without that sound.

AM

Is it classical or jazz?

SS

A lot of it is classical, most of it is now jazz. Jazz is like, I don't know, aubergines or garlic. It's something I just can't imagine having liked when I was younger and now I can't do without it and it keeps me healthy in so far as I am.

AM

And classical what?

SS

Well there that's family really. I mean my taste in classical music is my parents' taste. So Mahler and Beethoven and the German classical tradition up to and including Richard Strauss and my own taste initially was in early music actually when I was at Cambridge as a student and I sort of lost that slightly and gone back to my father's music, you know great Mahler symphonies booming away there somewhere in the background on ridiculously expensive speakers.

AM

I've noticed that film editors often edit to music. They did that in the series we were both involved in and that's to give their writing an actual pace, and it's said that, for instance Maitland. Maitland's writing you can see has been analysed musically and he often used to hum when he was writing. Do you think all this music in the background ever has that, any sort of more direct effect on what you are writing?

SS

I hope so, I mean it would be immodest to say that it does. Writing is the moment when I have ideas in so far as I have any and therefore it's kind of complex to pick the bones out of that. So in so far as I have had any original ideas at all they have happened while I am at a keyboard listening to music rather than in quiet repose or while thinking of something else right. I find that moments of intense concentration on the problem at hand, surrounded as it were, cocooned if rather by all the elements of the problem are what produces anything like an innovative approach to the problem that one is trying to work out. So there is a kind of exteriority to problem solving there that it's almost literally manipulating material on the page or the screen now, while the auditory environment is simultaneously blanking out everything else right, so it's a lens, it focuses. And yet at the same time it's clearly providing something rhythmic for this sort of concentrated reflection. It's quite hard to work out exactly what that is. I think it's not uncommon for people to use that kind of environment both as a resource and as an insulation, and certainly is for me.

AM

Yeats said that his poetry, when he was asked, he said my poetry is in the tip of my pen. That moment when you put the two together.

SS

Yes, yes.

AM

But quite a lot of scientists I've talked to and Weber himself, he said I never have any of my ideas at my desk. I create the problem and the data is collected there and then I go for a walk or something. So your description is not…

SS

Well if the choice is between Yeatsian pen tips and Weberian meditative walks elsewhere, I'm on Yeats' side unusually, right. Because I have very little experience of flashes of insight. I mean it is 99% perspiration I think.

AM

But have you had this experience that when you start in the morning to write, you don't really know what you're going to write and then as you write ideas come.

SS

Absolutely

AM

And by the end of the day someone says what have you written today and you say I don't know until I read it.

SS

No absolutely.

AM

As if it comes from outside.

SS

I mean absolutely that I've once had the experience of the demon, but that's wrapped up with one of the techniques which I fairly religiously stick to which is that I must not, I must not I've discovered, perfectly finish a piece of writing in the evening. Because if I then return to it in the morning I find restarting incredibly difficult. So I think that's strongly related to the idea of working on the page or on the screen rather than elsewhere. That the incomplete row of bricks shows you how to go on for a bit. So that you arrive in the morning and there's an incomplete row of bricks and you know rather mechanically at least how to finish that off and then you're in the swim. Whereas if I come back in the morning and I've sort of got a perfectly finished little bit of wall I'm slightly at a pause because I don't know how to go on. So I would strongly recommend, it's a really important piece of information, don't polish off in the evening. One should take a break in medias res I think.

AM

This is something I learned from local historian W.G. Hoskins. He says, he makes it on a rather larger scale. In other words if you're writing all week don't finish it then because when you come back on Monday morning it will be really cold.

SS

Absolutely right, absolutely right. At least that is my experience. Because nothing is alienated from you quicker than this text that you allegedly wrote. It becomes very difficult to go back into the work that you're involved in. And I think, if I think back to when I was a science undergraduate it was much the same. That's to say problems were more easily solved as part of the work rather than looking at this perfectly finished thing and then trying to see if you could improve it. That didn't seem to work at all.

AM

How many times, since we're on this sort of creating work topic, do you draft and redraft and redraft?

SS

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No I'm an obsessive re-writer and a very bad cutter. So that one can always easily think of what needs expansion, rendering more explicit, developing and so on. As a result of which, at least professionally, the work is organised into 18,500 word long bits. I find it amazingly difficult to say anything in less than that. And very difficult to string several of these together. So to use the old fashioned musical analogy, these are EPs, these are extended plays, they aren't singles and they're not really albums. They're this rather unsatisfactory middle range object which I just work on and work on and work on. They're large cardboard boxes in which I tragically fail to throw away each successive draft and I have a kind of clear out and start again.

AM

Why do you say tragically?

SS

Well because they just, I mean, in terms of stratigraphy it's a bit complicated and also in terms of the amount of space it takes up in the house it's even worse.

AM

You referred to when you were a scientist, having been both at quite a high level and I not having been a scientist, is the process of creativity and discovery very, very different in the two or not?

SS

Well I wasn't ever a scientist at the higher level but I met several scientists who were scientists at the highest level, and I suspect that processes of creativity don't respect disciplinary boundaries. I mean that would be the first thing to say, that there actually are things one can generally say about how folk invent and innovate and create that are probably not systematically different between, I don't know, making a poem and making a theory and maybe even making an experiment and that, at least I hope there are some general things one can say about that because that's been part of my work. I think there are some obvious, as it were, systematic and institutional differences which are very, very interesting, especially in our culture now and perhaps the most interesting one is the one to do with the tools of the trade. After all, from one point of view I guess you could say that if you look like a Martian at the workspace of people working in, say, the University of Cambridge and you didn't know what they were working on, you couldn't tell whether they were doing history or astrophysics because they all look as though they're doing the same thing. They all look as though they're at a keyboard in front of a screen.

AM

Isn't this a recent thing?

SS

It's a very recent development and it's, I think, still, in interesting ways, an under-analysed one. That's to say, at the very moment when people speak about more and more specialisation, more and more disciplinary boundaries, more and more exquisitely distinguished sub-sub-specialties, the phenomenology of this sort of work has become more and more similar for larger and larger groups of people and not just people who work within the academy, of course, in fact, absolutely not just people who work within the academy. So one can talk of the military entertainment complex, as some of my best colleagues like Tim Lenoir do, where skills at pattern recognition on the screen with a keyboard move across from the most heterogeneous areas, from Game Boy to nuclear war, from simulacra to reality. That's one line one might want to pursue. But if one's trying to think, you know, what is the work folk are doing when they are being creative, if you try, as it were, to identify what that work is, by and large, the manual, practical, material aspects of it have converged massively in the second half of the last century. You go back to the immediate pre-Second World War period, we could not have said this.

AM

Yes, and that talent is still rather different...

SS

You know the difference between, as it were, Rutherford's boys and Trevelyan's boys. You would know that difference and now you don't, at least not if you're a Martian and you don't ask them what they're doing. So perversely, and I think ironically, reflection on creativity across various disciplinary boundaries might, from that point of view, have become interestingly easier, because one's dealing with some bits and pieces of practical behaviour which have got more and more similar over the last 50 to 60 years. And that's actually quite an interesting issue, certainly in the science with which I'm most familiar, which is astronomy. So that actually there ought to be, whether there are robust principles that help us to understand creativity, there ought to be robust principles that deal with what it's like having smart new thoughts that work when you're a typist at the cinema, which is the standard situation of almost all workers and intellectuals in this culture now, in this little restricted culture.

AM

Let's pursue that in more detail next time that we talk. We've just got three minutes on this tape, is it, and you're still at school, you're about 16. Is there anything more that should be said about the school or shall we move on to the – you had a gap year...

SS

Let's move on. So the system in those days was if you were thinking of going or applying to Oxbridge, which I was, I was going to apply to Cambridge to read natural sciences, you stayed on for one extra term. So this is the autumn of 1971, and it was called, this really situates my school perfectly, it was called the Upper Bench. Lower sixth, upper sixth, upper bench, okay. And you did entrance exams in December of that year and I got an exhibition to Trinity, which I was amazed by. And then I had therefore from December of '71 until October of '72 to do what I wanted.


PART TWO

SS

So, that year, we're talking about the first half of 1972, now, 17, was obviously very important for me. I mean, I learnt that I was quite young and I learnt that I could survive on my own and I became very disillusioned with various forms of political Zionism. This is just before the Yom Kippur War. And, I became a entrepreneur in all sorts of ways. One of the most interesting things I did was I did a lot of archaeological work. There was a major dig going on under the southwest wall of the old city. So, a very, archaeologically and historically, but of course always also, is a politically significant place. The boundary between the Temple Mound and the old city, it falls away very steeply into Gehenna, into hell. It's the site of Herod's Palace, perhaps, or King David's, perhaps. The level that the archaeologists were at when I was working there was Byzantine and there were many yards still to go. And that, I think, the meticulousness of a classical archaeological dig is an extraordinarily interesting object lesson in every sense of that word. I found a coin and I found a tiny piece of turquoise glass, which apparently was important because it was a Byzantine perfume bottle design and this showed this was the bath house. So, you learn a lot, patience, which I still haven't learned, attention, reading the signs, the method of Zadig, as Huxley calls it in a famous article in the 1860s, that only by attention to exquisite detail can you make any inferences at all. And those inferences, I much later learned, have the quality of abduction, that's to say they're inferences to the best explanation. There are a hundred reasons why a small piece of Byzantine turquoise glass could have been in this place, but the archivist said, ah yes, we know what that is. So the loveliest explanation is also always, as Peter Lipton would say, likely to be the right one. So detection, all that was going on. I learnt a lot and it was exhausting. It was unbelievably exhausting. I came back to England in the summer of '76, went youth hostelling and then came up to Trinity with an open exhibition to read natural sciences and the rest is history. Trinity was an amazing experience as an undergraduate. It was still a single sex college between 1972 and 1975. It was enormously supportive. It was pretty stern. Certainly in terms of provision, it was fantastically stern. There was no central heating, for example. We are still in the period of toasting waffles in front of the gas fire.

AM

The Nabokov period.

SS

Exactly. And the cellars flooding regularly, and the shared rooms and so on. And in effect, although again, of course I didn't realise it at the time, a very classic, rather 19th century pattern of training for the tripos. So the vast bulk of significant teaching took place within the college, with the other students reading natural sciences in Trinity. This was definitely a collegiate rather than a university experience, in ways that I think have changed. So even though, I mean I could bore for England about this, even though the early 20th century Master of Trinity, J. J. Thomson, had been terrified, he says in his autobiography, about the effects of the big science labs on college life because, as he put it, laboratory workers wouldn't lunch at college and they would lunch in the lab. They wouldn't be seen around college. The authority of the colleges would be undermined by these centrally funded, wealthy, centrally organised, big workplaces. And to a certain extent that's the history of the university in the 20th century.

AM

That's happening now with the West site.

SS

And I think that it's, I mean sub specie aeternitatis is one of the most dramatic changes in the university. It's the sort of thing Cornford gestures at in 'Microcosmographia'. But it's at least as interesting sociologically as it is fiscally. I mean Cornford is a genius because he's got his eye on the cash apart from anything else. The Adamites who live in caves along Downing Street are the masters of the big new science buildings and they have the money, says he. Well that I think is an interesting issue but the way in which a large and powerful and as it were cocooning institution like Trinity as it was 30 odd years ago, nevertheless preserved very strong college modes of teaching and so on is very striking to me as I think back. So all the mathematics and physics and so on, that was basically college teaching. And it wasn't until my, really towards the end of my second year, which is the spring of 1974, that my kind of centre of gravity academically begins to switch from college to department. And the department to which it switches is definitely History and Philosophy of Science. At this stage, again I was an oik and didn't know any of this, the department was not in the Whipple building on Free School Lane because that was undergoing massive reconstruction. It was in a series of buildings on Lensfield Road, Bennett House. And these tiny seminar rooms became rather inspirational for me and I wonder why. Partly because of the kind of teaching, I mean of the then teachers in the department, the man I would single out and my generation would always single out was the late Gerd Buchdahl. Not because his work is the work that I followed, that's not at all true, but because of the way he taught and because of his egalitarian humility, which I'd never encountered in Cambridge from anybody else. So let me talk about Gerd for a bit because he's really a maître pensé. Gerd was a Jewish and Central European intellectual of the classic type who'd been in Australia, having been a refugee during the Second World War, and was interned in Victoria as an enemy alien, where as a young man he started a reading group in philosophy and philosophy of science in the prison camp in rural Victoria. And after that got a post at Melbourne University and more or less single-handedly, I'm going very quickly over a fascinating but marginal for this point, story, more or less single-handedly established the first real department in history and philosophy of science. There was one in London in the 1920s at UCL, but this really, this one in Melbourne was serious. And it involved complex political negotiations with the science faculty, with the philosophers. It brought together historians and philosophers of science in a principled way, pedagogically as well as in research. And the Melbourne department became under his aegis, very, very important indeed. His central area of interest was critical philosophy, Kant above all. Much later on he was to publish a stunning monograph called Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, which was the content of the seminars and lectures that he gave us in the early 70s. He came to Cambridge in the 50s, more or less, I mean this is not entirely accurate, with the express function of setting up a programme in Cambridge like the one that he'd already established in Melbourne. So the Cambridge department, qua department, is very much the child of the Melbourne department and the project of Gerd Buchdahl, who became its first head. It was he who hired Mary Hesse, a brilliant young mathematics academic from London, and together they really forged the department as it is now. By the time I met him he was already a grand, stately, hilarious man, with an enormous sense of humour and very expansive views, who, and I think this is not untypical for influential teachers, almost completely failed to communicate the content of what he was teaching, but absolutely succeeded in communicating its importance. So that for the first time really in my university career I was sitting with someone for whom this was a matter of life and death, if not more important than that. And he really did do things that are now the subject of glorious reminiscence and anecdote like he really did turn up at the second lecture of term in Michaelmas and say everything I told you last week is wrong and I want you to throw away those notes and we'll start again. And this was on John Locke's epistemology. And while it was very difficult indeed for an ill-informed Cambridge second year natural scientist, otherwise working in physics, to understand why this was such a puzzle, right, does Locke believe in innate ideas? Is Locke really committed to the view that everything we know is due to sense data that we receive from outside our minds? Or is there not some prior set of categories within the mind that organise and dispose and combine those sense data? I couldn't initially see why you'd lose sleep about that question but I absolutely saw that Gerd was losing sleep about this question, and no one else had communicated to me the idea that a question like that or any question might be so significant to one's, as it were, moral salvation. So I thought this is for me. I mean I'm not going to do this but something like this is for me. The other thing that Gerd and his colleagues were very, very good at, very good. Martin Rudwick was also teaching on the programme which was a treat and a privilege, an amazing lecture course on 19th century earth sciences, was to imagine that even if you had no background your views were worth hearing. So that's partly what I mean by the egalitarianism, that this was a set of problems which one ought to be able to describe such that everybody in the room could take part in the conversation on roughly equal terms. Even, and in a way interestingly, particularly where matters of fact were concerned, and that seems amazing to me in retrospect. So I learnt a lot slightly indirectly. In the summer of 1974, and this I think is probably the single most important thing that happened to me in this period, I noticed that the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich offered internships which were essentially for volunteers for two months to work in Greenwich on some aspect of the collection and you were paid enough to allow you to rent a room somewhere near the museum. So I did that for the summer of 1974 and that was the big deal for me because that was the first time that I'd really worked with and behind the scenes at a museum first, that I'd actually got the experience of thinking about scientific hardware and scientific instruments because one of the jobs I was given, now I don't think they do this, but it was an absolutely wonderful job. The entire instrument collection of the National Maritime Museum, one of the great collections in the world after all, was held on index cards, was catalogued on index cards. So I was given a Polaroid camera and about two dozen sextants and I had to take these to bits with white gloves and take a Polaroid of each bit and paste the Polaroid onto a card and write down what it was and then take the next bit and then take the next bit and then put it back together again and then go on to the next instrument. So presumably somewhere in the basement of the basement of the basement of the National Maritime Museum there are these rather inadequately annotated, rather fading presumably, Polaroids of this hardware. So as one can imagine, I mean that was absolutely revelatory for me, that you could learn things from this hardware, that minute differences between putatively identical devices mattered, and I was working with a small group of curators and assistants who were world experts. Commander Waters, splendidly named head of the navigation department and Alan Stimson, brilliant historian of scientific instruments, and I found material both in the collection and in the library which suggested a possible dissertation topic for my final year. By then I was utterly committed to doing History and Philosophy of Science for Part 2, which one can do in the Natural Sciences Tripos. That was a bit of an agonising decision actually because I really wanted to stay with physics. The timing is interesting perhaps from the historical point of view because mine's the last year that studied physics in the old Cavendish because 1975 is when the physicists moved from town to West Cambridge to their glamorous new buildings. So it was also of course the centenary of the establishment of the Cavendish and Crowther's I think rather inadequate book had just come out, the history of the lab over that century. What that did to me was make me think about the history of physics. So you could tell I was a lost soul already. So I was more excited and entertained by as it were the archaeology of what was left on Free School Lane, especially since it was next to where the HPS department was than I was by what might happen with the move to West Cambridge. But it was still a bit agonising and very often one is strongly dissuaded by directors of studies and others from switching into something like that because one was giving up the possibility of research in science basically, and that was made very clear to me that that was a very bad thing. Nevertheless I did that and it was I think the right decision and I had an absolutely splendid time in my final year. I had a lovely room in Neville's Court. I learnt the wonders of the University Library or began to. The dissertation topic that I'd found in Greenwich proved to be viable and interesting. And at this point, this is also not unimportant, my father who by then was a professor at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex was on secondment to the Shannon Free Airport Development Corporation, as an advisor. This really dates it. This is the period just before and during accession to the EU. So the Shannon Free Airport Development Corporation hired my father as an advisor on ways of improving economic development in the west of Ireland, particularly in County Clare. And this involved my father and mother moving for a very long period to an absolutely wonderful cottage in a village called Corofin in Clare, about 15 miles from Shannon, between the plains of the Shannon Valley and the Burren, the high desert limestone plateau where the Cromwellians said there was no water to drown a man or no tree to hang him from. This had been Daniel O'Connell's base in the 1820s and 30s, so it was the liberator. It was De Valera's constituency in the early 20th century. It was an eye-opener in a different sort of way. Again, archaeology played a role, but also politics. This was the early 70s in the west of Ireland. We were not very far from where Whitelaw and others were meeting with the IRA in various pubs in East Clare. There was the local bar, Bofey Quinns, which was run by a man who built a submarine which he sailed, if that's the right word, in the Loch. Everything from the reminiscences of an Irish resident magistrate all the way to the most intense contemporary politics was co-present there. So that in the vacation I would go from Cambridge to the west of Ireland and sit in this cottage writing about the problem of longitude or whatever. And that was really an amazing set of experiences to think about. Our landlord there was a man called Ignatius Cleary, who was a local saint, there's no other way of putting it. Very important man for me to think about what intellectual life is. This was a man who was the unmarried middle son of a very large family. The youngest son of the Clear Reef clan, also unmarried, Ender, was the housekeeper, which was classic. Beautiful Georgian house called Riverview. Naoise worked extremely hard to reclaim the disused Church of Ireland, Protestant church in the village, and turn it into a museum of the history of Corifin. So again I think museology and material culture played a role. We helped because he was our landlord. I wrote labels. And all of that came together I think to convince me that this was the sort of life that I quite liked. As usual I couldn't quite make up my mind in the first half of '75 what I really wanted to do. I mean if I reminisce the reason why I applied to read natural sciences at Cambridge, one reason, apart from its enormous distinction and privilege of studying there, was that you didn't have to make up your mind. I think I wouldn't have applied to Cambridge if, like Oxford, there had been a specialist physics school, because I couldn't decide between physics and chemistry or physics and maths or whatever. And similarly, you know, in the final two terms of my undergraduate life in Cambridge, I couldn't decide at all what I wanted to do, so I applied for everything. I applied to go into the Foreign Office, for example. So I took the Civil Service Entrance exam.

AM

Did you get in?

SS

Yes I did. The most amusing aspect of that, there were many amusing aspects of that, the most amusing aspect of that was being vetted. So sitting at home in Brighton and having a retired policeman from Hove actually come to interview both me and my parents, and I got through, just I think, security vetting. One point that they were very clear on, and this is after all right in the middle of the first oil price shock, because this is now the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, and the miners' strike and so on in the three day week. By '75, Labour had come to power again, and there was, as there regularly is in Whitehall, a general feeling that there were insufficiently many people with science degrees working in the Civil Service. This is a sort of periodic feeling. So the fact that a Cambridge Natural Scientist was applying to go into the Foreign Office was thought to be a good thing. There was some discussion, in retrospect very interestingly, about the possibility of me entering to, on the stream that goes into the FCO, where you also commit yourself to studying what they called rather wonderfully at that stage, a hard language, by which they meant Arabic or Chinese. And I was very clear that if I'd gone and thrown aside the course I'd have taken Chinese and gone off on a completely different route, presumably to Hong Kong. But in the end I was offered a Kennedy Scholarship to go to Harvard for a year, so I did that. Because Harvard had and has the world class History of Science Program.

AM

When you say the world class you mean the best?

SS

Yes. And it was going through a period of enormous transition in the mid-seventies, but it taught a thorough, systematic Masters Program, which Cambridge did not. And many eminent scholars were working there. And that was what I think trained me in and committed me to this particular discipline, and certainly convinced me that what I wanted to work on was early modern natural philosophy, Newtonianism and so on. Bernard Cohen was one of the eminent scholars at Harvard. And the way that graduate program was organised was exceptionally good, because it balanced together intense seminar teaching, which I enjoyed, having been taught that way by Gerd Buchdahl, with what are called directed reading courses. So basically one sat with, in my case, Franklin Ford, one of the best historians of early modern and Enlightenment thought, who just provided one with a bibliography. You read it, you wrote an essay, he read the essay. I mean that seemed an ideal way of teaching. I reflected on staying. I could have stayed I think. They would probably have given me a scholarship. But I by this time was committed to saying things about Isaac Newton and it seemed silly to say things about Isaac Newton there when I could say them in Cambridge. So I came back to Cambridge in 1976.

AM

Did you enjoy it in America?

SS

Of course. I mean I was 19 years old and 20 years old.

AM

So you'd gone to university very young.

SS

Yes, I mean I'd been here, I'd been in Cambridge, I came up to Trinity when I was 17. And I think the year in the States was really a year of maturing. It was also a year of much travel. I mean I did what folk were supposed to do, are supposed to do, which is to drive around everywhere and I had the unique privilege of not being able to drive so I could actually see things and read maps. There was New Orleans for Mardi Gras, there was the drive across the country over the summer to San Francisco. It was bicentennial year. Gerald Ford was President. It was a country in absolute crisis after all in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. I was, as I think a lot of young Brits often are, impressed and excited by hybridity and pluralism and robust optimism on the one hand and depressed by introversion and what one thought of as a deeply ill-informed attitude to the rest of the world and a certain kind of strange provincialism. These were the prejudices of youth but they're very common, right. And the continent-size, scope and scale of what was involved. It wasn't the first time I'd been to the States. I'd been to the States when my father was on sabbatical at Cornell back in 1967, which was an almost, if not more, dramatic and crisis-ridden period. This was exactly the moment of the demonstrations against the war at the Pentagon, right, that Norman Mailer writes about. And Cornell, Ithaca, was a centre of anti-war sentiment. I went, I'd been to the local junior high school in Ithaca called DeWitt Junior High, which is now, I think, a women's centre in down-town Ithaca. And I was taught about how well the Green Berets were doing in Vietnam. They showed John Wayne's film. I was taught what to do if there was a nuclear attack. I'd never seen an air raid shelter for nuclear war before. I wrote an essay on General Burgoyne and the Battle of Saratoga, from the British point of view, just to piss them off a bit. And we stayed in an absolutely wonderful Marcel Breuer tower block up on the hill on campus. That was a rather limited but interesting view of the States, and then sort of massively broadened when I was at Harvard. I think educationally, the most important thing about the Harvard program was the course offered by Everett Mendelsohn. So he's an interesting, and for me, very important figure as well. Deeply active politically on the left, on the liberal left. A major peace campaigner. Teaching a course in the sociology of science. A phrase I'd never heard in Cambridge. I mean, here in 1976 it would have been treated as oxymoronic. And the course, again, one realises in retrospect, was a brilliant summary of the state of, what shall we say, social and social scientific thinking about the natural sciences just before a major sea change, methodologically and disciplinarily, was about to happen. So that, for example, this was a course oriented partly around the classics of sociology. Talcott Parsons, Merton, particularly Robert Merton, Ben David. By which I mean a sociology which took the problem of the sciences as explaining sociologically the asocial quality of the sciences. The function of this sociology from that point of view was to explain the fantastically successful prophylaxis that surrounds science. How could this communal, disinterested, sceptical, virtuous and progressive project have survived the enormous social pressures which might otherwise have corrupted it? One looked at how robust and well fortified the institutions of the life of science were. That was half the course. But the other half of the course was about alternative ideologies and alternative ways in the sciences. So one read Schumacher, a matter of fact, and Thomas Szasz. And that seemed like a kind of slightly schizophrenic picture. But the particular thing that I learned from and admired Everett more than anything for was again, he was prepared to encourage any of his students to do whatever they wanted and to resource that as far as he possibly could. So this was a moment of very interesting micro and macro controversies around the sciences taking place in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the one hand, a really important crisis and struggle which Everett had personally been involved in, which was involving really major scientists like David Baltimore, Nobel Prize winner at MIT, on whether Cambridge, Massachusetts was prepared to host research on recombinant DNA. And there had been a conference at Asilomar which had proposed a moratorium on that kind of biomedical research because of its unknown and unquantifiable dangers. And the mayor of Cambridge, Mass. had played a really crucial role in insisting that labs in his city, which means Harvard and MIT, not do a certain kind of work. So all sorts of issues, very troubling ones, but really fascinating ones, about the politics of public science were in play. And Everett, as a practitioner and a participant, was able to tell us not only what was going on, but how one might study it, which I thought very interesting as a theme. And then the science news was full of, again, what is now seen as an example of pathological science, a phenomenon called polywater, which is now almost completely forgotten, perhaps. So what was polywater? Polywater, it turned out pretty soon, was literally 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. If you hang horizontally very, very thin glass capillary tubes over very purified distilled water in vacuum flasks and then rapidly reduce the pressure, basically evacuate, the water evaporates and then condenses preferentially inside these thin glass capillary tubes. And significantly scientists in the Soviet Union, a very eminent physical chemist called Boris Derjaquin, announced in the international scientific literature that this stuff that was condensing inside these tubes was still water, but it had very spooky properties. It stayed essentially solid or viscose to very high temperatures and it had various other interesting thermal properties, which if checked out would have been economically fantastically significant for insulation, for example. I mean a water that doesn't melt would have saved the planet in a certain way. It also had a good shelf life because at roughly the same time the greatest of American science fiction writers, Kurt Vonnegut, had published a novel called 'Cat's Cradle', which describes a substance called Ice-9, which strangely has rather similar properties to polywater, so it was easy for the New York Times to know how to describe this stuff. And because it was a Soviet discovery, the Office of Naval Research and other American government agencies were quite prepared to subsidise research into this stuff. And after about three or four years it died completely. And I was able to learn how to do oral history, not as well as you, but I was able to learn how to go up and down the East coast of the US with a small notebook, talking to the veterans of this episode in Princeton, at MIT, and at Maryland and elsewhere, because I was coming just after the end of the debate. And that taught me a lot. I mean talking to scientists who, as they cheerfully admitted, had been wrong temporarily was absolutely fascinating. And I learned that what counts as wrong is achieved during the course of quite complicated and extended processes of fantastically impressive, ingenious, collaborative work. And I wanted, as it were, an account of the sciences that did justice to that experience. I wrote this up as a term paper and sent it off to this new journal called Science Studies, which was edited from Edinburgh by a very saintly former BBC radio producer called David Edge, lovely man, who I knew of because he'd written a marvellous book on the history of radio astronomy about Ryle's work with his colleague Michael Mulkay. So I sent it off to this journal and they probably rejected it, quite rightly. But the referee of the journal, whom I later discovered was a man called Harry Collins, then based in Bath University, wrote, and massive respect, this was really a life-changing experience, pages and pages of comments on how one could better have talked about this episode. And I learned a lot from this rejection. So there I was back in Cambridge with one rejected article at the age of 21, back in Trinity, who'd been generous enough to give me a graduate scholarship as well. Again, havering between this kind of work, which seemed to me to be really exciting, and working on Isaac Newton. And my supervisor, Michael Hoskin, convinced me, rightly I'm sure, to work on Newton. He pointed me towards a remarkable PhD, not exactly PhD thesis, a typescript three-volume object in the University Library by a deeply eccentric, I didn't know how eccentric he was at that stage, Spanish-Jewish nobleman called David Castillejo.

AM

How do you spell that?

SS

C-A-S-T-I-L-L-E-J-O. So David, whom I never really met, David had been the first scholar to look in any detail whatsoever at Newton's theological papers. Newton's theological papers, the plurality of them anyway, had come up for auction in 1936 at Sotheby's and had been dispersed over the world. A large section came into the hands of an Iraqi Jewish scholar, intellectual banker called Abraham Yehuda, a friend of Einstein, and in fact a pretty fierce anti-Zionist in an interesting way, who in complicated ways, partly through Einstein, partly not, left them to the Jewish National Library in Hebrew University in Jerusalem. And David Castillejo, we're talking now the late 60s, early 70s, had really been the first scholar to look at these documents and they are astonishing. Their existence was not at all unknown, their contents in a certain sense not at all unknown, though there's a very complicated and lengthy story which would be tedious to go into, about how folk had explained their existence or explained them away or ignored them.

AM

Don't censor yourself, Simon. It's all fascinating.

SS

David Brewster, the greatest of Newton's biographers by far, I think, from the 1830s to the 1850s, worked on various versions of Newton's life and he had access to essentially all of Newton's papers. And Brewster...

AM

They were in Cambridge then?

SS

No, they were in the hands of the family of the Earls of Portsmouth, a cadet branch of the Newton family, because Newton himself of course had no children. He had a niece, a rather gorgeous niece, called Catherine Barton. Voltaire falsely alleged that Newton became head of the Royal Mint because of the beauties of his niece. This is in fact false, but never mind. And through her and various other family connections, John Conduitt and somehow came into the Earls of Portsmouth's hands and in the 19th century they had all the papers at Lymington, I think. And the bulk of those manuscripts are not mathematical or natural philosophical or astronomical. The bulk of those manuscripts are alchemical and theological. And Brewster, fierce Scottish evangelical, for whom the ideal type of the man of science was of course Isaac Newton, and who had the category martyr of science in which to fit men like Galileo and Newton, both ignored and explained away this material. Ignored in one sense in that he didn't take it very seriously, explained it away in that he tended, as did many commentators at the time, to see this as simile. This was the maundering of old age or something, or Newton had been poisoned or whatever. But Brewster, because he was also a man of virtue and honesty, transcribed some of the material. And so it was in the public domain. I mean we aren't talking about the sudden revelation of Newton's occult, prophetic and theological interests. That is not the story. That's a story that makes pot-boilers lots of money. So every ten years or so someone writes a book saying guess what, Newton did alchemy. We didn't know that. Or guess what, Newton wrote thousands of words on the apocalypse and the second coming of our Lord. We didn't know that. We didn't know that. We did. But how did one approach that? So in the 1890s the whole of the Portsmouth Collection was offered to the University of Cambridge. And the great and brilliant Joseph Larmor, in particular the Lucasian Professor, was given the job of reading his predecessor's papers. And he did what any good Edwardian scholar would do. He sorted them out into true and false. And this produced on the one hand the Portsmouth Collection in the University Library, which is the mathematics and natural philosophy, broadly speaking. And the rest was given back to the family. And death duties then kick in in the 1930s. So they auctioned the rest at Sotheby's in 1936. Maynard Keynes of course, bought, thank goodness, a very substantial and deeply significant group of papers which live in King's. And subsequently writes an absolutely magnificent, slightly crazy, but absolutely magnificent lecture on Newton as the last of the magicians. And as I say, a very substantial group of these papers goes through various dealers to Abraham Yehuda, to Alexandria, to Jerusalem, and there it is. David Castillejo in the 1960s is really the first adequately equipped scholar to deal with this. Others had published bits. Herbert McLachlan, a ferocious and rather incompetent Unitarian, had published extracts from the theological manuscripts. Not very adequately. Others had begun to discuss this. I suppose the most important of them was the brilliant intellectual historian Frank Manuel, who'd given two sets of lectures in the States and Oxford, one on the religion of Isaac Newton and the other on Isaac Newton, the historian, that's to say on Newton's incredibly important work on chronology. But the Castillejo trilogy was just an eye-opener because it was written by someone who was obviously disturbed in many different ways and fanciful in many different ways, but who transcribed and tried to make sense of a very large amount of theological and prophetic work. And this seemed like a good area for a short PhD, which I then tried, not entirely successfully, it has to be said, to write between 1976 and 1979. And it's called, it has a terrible title, a very bad pun, 'Newton's Cosmology and the Steady State', which was a pun as between the dynamics of his cosmology and his politico-theological view. And I tried to say some things about these papers and about what I took to be the relation between Newtonian cosmology, Newton's cosmological projects from the 1670s to the early 1700s, and his views about providence. While I was doing that, I was also doing lots of other smaller bits and pieces of research. And as usual I was being a butterfly, I was kind of working on three or four different things at once. Michael had founded a journal, Michael Hoskin had founded a journal called the Journal of the History of Astronomy in 1970, which I think really helped define a new sub-discipline in the history of astronomy, where one could begin to write the history of this discipline for example, from a more properly historical point of view. And the key historian of science in Cambridge for me at that period was Tom Whiteside, who published in the very first volume of the Journal of the History of Astronomy on Newton's path to the Principia, a magnificent and indispensable piece of work, and was at this point editing Newton's mathematical papers, one of the great triumphs of late 20th century scholarship. I was not equipped to really learn as much as I should have done from Tom, and he was maybe not the easiest person to get along with, but he was a towering pillar of scholarship. In 1977 there was a major conference at Churchill College to mark the anniversary of Newton's death, 1727. And Tom was presented with the Sarton Medal, the most eminent medal in our field, and I was ridiculously asked to give one of the papers there, so I gave some kind of presumably jejune version of what was going to be in my thesis. But that was absolutely amazing, to be at anything like the top table. I got very interested in these issues of cosmology and cosmological development of the period. I found or transcribed a couple of papers written by Edmund Halley that I'd found in the Library of the Royal Society. I published those in Notes and Records of the Royal Society because they seemed to bear quite directly on the issue of the danger of seeming atheist if one said the world was eternal. And Halley had notoriously failed to get the post of civilian professor in Oxford in the early 1690s, even though one thought he was backed by his patron, Isaac Newton. And the story was that he'd failed to get this job because he was an eternalist, because he was an atheist. And these two documents from the Royal Society showed Halley trying desperately to show that he wasn't, so that seemed interesting. With Michael's very strong encouragement, I was able to begin publishing a series of pieces in his journal on, or related to, similar things. At the same time, the manuscripts of, I guess, one of the greatest astronomers, William Herschel, were available in Churchill College in the library where Michael was working, and I was able to use those to work on William Herschel's astronomical and cosmological beliefs, and Michael very kindly published one of those, two of those papers actually, in the journal, one on the discovery of Uranus. So I was doing a whole slew of different things. The single most important person whom I met in my field in the late 1970s was Roy Porter, about whom everyone has now said a great deal because very tragically he died in 2001 at a ridiculously early age, 55, a few months after retiring. And I've written obituaries for him.

AM

It would be nice to hear.

SS

Yeah. So Roy, hmm. Well there's institutional and personal aspects there. I mean institutional ones first of all. Roy was the only member of the Cambridge History Faculty remotely interested in what the historians of science were doing in the 1970s, at all. There was no other conversation going on, as far as I remember. And he was a professionally trained historian from Christ's, where his own influences.

AM

Another Jack Plumb.

SS

Exactly, Jack Plumb, Quentin Skinner, Barry Supple, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and so on had either been his colleagues or immediate superiors. He'd been very close to Martin Rudwick. His PhD thesis, Roy's, was on 18th century earth history, which he of course immediately published as a book called 'The Making of Geology'. He showed us by example and by precept how you could be an historian of the sciences. That's to say what were the interests and skills that historians, properly speaking, could bring to the study of the past of the sciences. That was not obvious at that time. Almost nobody in the History and Philosophy of Science department in Cambridge had been trained as a historian. And there's a huge irony about the development of the discipline, which my former colleague Anna Meyer has written about beautifully, which is as follows. The history of science anything like an academic enterprise, really begins in Cambridge in the 30s through the work of Joseph Needham, Ernest Rutherford, Arthur Eddington and others, Walter Pagel and others. In other words, scientists who started a Cambridge committee for the history of the sciences, gave lectures on the past of their sciences and, especially in Needham's case and Pagel's case, argued ferociously for the indispensable role that a knowledge of and study of the past of the sciences must bring to the sciences. To summarise this very superficially and very brutally, after the war, one was therefore in this rather ironic situation, this is before Buchdahl arrived, in which members of the Communist Party or fellow travellers or both, dominated discourse on the past of the sciences in Britain.

AM

Bernal.

SS

Above all, Bernal. Well, he'd left Cambridge for London just at the time of the committee starting, but of course his work in the 40s and early 50s, culminating in the vast book 'Science in History', the vast tetralogy, to which all of these others contributed in different ways, and the launching of Joseph's project in the late 40s on 'Science and Civilisation in China'. I mean, that meant that, as it seemed, authoritative conversation, discourse, lecturing, publicity, knowledge of the past of the sciences was in the hands of historical materialists who were scientists. And it seems clear that figures like Herbert Butterfield and Rupert Hall and others responded to that from within the discipline of history and in fact from within the history faculty in the most predictable way. The past of the sciences is too important to be left to the scientists, especially if they are materialists and historical materialists at that. And there are a whole series of, for us, famous controversies and disputes which of course had been launched in 1931 at the International Congress on the History of Science held in London, where the Soviet physicist and historian Boris Hessen had given a lecture called 'The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia', which was Les Majestés, it was an attempt at a historical materialist account of Newton. And it had apparently a profound influence on Needham, on Bernal, Haldane, Hogben, Levy and others. So there's an irony, almost a chiasmus there, right, hard now to recapture, in which, again this is ridiculously superficial, left-wing scientists were writing materialist history of the sciences and conservative, in several senses, idealist historians were writing intellectual history of scientific knowledge. Butterfield's 'Origins of Modern Science', which is lectures he gave in Cambridge, comes out in 1947, is a kind of shining example of the latter, precisely to define the scientific revolution as, and I quote, “putting on a new thinking cap”, unquote, to give it nothing but intellectual origins, is a riposte to the Bernal-Needham-Tilzel CHECK argument. Okay, so jump forward to the 1970s. By this stage, idealism and intellectualism are firmly ensconced within the Cambridge programme in History of Science and Philosophy of Science. And Roy Porter brought reasonably judicious social history back into the picture for all of this. Also there's his kind of exemplary qualities. This was a very different way of life, put it that way, more literally as well as figuratively unbuttoned. And that seemed entertaining and seductive. Roy was generous enough to get me to give a couple of talks to his final year special paper that he taught on 18th century sciences and got me to review quite a bit of stuff for the journal he was then editing, History of Science. And that really taught me an enormous amount about how to write and what to do, insofar as I've ever learned. And the third thing that happened, along with the Newtonian stuff and Michael Hoskin's influence and Roy's work, was going to France. In 1979-80, just as I was finishing my thesis, I was encouraged by my parents to spend quite a bit of time in Paris. And I was given a, what was it called, Thank Offering to Britain Fund Award, which I think must be the Norwegian government, administered through the British Academy, which paid for me to spend two or three months in Paris at a place called the Centre Koyré, which was a section of the École des Hautes Etudes.

AM

Koyré as in the sound?

SS

Yes. The Centre Koyré was then, and still is, the centre of a certain kind of French study of the history of science. It then lived in an unbelievably romantic set of rooms in the Rue Colbert, next to the old Bibliothèque Nationale. Low ceilings, winding staircase, uneven, polished mahogany floor. The seminar room was also the principal study, and it was mainly occupied by two elderly, beautiful gentlemen. One, Father Costabel, who was the editor of the Correspondence of Mersenne, the greatest of 17th century knowledge brokers. The other, René Tatton, the doyen of historians of Enlightenment science, and the editor of the 'General History of Science', and a good friend of Michael Hosking in the 'General History of Astronomy'. And they were very hospitable and welcomed me, and encouraged me to basically wander Paris archives, which was an eye-opener again, looking at French astronomers who collaborated with or responded to Herschel, and to British astronomers, and improving to a certain extent my French. At the same time, of course, this was Paris, this was 1979-80, so I was able to go to the Collège de France every Wednesday morning at 9am, and go to lectures by Foucault, which was, what, the seventh of his lecture courses at the Collège de France. This was on the practice of confession, a pretty unforgettable experience. Foucault's lectures were divided between public lectures, which he clearly deliberately scheduled at 9am in order slightly to control the crowd, with four years after the appearance of 'Surveiller et Punir', and he was working on the project that is the 'History of Sexuality'. The lecture audience consisted of a small layer of Grande Dame in furs from the Ile San Denis, who would walk across the river every morning with their little dogs, leave the dogs outside and listen to the great man. A large-ish group, mainly of East Asian students by this stage, because Foucault's status in China and Japan was beginning to be massive, who'd all brought things I'd never seen before, which were these little portable tape recorders. And then right at the back, these ridiculously badly dressed and slightly smelly people like me, scribbling notes for all they were worth. And of course that had a huge effect.

AM

What were the lectures, what was he like as a lecturer?

SS

He was quiet, high-pitched, charismatic, very rapid, allusive. He spoke off the text. There would be four or five pages of notes. And the breadth of learning was remarkable. I mean, this was a series of lectures each week on the theology and philosophy of the practice of confession in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the practices of truth. And one could immediately see how it developed out of 'Discipline and Punish'. One couldn't see where it was going. I think being in Paris was obviously an emotional and rewarding experience, and it was also a period again of extraordinary political change. This was the end of Giscard and the beginning of Mitterrand. But for me, it was also a bibliographic revolution because I was able, for the first time I think really, to encounter a lot of French philosophical and epistemological writing, Foucault, of course, Althusser, that was simultaneously Martian and indispensable. I mean, Martian for obvious reasons because it seemed to make no reference of any kind whatsoever to any materials or traditions with which I was remotely familiar, yet it seemed to be talking about precisely the questions within the sciences that had interested me. And a good example was my work on Herschel. I mean, not, you would have thought, the most promising area to be modish and Parisian and left-bank. So what was my problem and what was, as it seemed, the solution? My problem, the very obscure, technical, trivial problem in scholarship was this. William Herschel was a Hanoverian musician, military bandsman, who came to Britain from Hanover to practice as an organist and choirmaster and set up eventually at Bath in the 1770s with eventually to his sister, Caroline. He joined a local philosophical society. He began to study natural history. He got his own microscope. He was fascinated by coral and corallines because they're the ambiguous natural historical class for a linean. Are they plants or are they animals? Meanwhile, he was also teaching himself how to build telescopes. And from the mid-1770s onwards, he built increasingly large, increasingly magnificent and, by the standards of the time, strange instruments because they were mirror telescopes, they were reflecting telescopes. They weren't designed for precision but for light grasp, for penetrating deep into space. And he set out to survey the heavens. Now the immediate result of this survey was the discovery of what we now call Uranus in March of 1781, which brought him international fame, the first planet discovered in recorded history, which of course he decided initially to call George. And I wish it was still called George. And having discovered George, the king gave him a pension and a place in the Thames Valley, eventually at Slough, from where for the next 25 to 30 years he ran an unprecedentedly detailed survey of just those parts of the sky astronomers were not interested in. And that's my puzzle. Herschel was not, in that sense, by late 18th century standards, an astronomer because he wasn't observing stars much and he certainly wasn't observing the position of planets. He wasn't doing transit observations, he wasn't doing high precision measurements. He was mapping the heavens. He was looking at clouds of light, nebulae, the Milky Way, which were the disturbances in the sky for classic 18th century astronomy. And indeed several of his contemporaries said, Monsieur Herschel, and the French said, it's amazing, this guy has discovered this planet. He isn't even an astronomer, he's a musician. So he wasn't in that sense technically perhaps an astronomer. What was he? Well if one read what Herschel said he was, he says that what he's doing is the natural history of the heavens. So there seemed to be a solution to this puzzle. What he was doing was applying the methods of Linnaean natural history, only not to corals now, but to stars. He says that he proposes to classify them into species, he sees the heavens as full of strata, he says that he's in the position of a gardener who looking out over a mass of vegetation sees the same plant at different stages of its growth cycle and therefore able to reconstruct the growth cycle of the plant from seedling onwards. So that even though one can't, as it were, trace a nebula coming into being and passing away under the action of gravity, we have all its stages co-present to us. And we have that because he's seeing so far. It's Herschel who gives us the notion of light year and Herschel who insists that when you look deep into space you're looking deep into the past. Foucault's work seemed really useful as a tool for describing that because here we had first of all a contrast between method and subject. Herschel was using classical natural history as Foucault had described it to deal with things classical natural historians typically didn't deal with. And if I read 'Les Mots et les Chose' and subsequent work I could kind of perhaps make sense of Herschel as one of those natural historians. The fact that he's building telescopes and looking at stars is not the serious issue. The serious issue is the method and the approach that he was using. So I wrote this ridiculous article called Herschel in Bedlam, which is half Foucault and half Herschel, and sent it to the British Journal of History of Science and they published it. And it's full of my Paris experience.

AM

Literally, I mean.

SS

Almost literally, yeah. I mean there are sort of footnotes saying I've just read this and so on. And I first gave it at a conference in Bath, appropriately enough, in March of 1980, which more generally is for me the important event in the emergence of the social history of scientific knowledge in Britain. Because it was the first joint meeting of the British Sociological Association and the British Society for the History of Science. And it brought together a new generation of sociologists of scientific knowledge, Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch, Stephen Shapin, David Bloor, Barry Barnes, David Edge, mainly based in Bath and Edinburgh respectively, and fellow travelling historians of science of various sorts, mainly from London, Mike Roy and Michael Neve. And then the odd sort of junior like me. So I got on the train at the Gare Saint-Lazare and ended up in Bath carrying my hot little Foucauldian paper. And I think it went quite well. The eminence was this kind of vibrant, charismatic, tall, dark haired, slightly strange but absolutely brilliant figure at this meeting was a young French anthropologist called Bruno Latour, who was there to talk about the work that he'd been doing with his Cambridge-trained colleague Steve Woolgar at the Salk Institute in Southern California. So everybody was co-present. The paper at the conference that impressed me the most was again a very strange paper by this guy from Edinburgh, Stephen Shapin, which was on the dispute between Leibniz and Samuel Clarke. In other words it was on a topic of the thesis I'd just finished. In fact my final chapter was on exactly the same thing. And Shapin's paper was called 'Of Gods and Kings' and it was witty and clever and much better at analysing what was at stake in that metaphysico-philosophical dispute than I was because it showed point by point the political issues involved in these different cosmologies. And it footnoted anthropologists, again, who I'd never read or in some cases heard of, like Mary Douglas. So when it came to choosing examiners in conversation with Michael Hoskin that year, it seemed obvious to me that the internal examiner had to be Roy Porter and the external examiner could be this guy whom I'd never really met called Stephen Shapin because he was obviously working on the same thing and might be sympathetic, neither of whom belonged to the Newton industry so this would help. So on a, for some reason, very cold, rainy day, that's how I remember it, in London at UCL, which is where Roy then was, in one of the prep rooms of the anatomy department in University College London on a Saturday morning, I had my viva with these two guys. Steve turned up wearing tennis whites because he was about to play a game with Bill Bynum and he explained very kindly why he was dressed in tennis whites. And Roy explained that I shouldn't worry about the thesis too much, that they'd both taken a positive view of it, but that he'd have to leave the room every 15 minutes or so because he was suffering from quite bad diarrhoea. But he'd taken the precaution of bringing along a bottle of wine for us to drink afterwards which we then drank in little lab beakers before I went home to Cambridge.

AM

They told you at the time you'd passed.

SS

They did and they shouldn't have done that. It was all ultra-vires, but they did. And it was a marvellous experience and that's how I met Stephen Shapin.

AM

Would you like to talk about him because you've worked with him?

SS

Yes. Well, he's really indispensable for my work and life. I think he brings an extraordinary range of resources and strengths to his work and his work with others. Collaborative work is really, really hard and he makes it really easy and that seems to me to be an extraordinary trick. In fact, that initial paper of his I'd read before I met him turns out to contain a lot of the germs of these virtues. It moves into what might be taken to be a very familiar area of intellectual history. I mean, what is more familiar, as it were, for intellectual history than a text like the Leibniz-Clarke dispute? And because it's quizzical and witty and penetrating on the one hand, yet utterly scholarly and utterly committed to the most exacting standards of philological precision, he's able somehow to find a new and important thing to say about these very familiar texts. Secondly, perhaps even more importantly, he's able to do this without jargon. I mean, I haven't learned as much as I should have done from Steve, but Steve seems to me to be one of the most lucid writers in our field. He's able to show you how to re-examine and re-analyse a piece of work without simply absorbing it under some more general interpretative schema imported from elsewhere. On the contrary, it seems to emerge from the material in question. So there's a deep empiricism to the work, which I find fantastically important and attractive. And the third aspect of it is that there's a kind of respect. Steve's long-standing interest in questions of authority, trust, scepticism, expertise, deference, solidarity and sociability is partly autobiographical. It's because those are many of the themes of the way he lives. He's very respectful of genuine expertise. He's delighted by craftsmanship, by connoisseurship, ranging from well-made silverware to well-made wine, to well-made food, to well-made furniture, to well-made books. He moved from a liberal arts college on the west coast, Reed, to Philadelphia, to Penn, which was one of the headquarters of the social studies of the sciences. Had met some very important figures in early social history of science there, Jack Morrell, Arnold Thackeray, figures like that. Did his thesis on the social world of science in the Edinburgh Enlightenment. Magnificent piece of work, which brought him to Scotland and then back to the States. Remarkably, Tom Whiteside had played a minor role in getting Steve initial employment at Keele University to catalogue their library of mathematics books, which they outrageously subsequently sold off to a dealer. And then acquired the post in the science studies unit in Edinburgh from the later 1970s. Extraordinarily charismatic figure and very generous, so that the Leibniz and Clarke paper was part of a sequence of papers that he was working on around the theme of the social use or moral use of nature. These would have included studies on the history of phrenology, on the history of matter theory and so forth. And with characteristic generosity, but also extraordinary perceptiveness, he noticed in his work on the scientific revolution and early modern matter theory, that there had been a controversy in the 1660s, which had not been studied apparently, between Robert Boyle, on whom there was, in the late 1970s, early 1980s, a great deal of recent, very important, extremely impressive scholarship by various historians, and Thomas Hobbes. And again, characteristics Steve Shapin, he immediately divined that this might be interesting. Why might this be interesting? This might be interesting because the terms of the controversy call into question the basis of certain assumptions, now so institutionalised we don't recognise them as such. And he was able to develop the notion of playing the stranger. Clearly, his familiarity with anthropological approaches, mainly structural functionalist ones, right? E.P., Mary Douglas and so on, played an absolutely decisive role there. And I think, in terms of the intellectual history of intellectual history of intellectual history, it's very important to go back to the 60s and 70s and think about the reception history of Evans Pritchard in the humanities, which I think has not been analysed, or not analysed properly, or not really studied at all, right? So that a deferential reference to the chicken means much more than it might be taken to mean. Just as, for example, the notion of hot and cold, which is exactly what kind of argument that is, exactly what kind of methodology is required to make sense of the movement between here and there, between present and past, into worlds that have history, or allegedly seem not to, the interests in play in making those interpretive judgements, those are indispensable for understanding where a certain kind of social history of knowledge comes from. Everybody knows this, and yet it's kind of passed as self-evident, as though there was no difference between Evans Pritchard and oxygen. And it's not like that at all. The same is true of mutatis mutandis for Douglas's work. I mean Bloor's paper, which is called 'Polyhedra and the Abominations of Leviticus', which is a systematic attempt to apply the argument of purity and danger to an episode in the history of 19th century mathematics. Extraordinary article, not just for its application to the history of mathematics, but also because of the way it uses purity and danger, and natural symbols, and so on. One isn't saying that these are reliable versions of the classics of structural functionalism, surely they're not, but a spanner can be used for many things. And it seems to me we need to perhaps go back and think about what was going on there precisely. So, the notion of playing the stranger, that it would be indispensable to find a contemporary of the founders of experimental method, querying the basis of that enterprise, so that the basis of that enterprise could then be subjected to proper historical analysis. That, at least for Steve, clearly came partly from that anthropological insight, which he'd already tried out in the case of the phrenological work. So, whereas in the case of the phrenological work that he'd studied, he was, as it were, making the utterly strange plausibly familiar, how could one write the history of the falsehood? Like the cerebral localization of Edinburgh Phrenologists, which is certainly a falsehood. Well, anthropological methods might help you make the utterly alien, make certain sense. That was the game. And in the case of Robert Boyle, the enterprise was the opposite, to make the utterly familiar odd. And those are the two things that historians of science have to do. We have to work out how to make the aliens friends, and we have to work out how to make ourselves weird. And anthropological resources clearly help you do that. They're indispensable, but they're not sufficient. So, what was I doing? I was getting a job in London. Hooray. Which I'm eternally grateful. I don't know what would have happened otherwise. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph, departments across the country were being butchered. And in the case of the Department of History of Science and Technology at Imperial College, the professor, Rupert Hall, and the reader, Mary Boas Hall, retired simultaneously. And the budget was cut, and they were to be replaced with one junior lecturer. The post was advertised, and thanks mainly to Mary Hesse, who'd been at Imperial, and who wrote me a stellar reference, apparently. I was hired. So, my first job. So, at the very moment where I was beginning to talk to Steve in the wake of the viva about this text of Hobbes and this controversy that he was working on as a paragraph or two for a chapter of a book, which was to be called 'The Social Use of Nature', that's how it began. I mean, he needed a bit of analysis of the Hobbes text for a section of one subsection of one chapter of one book. I found myself in London, in a flat in Paddington, so that dates it. No one could now live where I lived. I would walk to work every morning past... What year is this? This is 1980, 1981. I would walk to work across the park along the Serpentine. How wonderful is that? Past the Albert Memorial and the Albert Hall and the Royal College of Art, and then back in the afternoon along the lake. It was glorious and I had a wonderful time. Lots of music happening as well at this period in London. Certain problems, because Cambridge had trained me to be a bit lazy about libraries, the library at the Senate House in the Ministry of Truth in London and the British Library were kind of more challenging to use than the UL. And between 1981 and 1983, Steve and I wrote a book, which started epistolary. He was in Edinburgh and I was in London. There is no digital work going on. There is literal scissors and paste. This is the archaeology of the archaeology of knowledge. And we just write letters to each other, typed letters, and then cut them up and paste them together again and then send them back. And this gradually expanded. And every so often I would go and stay in his absolutely wonderful flat in Bruntsfield, which is on the other side of the meadows from Edinburgh University, very near Murchison, where John Napier, inventor of the slide rule and logarithms, lived once. We'd sit in the golf tavern on the links and argue. Occasionally we'd talk to someone else, Harry Collins for a brief period. But it was an intensely cloistered project, which one should remember, right? I should remember, note to self. We barely discussed it with anybody else. This was deeply backstage work. We didn't give lectures or seminars about this. That was not what we were talking about. We didn't teach on it. We didn't apply for major collaborative research grants. In fact, the only grant we applied for was a tiny grant, but very much appreciated from the Royal Society to help us make sure we had covered the extant air pumps that there were. And there aren't many. And otherwise it was a very private experience. And I think if the book has virtues, this book that came out at the end of '85, eventually from Princeton, called 'Leviathan and the Air Pump', one of its virtues is that it was a backstage project. Yet intensely conversational. I think it's a epistolary structure still, at least to me, it seems obvious that it's the two guys trying to convince each other of what they're doing. And it was an attempt systematically to see if it was possible to use an approach that had been developed in Bath and in Edinburgh and elsewhere by sociologists of scientific knowledge, particularly sociologists working on scientific controversies, for a passage of past science. Why might that seem to be difficult? It might seem to be difficult because the premise of a lot of sociological study at that period was that one had to follow science in action. Once a controversy was closed, the facts, as Harry Collins put it, would seem to be like ships in bottles and one would be hard put to it to see how they got there. There would be what he called a catastrophic crystallisation of certainty. And you would no longer be able to follow the contingencies which had been negotiated in order to make this thing so. So the challenge to historians was obvious. Everybody's dead, there's no oral history to be had, and reopening the possibility of alternative outcomes looked weird and strange. Was it possible to do that? We thought yes, it probably was possible to do that. Partly because of the supreme virtuosity of the protagonists involved, Mr Boyle and Mr Hobbes, partly because of the extreme control over the material. The book took longer to write than the events that it describes, after all. And what was at stake, while centrifugal to a degree, it took us into the politics of the restoration and exactly how do you make a sealant that doesn't leak? If you want to join glass and metal to leather in the spring of 1661, if you're Robert Hooke, how do you do that? What kinds of grease and fat do you use? Since whether the air pump leaked turned out to be a really important historical question. I think the book fell stillborn from the press. I remember turning up at Berkeley in 1985 with, again we're still pre-digital, the proofs of the book, which were printed on a more or less continuous roll of lurid green paper by Princeton. So that in order to read a bit, it was papyrological, you had to unroll this, no PDFs or anything like that. And we both gave extracts from the book, no interest whatsoever. And almost all the initial reviews were understandably either uninterested or very hostile, with two exceptions. One by Harry and one by, I never cease to remember with pleasure, Owen Hannaway, who's now no longer with us, wonderful, tough, Glaswegian, working class bloke, trained as a chemist at Glasgow University who'd gone to Johns Hopkins and started a whole programme in early modern history of the sciences, especially of chemistry, who seemed instantly to understand what we'd been trying to do. He became a lifelong friend and I mourned his passing and in fact spoke a eulogy for him at Vancouver back in 2005, tragic loss. But by and large this was not a book that changed the world. It changed life for me enormously because it helped me get a job back in Cambridge in 1984 and there I think we'll pause.

AM

I just wanted to mention that it won, much, much later it came to public notice because you won the Erasmus Prize, didn't you?

SS

That's right. I mean I can say a bit about that. The Erasmus Prize was established in the late 1950s in the Netherlands, initially as a prize for cultural achievement and scholarship, but cultural achievement in its widest sense. Early winners include Charlie Chaplin, Ingmar Bergman, Maurice Meleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss. By the 1980s and 90s the prize under the brilliant administration of the Erasmus Foundation was becoming perhaps slightly more scholarly, but one could still win if one was a group of eteerseteers or an architect. The way the works, as I understand it, is that a field is defined first and then for that year and then within that field exemplary figures are then chosen as the prize winners. So for some reason the Foundation decided to choose for 2005 the field of roughly the social history of science, science studies, and they very generously chose Steve and me as exemplary representatives. And one was presented with the prize by William Prince of Orange at the Royal Palace in The Hague, amazing, an unforgettable event. My mother was able to come, which is really one of the things that made it for me, and we were looked after astonishingly well, very embarrassing. I really did think when we got the letters, Steve and I, in early 2005 that this was a practical joke by one of my splendid students because I really didn't think this was plausible. But yes, I mean it was made clear to us that this was not for the book but for our work, but clearly the fact that it was jointly to us and so clearly established the book as the rationality for the prize. It's often cited, put it that way. I rarely recognise a reading of the book that matches my own, but see above, that's how things are in the humanities and perhaps more generally. I'm just very pleased to have helped in a minor way actually make something that people seem to have found interesting and useful. It's Steve's book I helped and I think the force there, the force of the analysis, the genial idea of showing how contingencies become certainties in the course of action, the decision to make the very enterprise of experiment a fundamental question, those are Steve's decisions and intuitions and thank goodness for that. Also the way in which, what should we say, a rather relaxed, in the best possible sense of the word, attitude is taken to fraught and complex questions in epistemology and in sociology is I think a virtue of that book. The most difficult questions I think are tractable with ingenious forms of writing and analysis. It goes back to something we were talking about much earlier in this conversation about the fact that good ideas happen in the course of work and that's both the principle through which the book was written and the argument that the book makes. The argument that the book makes is that really important creative innovation happens in the course of detailed meticulous labour. I see the book as a contribution to the labour history of knowledge, precisely that, and that's why it asks apparently obscure questions like, okay, how many air pumps were there such that anyone could do the work Boyle said you had to do, turn into answers to otherwise rather complex metaphysical questions like what is it to replicate an experiment. So the book proposes to show how metaphysical questions can be resolved through labour and it shows that analysts' labour can itself resolve what might otherwise seem to be metaphysical questions. So it's a metaphysical question as to how two folk who are very different, doing very different things in very different places at very different times can nevertheless be judged to have repeated an experiment. How could that possibly be? What is it to go on in the same way? That's our version of the question, what is the void? If the void, as Hobbes says beautifully, is no thing then it can't exist. So obviously we infringed massively on a whole series of very high status and very proficient areas of scholarship and were treated accordingly. And I don't regret that but one has to recognise that. Subsequently we've both done a deal of work, Steve much more than I, on similar questions. But for me I think what that work helped do was to give me a certain kind of self-confidence about the virtue of the kinds of questions I was trying to ask. Also I was able to tell interviewers in the University of Cambridge in 1984 that I was about to co-publish a book from Princeton and that I think helped their decision to hire me as a lecturer in History of Science, History of Philosophy of Science here in Cambridge, starting in the autumn of 1984. I was in fact replacing Gerd Buchdahl which only goes to show that, at least in my case, Cambridge works really well if it doesn't get too hung up about disciplinary specialism. They weren't replacing Gerd, it must be said, with someone who could do any of the things he did. But I was very grateful for it. At exactly the same time, almost exactly the same time, my father died of a heart attack which he'd suffered from coronary disease for many years. He died on 10th May 1984 and I've never recovered from that, I think. He died after giving a talk at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. So for a period neither my mother nor I knew where he was. And we literally had to phone round London hospitals to find that he was in the Westminster. And he didn't last very long. It was really dramatic. And it was appalling. There's no other way to describe it. I was, what, 29. And as I say, I haven't really recovered from his absence. I still have the experience of pointing things out to him. New things. I still feel that I'm kind of within my mind making that very characteristic gesture that one does to one's closest friend. Look at that. Or isn't that interesting? Or what do we think about that? He absolutely is there for me in that sense as the person with whom I'm constantly comparing my experiences. And without being too maudlin about it, the fact of the matter is that whenever I achieve any success such as it is, it just makes me sad that he's not there to share it. And we talked about the Erasmus Prize. Well, that's an example. On the other hand, I think it's clearly brought myself and my mother much closer. She has led a very long, active, committed, exciting life. She threw herself into the politics in Brighton from the mid-eighties onwards as part of the struggle against that Thatcherism. She became a Labour councillor for Hanover Ward. She became a very active militant in the anti-nuclear movement and in the Green movement. And she's taught me a lot about how to go on and how to survive and live a full and creative life. And that's been a really important still centre of the turning world for me. So 1984 is clearly a crux moment for me. Where I come back to Cambridge, and I've been here ever since, where I saw what my career was going to be. I think when I was teaching at Imperial, I was still very much up for grabs. It was, in retrospect, the most productive and exciting period of my academic life, but I attribute that partly to meeting Stephen Shapin and partly to the entire, total, complete and utter absence of any administrative responsibilities whatsoever at Imperial. Also partly to living in London, which is always exciting and fun. But coming back to Cambridge was really, in a certain way, coming home. And it's been a department that I've enjoyed and delighted in ever since.

PART THREE (2nd July 2008)

AM

Right, you arrived back in Cambridge....

SS

In 1984. And if I was asked what the main theme of my professional life has been while I've been back in Cambridge, I think it's about working out all the consequences I can think of, of the idea that communicating knowledge is always also making it. So that there's a very common idea, which has initial plausibility but is in fact completely false, that what one's at as a scholar or researcher or whatever is working solidly backstage, making knowledge, finding out new truths, making connections, and then subsequently somewhere else in a completely different way, all of this is going to be communicated. It's going to be communicated by publication, in teaching, in broadcasting, in exhibitions and so on. And I guess my experience over the last quarter of a century is that that's exactly the wrong picture of what happens. And on the contrary, almost all the good ideas that I've ever had, there aren't very many of them, have happened in the process of deliberating, communicating, exchanging and so on. So working with students, especially PhD students, and working with teams to organise and put on and interpret and plan and discuss exhibitions and work in museums, working with groups around broadcasting and radio, television and so on, all of that has been, or provided me with, the places where and the opportunities to actually find out new stuff. And on the contrary, the arrow almost points in the opposite direction, counter-intuitively. It points from the museum to the study. It points from the supervision to the article. It points from the television programme to the book, not the other way around. And in retrospect, that's really what I spent the last 25 years doing, television. I started working around television and history of science fairly early. In fact, when I was in London, when I moved to London in 1980, which was a period, I mean politically catastrophic period of course, for the country. But it was also, the law of unintended consequences applies here, the cultural period that future historians will describe as early Channel 4. That's to say, miraculously, for reasons that I think we still don't understand, government in association with certain interests in media and elsewhere had invented a system of commissioning and making television programmes which was unprecedentedly liberal and unprecedentedly expansive and unprecedentedly well-funded, which was how the early Channel 4 franchises worked. And one of my former Cambridge allies and comrades, Bob Young, had managed to persuade Central Television, as it then was, to run a series on science. There was no science slot in early Channel 4 and Central Television, based in Birmingham, bid for and won the franchise for that, with a huge budget, with initially a dozen programme slots, each one hour, broken by advertising, hence the money. And Bob Young took over the whole programme series, it was called 'Crucible'. He commissioned his mates and allies to each make a programme and many of them were extremely powerful, effective and distinguished. Donna Haraway, for example, then not the key thinker that she subsequently became, but an absolutely vibrant and brilliant young historian of biology actually at that point, and feminist, made an extraordinary programme, a classic I think of television science, on primatology and on the way in which apes were studied by humans in confined spaces, often in Caribbean islands, and it wasn't clear who was studying whom. And some really marvellous footage and brilliantly edited. I was asked to make a programme about Newton with essentially unlimited resources, so we did that. It was called 'Portraits of Newton'. It was extremely good fun. I learnt how to talk to camera. I learnt what you could and could not do in an hour. I learnt about shooting ratios, that it would take you a day or more to make three or four minutes of broadcastable footage. It was still the steam age of television, so editing was done in a suite using a Steenbeck and scissors, essentially mechanised scissors. I was uniquely privileged because the director-producer was a marvellous man called Lawrence Moore. Genius, I think, real genius. And also ridiculously tolerant. He was prepared to let “the talent”, that's me, that's the jargon word, sit with the editors, which has never happened to me since, anywhere, ever. And that was really a treatment privilege and of course had a huge difference. And the film 'Portraits of Newton' is an attempt to summarise what I think about the way in which the reputation of a great scientist is made in culture and changes and is mutable, and the way in which iconography helps you understand history and vice versa. And I learnt, as I say, all sorts of techniques and tricks. That then carried on through the 80s and 90s and I got involved in various television projects which were astonishingly rewarding intellectually. The most important of them, by far, was a series that I worked on with Alan Macfarlane and with Chris Cullen and with Maxine Berg and Joel Mokyr and others, but entirely under the aegis of someone who, I think, really changed the way I worked, Gerry Martin. Gerry, in many ways, stands for the argument that I'm trying to make here. He stands for the idea that trying to communicate is the same as making knowledge. So Gerry, it's hard to summarise and since he's no longer with us it's also rather sad. I got to know Gerry, again to illustrate the thesis, through museum work. My department in Cambridge has one of the best collections of scientific instruments and books in the world, the Whipple Museum. It was endowed by the then manager of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, one of the neglected glories of Cambridge, Mr Robert Whipple, who on his retirement began to collect, when one could, in the interwar period, astonishing objects and books. Not just the classic paraphernalia, as it were, objects of virtue of past science, but really a very acute eye and taste. In 1944, when you might have thought people had their minds on other things, Whipple left the whole collection to the University. Initially, the University had no idea what to do with such a collection and the department grew up in the 50s around the museum, not the other way around. It's worthy of note that both in Oxford and in Cambridge, scholarship in the history of science grew up around the great museum collections, not the other way around. And one could think about the analogy there with the development of cognate disciplines like anthropology. So in the very same gesture, tragically one might say, one had a discipline that was increasingly neglecting material culture, developing around an institution which held all the resources to make material culture front and centre of one's work, and I think that tension remains. The greatest curator of the Whipple Museum by far is a man called Jim Bennett, who now runs the Old Ashmolean, the history of science museum at Oxford. A charming, witty, brilliant instrument historian, historian of astronomy, a brilliant teacher as well, who'd organised a series of exhibitions and publications around the Whipple collection, which I and my students very enthusiastically took part in. And it was through Jim's work with those projects that we met Gerry Martin, a wealthy, entirely self-effacing catalyst of innumerable initiatives, projects and programmes that he would simultaneously launch, start, provoke, direct and yet, in a certain sense, disappear from. And that puckish role that Gerry gave himself was I think one of the keys to his success. Simultaneously, absolutely down there with the work, and yet so modest, and so delightfully puzzled and quizzical about the performances that the court jesters would put on, that one realised all the time that the best one could do was not good enough. I mean, I've never met anyone who provoked ever more intense, ever more energetic, ever more committed work, without once being offensive or rude or in any way dictatorial. It was a kind of Aristotelian pattern, right? Gerry provided this ever slightly receding goal towards which one was supposed to move. Rather than pushing you or forcing you in any direction, he would simply move the goal a few microns further on, and you suddenly realised that where you thought you'd completed a task, this was only the beginning. And working on the exhibitions that he helped sponsor, this is in the mid-90s, was an eye-opener for me, for the reasons I've begun to sketch. First of all, it radically changed the kinds of questions that I wanted to ask. This was a set of exhibitions that Gerry almost entirely funded around science, especially physical science as it was in Britain and Germany a hundred years ago. We had all the resources to put on these shows. He gave us the funding to really make those exhibitions work. It completely reoriented the direction of my research towards questions like science and imperialism, Victorian technology and material culture, the absolutely crucial role of standards, measurement, standardisation, metrology, the significance of the trained eye, the importance of what Gerry thought of as those remarkable feedback loops that industrial society managed to develop between reliable knowledge and, as he always put it, moving matter around. All of this, I think, revolutionised the historiography of 19th century science and technology. He was the prime mover, but as I say, teleologically rather than efficiently. Simultaneously, he was working with and sponsoring a loosely structured community, a family almost, of scholars and others around the theme of innovation and discovery, the problem of genius, which met annually, sometimes bi-annually. It involved economists, historians, anthropologists, historians of science. It enabled me to meet people I would never otherwise have met and constantly bringing us back to basics, often by using a Gladstone bag with which he would arrive at a meeting full of goodies from Neolithic tools to late 19th century treasures, simply to make sure that you, as it were, kept your mental feet on the ground. That was one thing. But also because they provoke. The principal lesson I learned from Gerry around material culture is that no object is so powerful that it means the same everywhere and no object is so weak that how you describe it defines what it's for. And that seemed to unlock all sorts of research and expository and exhibitionary possibilities. And it also meant for the people I was working with most closely in Cambridge, PhD students and postdocs, the forging of a real intellectual community, in some ways the most important community I've ever worked with between the late 80s and the late 90s. For a decade we had here a very impressive, very productive, dynamic group of scholars, young, bright, eccentric, working on the history of the physical sciences in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, who've gone on to great success in Europe, Britain and the States. My work, in a certain sense, simply tracks what they were doing. So the articles I've written, books I've edited and collaborated on are essentially commentaries on and responses to this sort of work that they were doing. When Shapin and I had the privilege of going to the Netherlands for the award of the Erasmus Prize in the autumn of 2005, I was very keen that this group of people be there too. And a very substantial number of them actually came, I think partly because there was an invitation to a palace, which we hadn't had before, and partly because the catering in Amsterdam is of course extremely good in all sorts of ways. Jim Bennett came, a lot of PhD students and former PhD students, it was a remarkable gathering. My principal regret was that Gerry wasn't there, because I think he would have found it hilarious. Slightly embarrassing of course, but hilarious. Linked to that then are two themes that I think the work depended on. Again, broadcasting, which I find extremely entertaining and very frustrating simultaneously. So the project which I worked with Alan and Maxine and Joel and Chris on, which had Gerry as the strange attractor and David Dugan as the producer director, another I think media genius. In terms of making space and opportunity for the performing sea lions to do their thing, I mean David is really remarkable. And he cares, which I've subsequently discovered is a rare virtue in that industry. This was a series called 'The Day the World Took Off', six one hour television programmes. Alan and Gerry contributed enormously to that, because they dreamt up a scheme and a set of questions that I think unusually well organised and focused what would otherwise have been an entirely centrifugal activity. The idea for example of moving backwards chronologically that that series embodies, and of moving outwards from a point to the universe. So the first programme was on the events between Manchester and Liverpool around the first journey of the rocket, all the way to the last programme which was about the agricultural revolutions of antiquity and pre-history and their global consequences. That seemed absolutely genial to me. And one reason why it was obviously smart is that's how historians actually make their claims. They don't begin with abstract universal theory from which they then, using the hypothetical deductive method, derive a particular consequence for a particular instance in a particular place and time. It seems to me great historians are all casuists. They make the instances which they've mastered and which they've analysed exquisitely count backwards, genealogically as it were, as telling lessons for much more global questions. It's worth remembering after all that the word theoria originally meant “the activity of going away and coming back and telling your citizens what you saw and learnt”. So Herodotus, if a traveller, which he probably was, was a theoretician. He brought theory home from the world to the city. Theory is absolutely about voyaging, journeying to elsewhere, to alien places and learning and systematising particular bits of almost atomic experience and then putting them back together. And the work that we did for 'The Day the World Took Off', and the handful of other programmes that I've been involved in that I'm proud of, is exactly like that because the pressure there is always on the telling in both senses and weaving the telling into a set of images and noises that then hint at and imply a much more global narrative.

AM

So you were involved in another series on light, weren't you? Was that important?

SS

That was important and again an object lesson. This was work for the BBC in 2001, 2002, 2003. Two things there. One was there's an old Australian expression, “you can't win it if you're not in it”, which means you're not allowed to criticise or judge or comment unless you're a player. This is an expression that comes of course from cricket. So grumbling about the public face of the sciences and especially the way folk tell stories about the past and the development of the sciences is fine provided in a way you've paid your dues. And about five or six years ago I was really keen to see if, as it were, I could make something like a television project, I could take part in a television project which expressed not only some stories that I wanted to tell but also a way of telling them that I was pleased with. And fortunately, entirely out of the blue, I was contacted by a team from the BBC who were after making a quite large scale series, perhaps four hours, four programmes, on optics. And I found in conversation with the various producers who were involved, especially the principal producer Paul Senn, who remains a close personal friend and is a very important producer of science documentaries, that there was a possible scheme here, not to do something on optics but to do something precisely on light because that would broaden and deepen the scope of what we might want to talk about. The other important experience there was to rethink yet again the nature of chronology and chronological narrative in thinking about the development of the sciences and scientific knowledge. So what we did for this series was to choose a series of overlapping chronologies. So rather than move from the beginning of all things to Hiroshima, we constructed it as a series of interlocking stories so that each programme went back over some material in the previous programme but from a completely different point of view. The programme of those that I'm most proud of for sure is the one on electric light. There was an obvious reflexivity about this in that, there's a sense in it that if you can't make a television programme about light, then you can't make a television programme about anything. And very skilled producers and editors played with that, I thought, wonderfully well, especially the material on Edison and the second industrial revolution, the development of the power and light system in late 19th century Europe and North America, so that the iconography of the film is part of the argument, the coming into being of that way of seeing of that kind of illumination, which I'm describing verbally, is also very much what you're seeing playfully on the screen and I'm very proud of the way we did that. We were also very lucky because the programme happened to coincide with one of the greatest contemporary art exhibits I've seen recently, which is Olafur Eliasson's weather project at the Tate Modern, which essentially made the entire argument of this series in one installation. Vapour hanging in the turbine hall with a vast number of light bulbs creating the image of the sun, sand spread over part of the floor, but also mirrors to concentrate and diffuse the various kinds of light and without planning, Londoners treated it like the beach, so that when one visited there were literally hundreds of prone bodies lying down in front of this artificial sun inside, check it out, a turbine hall, so that everything I wanted to say about light, culture, urbanity, art, power and light, electric generators, was all co-present in this room, in this thing and that really makes the principle point that I want to make about what I learned from working with David Dugan and Gerry Martin and Alan and others and Jim Bennett and my colleagues, which is, it is possible to make very complicated ideas into material objects and then to reflect literally on those material objects to extract new, better, refined ideas and models and theories. That had absolutely not been obvious to me before throwing myself into all this work. It's culminated in being offered the chance of becoming a trustee of the National Museum of Science and Industry, which I now am, which is again an eye-opening experience to see from that point of view behind the scenes of the museum. This is the most important science and technology museum in Europe and one of the two or three most important in the world, which has had interesting and often troubled history, which has many different functions, communicating science and technology, enrolling public interest in the sciences, a vast biomedical collection as well as the classic technology and science collections, based on three or four major sites including the National Media Museum at Bradford and the National Railway Museum in York. A fascinating learning experience for me and I'm one of the first historians of science, if not the first historian of science, to be a trustee. So that's given me an enormous amount to think about and it's an area where, for the next few years anyway, I'll be doing a lot of work. Related to this of course is the theme of the museum. It's through the museum and the public exhibition that my work with my maître à pensée in Paris, Bruno Latour, has been most pursued. Latour has become the most famous, the best known exponent of something like science studies, science and technology studies, over the last decade. The usual principle that no one interprets work the same way twice applies in spades to Bruno's work. His principle that meaning is in the hands of future users applies spectacularly to what he's done. So my impression of him and his work is radically different from that of many of my colleagues. I met him first in Bath in 1980. We stayed in touch. My regular trips to Paris for research brought me in contact with him. He was the first person, actually, to take the book that I did with Steve Shapin seriously, though his interpretation of it differs very radically from mine or from Steve's. He was trained as a theologian and an anthropologist and a philosopher. A marvellous combination, maybe not that different from Leiris. He's by no means a politically radical figure, on the contrary. There's a very profound Gallican Catholicism in Latour's work which simply doesn't make it to Anglo-Saxon. I mean it's invisible here and in the States, but it's absolutely visible in France. And it needs to be respected as a very important component of his work. He was based for a very substantial period of his career at the School of Mines, which tells you a great deal about how French intellectual, left-bank intellectual life works. The School of Mines hosts a centre for the sociology of innovation, which is kind of a Gerry Martin title, if one wants, where with his colleagues, especially with Michel Callon, Bruno developed an unbelievably powerful, falsifiable but powerful project to analyse how the sciences are pursued, science in action, with a vocabulary and an armamentarium, one could easily use oneself. The contrast between his approach and those of some of his Anglo-American colleagues is perhaps too harshly drawn. The aims to completely reconstruct the social sciences on this basis perhaps again slightly too ambitious. But as an intellectual, he's one of the major figures that the revolution in our understanding of the sciences has produced in the last 25 years. And his work is indispensable for any adequate account of how science, technology, society are for us now at this critical period. Personally he's one of the most charming people I've ever met, absurdly hospitable, genteel, courteous and of course generous. Example, in the late 80s, early 90s I wrote and published an article which was somewhat critical of one of his masterpieces, a book which in French is called 'The Microbes, War and Peace' and in English is called 'The Pasteurization of France'. And I compared what Bruno was doing in this project, which is an analysis amongst many other things, of the reasons for the success of Louis Pasteur from 1848 into the 1880s with the analysis that Marx gave in the 18th Brumaire of the reasons for the success of Louis Napoleon between 1848 and later. And Bruno, I think unlike many senior colleagues in our field, responded to this paper by coming to Cambridge with the very best of his family's wine, I mean the best white wine I've ever drunk, which of course we couldn't drink on the spot because it had been shaken up by the journey, and sat with me for a couple of days talking through what I meant and what it meant for him. And I thought that was an act of intellectual honesty and rigour that you don't often find and he's been like that with me and with his closest colleagues always. He's also massively committed to making sure the work we all do is public work and I respect that enormously. We are not dealing with an obscurantist, recherché figure who wraps up his arguments in a jargon that only the croyant can follow, that is not what is going on here. So for example in collaboration with Peter Weibel in Germany at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Bruno has organised two astonishing public exhibitions which he's mobilised a lot of his colleagues and friends to take part in. And again, remarkable knowledge producing, culture producing activities, what he calls assemblages, which I think are some of the most exciting projects that I've ever worked on and in. So although we never quite agree, we're never quite on the same wavelength, the interference between the different forms of radiation that we all broadcast has provided me with some of the most productive and interesting public as well as academic activities in which I've been engaged. He's also a model, as is Steve Shapin, for how to deal with trainees, with students, a balance that's always very difficult to strike of course, especially I think in the field of science studies and history of science where there is no background that is irrelevant, no former experience that can't pay off for one's work in this field and therefore perversely no one is qualified to speak. So the activity of training and collaborating with students is endlessly analytic and open-ended to a degree that I think is unusual in comparison with other fields. Should one have a qualification in the sciences? Of course. Should one know the languages of learning? Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Greek? Of course. Should one be able to master paleography? Absolutely. Should one make sure that one's cases are drawn not just from, as it were, Britain but also from elsewhere in industrial society and indeed of course one has to respect indigenous forms of knowledge in many other parts of the world? Yes, absolutely, that's completely indispensable. So although the early age of the polyhistor is past, we're supposed to be like that and that raises extraordinarily interesting but also intractable questions about how you train anyone to do the sort of work that we find interesting and valuable. Similarly, the way in which students are always collaborators too, in the case of Shapin and Latour, I've learnt a lot about how that can be and is in our field. And finally the virtues of simplicity which I admire in those two men's writings but have never managed to emulate myself. So at the end of the day, I think one thing I've learnt is that the creativity of work in this field is always distributed, that's clear, and always located, that's clear as well. And that seems very paradoxical if I think back over the career. Distributed in the sense that it's always very difficult to pinpoint, in fact one shouldn't even try, the person, the unique moment, the individual who prompted all this work to happen. And yet at the same time, it's very much a particular site and a particular place that seems crucial for the most important, most creative, most dynamic moment. Again, there's obviously a reflexivity there. This is the question that my sub-discipline has to answer. It has to answer the question, whence this astonishing innovative activity and its successes and problems? And the quick and dirty answer is that we're dealing with a complex of at least these two processes, spatialisation and localisation. Spatialisation is that astonishing technique that certain enterprises and societies seem to have mastered, which is making what works in one place work elsewhere and in principle everywhere and in principle anywhere. How is that done? In the history of experiment that's called replication. In the history of the economy that's called commodity production. In the history of philosophy that's called the problem of induction. And they're clearly related to each other. On the other hand, the solution to those problems is localising, is to bring resources, heterogeneous resources, to a point. March to the sound of the guns. So when one looks at a particular laboratory or a particular desk or a particular workshop or a fortiori, as Gerry always taught us, a particular piece of hardware, you're dealing with a hybrid complex of entities, elements and resources that have been brought together in a single place from all over the globe. Look at an 18th century electrical machine. One has mahogany, glass, silk, leather, brass and ivory, all conjoined in an astonishingly ingenious arrangement to produce a power that had never been produced that way before, since the creation of the world. And if you tie strings from a beautiful 18th century Nairne electrical machine to the places and times whence all those components come, you will have mapped the networks of global trade, commerce, empire, scholarship, learning and conflict from China, silk, to Africa, ivory, to the subcontinent, mahogany, to Limehouse, the glass, to a field somewhere in Berkshire, the leather, to the dissenting academies of Merseyside, to the Lunar Society, to Cambridge University, to the Royal Court of Queen Elizabeth I, where the word electric is first used by her physician William Gilbert. So bringing all that together into a single place and then making it work, and then doing something completely different and unanticipated with this. Let ten decades go past and this becomes mutatis mutandis, a cathode ray machine. Let another ten decades go past and it becomes a flat screen television. How is that possible? That's the question, that's the kind of question that I think we can answer, but it takes an incredibly long time and I guess what I've learned is that there are many different media which we should be using to show what the answer to that question might be.

AM

Wonderful. Can I just take it on one stage? Because I usually ask people how working in Cambridge has helped them and also more generally in your case, Cambridge as a creative environment.

SS

Yes, that's a very good question. Well, I've tried to answer this question on a number of occasions, all of them completely surreal. The most amusing and provocative one was as follows, so this is a roundabout way of explaining why Cambridge matters. A very close friend and guru of mine, Svante Lindqvist, took the job of setting up and administering a museum of the Nobel Prize which opened in Stockholm, in the old Stock Exchange actually, in the old part of town just a few years ago. Svante is an immensely brilliant and impressive technology historian. He wrote the definitive book on the introduction of the steam engine into Sweden and a lovely article, this is not irrelevant, on glass-blowing as the key technology of the modern world. It's called 'Variations on a Wagnerian Theme', and I love this article. So someone with those interests and knowledges, this is quite a challenge. How do you show the Nobel Prize? What is there to show after all? Cerebral convolutions, the results of IQ tests. He had a very clever idea, amongst many others, which was to note that in the century that the Nobel Prize system has run, certain places have been peculiarly good at winning it. Clearly Cambridge is certainly one of them. Indeed one or two of the Cambridge colleges, Trinity would be a very good example, have had more members win the Nobel Prize than most countries. So there's something in the water in these particular places. Princeton would be another, the Chicago Economics Department another. A particular cafe in Budapest, a particular street in Tokyo, a particular school. So he commissioned a group of marvellous Swedish film-makers to make 15 minute films about these special places. And he hired a really impressive young Swedish film-maker, Karin Vegsjö, probably mispronounced that, to make a film about Cambridge. And he indicated to her that she might get something out of talking to me. She decided to make a film which followed a carrot from a Fenland farm to St John's College high table. And to use that as the trope of the spine of the film and then around that a series of interviews with Cambridge people about the networked quality of the city. So she sat me down at the bottom of the stair in my home, in my house, and I just talked. And what occurred to me to say was that Cambridge has been, and this is certainly true for me, astonishingly rewarding and supportive because it's sufficiently withdrawn and sufficiently hybrid to provide mixtures of resources when one needs them. Withdrawn in the sense that it provides, and this is notorious, a certain kind of retreat. It's not perhaps as insulated as it would often like to be or as it's often represented. Absolutely not. A lot of the work that I've done on the history of science in Cambridge has pointed out the extreme porosity of the university with respect to the rest of the world. My work on Newton, for example, which I'm about to publish, which is called 'Newton on the Beach', indicates that he may have seemed to have been isolated and cloistered, but if one looks at the data that he was able to command from his rooms in Cambridge in the second half of the 17th century, it's very well linked with global information order, to use Chris Bader's expression. Nevertheless, the capacity to withdraw has always been indispensable and of course one worries a lot about the challenges to that capacity. Yet on the other hand, precisely because it is not secluded and it is not cloistered and it is not insulated, there's constant porosity, there's constant, as it were, permeability of the membranes. The juxtaposition of unanticipated skills, I think, has been absolutely crucial for me, so that relatively effortlessly one can assemble teams of people with the most surprisingly heterogeneous interests and skills, relatively frictionlessly, at relatively cheap cost. And as we've been saying, that's a key to being creative. Not in the banal sense that one is most creative when one is mixing, when one is in mixed company. I think that probably isn't true, actually. One is most creative when one is trying to survive in mixed company. It's a very different kind of activity. To explain to a well-meaning but under-informed, close personal friend exactly what the point of what one's doing is and how she can help, that's when a good idea occurs. This is the strength of weak ties that Granovetter talked about decades ago, that an entirely autarkic institution, which Cambridge always has the danger of becoming, is utterly disastrous. In that sense, one should be a very strong believer in the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, as many of the great Victorians were. On the other hand, an indefinite group of, as it were, mechanically solidarity-driven persons is very unlikely to produce anything worthwhile. The team photo should be taken after the work is over, not before. It's very much part of the victory celebration, rather than a way of ensuring that victory will be won. The reason why those astonishing disciplinary images, which Cambridge is very good at generating, of say the students of a particular private mathematics tutor like Hopkins or Ralph in the 19th century, are so astonishing. I mean one sees Kelvin and Maxwell and Stokes and so on, as it were, sitting next to each other, is because of what they've just been doing elsewhere and not on their own but with others in highly mixed and complicated company. So it's easy to make a certain kind of mistake about autarky and it's easy to make a certain kind of mistake about outreach, the two bug bears, the sclera and the coruptis, it seems to me, of what I'm trying to describe.

AM

Is it not summarised by Gerry, bounded but leaky?

SS

Exactly, exactly. Yes, there's a hole in my bucket but not a very big one. If there are no holes you're doomed and if it's just a sieve then you're probably doomed as well. That's exactly right. He always had the most pithy expression. And the leakage is what has always impressed me and what's always been the most useful and the most extraordinary actually, eye-opening experiences. The visitors passing through, the technicians, without whom none of us would survive and I'd never have had a good idea ever, the unknown collections which both vivify the work and must be constantly energised to stay in operation. The strangely motivated student, the bizarre shelving system of the University Library which means that actually a very substantial number of books that I've read are within ten metres of the books that I've been looking for normally in South Front four and five because they shelve their books by size which is just a brilliant idea. They could shelve them by colour but the fact that they shelve them by size and loosely by discipline is magnificent. And the strange intimacies that this produces as well so that one can be very friendly without being collegial and very collegial without the burden of having to be friendly. All of those things I think are valuable. There are, let me emphasise this though, enormous dangers. This is a fragile system in both respects. One danger is the danger which is always really serious of confusing the defence of autonomy with the defence of elitism and on the other hand confusing the demand for outreach which is crucial with the demand for abandonment in a certain sense of the intellectual work that we're trying to do. Were one not involved in this multifarious range of activities I think it would be very hard to defend what's going on here and were what's going on here not productive it would be indefensible, and I think that balance is frankly increasingly hard to strike. One way of saying that is that my work for example, so far as it goes, has wanted to emphasise just how implicated in empire and industry and capitalist society the work of this institution has been and vice versa without ever reducing it to, oh this is knowledge in the service of empire, hierarchy, class and capital. That's not what's going on and yet the porosity and the entanglement of those social forces with this institution is patent and indispensable. That I think strikes the right kind of balance and if that balance can be maintained then I'm relatively optimistic. If not then, which I think is a pretty characteristic Cambridge view, one has as it were optimism of the intellect and pessimism of the will. I think we can go on doing some of the best work that we have been doing but no one can quite work out how.

AM

Just one last question Simon. I mean you mentioned empire and it sort of links with my own work. Rivers, W. H. Rivers, how did you get interested in Rivers?

SS

Rivers, so William House Rivers, not to be confused with anyone else of the same name, was a physiologist, a medic, an anthropologist, a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, a therapist, a teacher, a self-experimenter, a traveller, an ethnographer and a politician amongst other things. And I learnt about him from Anita because Rivers was a member of the Torres Strait expedition from Cambridge to these islands between Australia and New Guinea led by A. C. Haddon in 1898, and played a major role in that expedition's work including the psychometric tests that were conducted on the beach and elsewhere on the islands. And his work in that respect was immediately fascinating for me because one of the things that has always interested me is what one might call the extramural laboratory. How can the exterior world be changed so that one can learn about it? If one doesn't transform the world one can't know it. But the world one wants to know about is the world before it's so transformed. And Rivers' strategy seemed to raise really interesting questions about that. So that was my initial entree in the late 90s. And there was a major conference that Anita co-organised at St John's which was Rivers' college on the relation between anthropology and psychology in the wake of his work. Also Anita took the family to the Torres Strait in 1996 as part of her planning around work for the Torres Strait project that she's been engaged on. So I was able, I was privileged now twice to visit the Torres Strait and to meet Torres Strait Islanders both there and in their many visits to Cambridge and to welcome them to our house. And that raised a whole series of questions of course for someone with absolutely no anthropological training whatsoever about what was at stake in making this sort of knowledge. A second strand was reading the decisive work of George Stocking, the historian par excellence of anthropology, who wrote a magnificent article about the roots of the anthropological work of Rivers' greatest contemporary, Franz Boas, in which Stocking points out the way in which Boas had begun as in the late 19th century training as a physicist essentially, and had moved to ethnography and anthropology and how the traces of that initial laboratory training marked a lot of Boas' work. And I began to ask, well I wonder if this is true of Rivers, given that Rivers in the 1880s and 90s was doing state of the art work in optical physics and optical physiology and fatigue studies with Kraepelin and in a whole series of self-experiments which are notorious and famous. And one motivation for that was as it were to stop treating laboratory science as the unmoved mover in this story, always to try and be more reflexive, to think well if it's true that this laboratory work provides someone like Rivers, the most charismatic, apparently saintly figure in the history of British anthropology, with decisive resources for what he then wants to do in the Torres Strait, elsewhere in Melanesia, in India with the Todas and of course in his therapeutic work during the First World War with Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and many others at Craig Lockhart, is it possible to use Rivers' work to analyse laboratory science and not just to treat his interests in and mastery of laboratory processes as a means of unfolding what he was doing in the field and in the clinic? So when I was asked to give a departmental talk at the Social Anthropology Department, which is a rare and wonderful privilege, I thought to speak to that issue. In other words, is it possible to fold back Rivers' work into a rethinking of laboratory science? To do it, I mean this is a ridiculously grandiose way of putting it, a kind of Plutarchian exercise on Boas and Rivers because they clearly have much in common even though they differ. And our friend Keith Hart then did me the honour of publishing a version of this paper in one of his early 'Prickley-Pear' pamphlets, sponsored by the Association of Amateur Anthropology, the AAA, which is still one of the longest and best illustrated pieces I've ever written. And I've stayed with Rivers for reasons which I suspect are linked to the reasons why everybody stays with Rivers, which is that he's a ghost. He still haunts this town and many other towns. Almost everybody I know who's really worked on Rivers is either at the strongest end in love with him, as Bartlett was. Bartlett, of course, his successor is the manager of Cambridge Experimental Psychology and author of 'I Discover', a text first in English to use the expression social construction and social constructionism, which was introduced towards the end of Bartlett's remembering. Well Bartlett saw Rivers sometime after Rivers died and...

AM

As a ghost.

SS

As a ghost, yes. And remained inspired by and provoked by that ghost. And that inspiration leads not entirely indirectly to the work of David Bloor through Cambridge Experimental Psychology and therefore, as David has pointed out in a number of stunning papers, Rivers is, as it were, the great-grandfather of the sociology of scientific knowledge in which I was trained. But I didn't know that until David showed me it was so. Similarly, Cambridge Anthropology's relationship with Rivers is extraordinarily conflicted. On the one hand, he's enormously honoured and on the other hand, he's defined precisely as whatever it is you do that's splendid but isn't anthropology. So the lecture that the Cambridge Social Anthropology Department occasionally holds, where it invites folk from outside the field to talk about how the field has helped them in their non-anthropological work, is named after Rivers. I find that very interesting because there's an ambivalence there, I think, about the great man. And those ambivalences are always a good sign of something worth thinking about hard. If something is that difficult to manage and yet that rich and provoking a century later, you should think about it very, very closely indeed.

AM

We've had 46 minutes. Is there anything I have forgotten to ask you and you would like to have said? This may not be the last occasion so you don't have to.

SS

I mean, one other thing very briefly that I think I would want to say is that a lot of what we've been talking about is more general than merely reflections on the sub-discipline in which I work, right? And I think that the question of disciplinarity raises its ugly but fascinating head here, right? We're facing, I think, a real political and economic crisis within the Academy at this point. And it's a crisis which is well defined around the notion of discipline. Because on the one hand, we're told once upon a time there were rigid, well-recognised, formal, loyalty-commanding disciplines. Everyone knew where they were within the Academy. And now we live in an epoch of fluidity and hybridity and multi- and interdisciplinarity, of large-scale collaboration, of public-private partnerships and what some of my colleagues call a new mode of the production of knowledge. On the other hand, so according to that story, rigid disciplinarity within the sciences has over the past generation disappeared or melted somewhat. On the other hand, we also know that this rigid disciplinarity, if it ever existed, allegedly didn't exist before the Industrial Revolution. It didn't exist before roughly 1789 to 1848. It was then, we're told by most historians, that the modern form of disciplinarity came into being. So we're facing, on the one hand, a series of urgent political and economic and administrative stories that tell us that our tradition is passing away, multiplied by a series of stories that tell us that what we took to be our tradition isn't really our tradition at all. And that apparent paradox is utterly characteristic of a lot of the work that people, I think, in the history of the sciences and elsewhere are engaged in. It's a constant struggle against that mixture of amnesia and nostalgia, against forgetting how recent it is that we live like this, and then forgetting that actually absent anaesthesia and good dental work, you don't want to live in the 19th century. We don't want to live in the period that we were studying. Now that sort of argument could be generalised, and one obvious way in which it can be generalised is to think that model of history and that model of disciplinarity in properly global perspective. For most of my career, after all, it was assumed that the arrow of history pointed west, that what a series of poets and chroniclers and historians have constantly told us was true. So that the more recent, the more advanced and the more modern the science and technology one was describing, the further west the place where it was being made. And the Eurocentrism, and indeed Anglo-Americanocentrism of our discipline, is a consequence of that great illusion. And I think the single most important and exciting thing that is happening and could possibly happen to the discipline that I've been trained in, is completely and seriously to abandon that intellectual map. So that one no longer assumes that that's the arrow of history, and on the contrary, one goes back to the, for example, 18th century, confident in the knowledge that the loss of economic and political leadership by the Qing in the 1790s through 1848 was just a temporary blip, probably. This would be roughly to re-ask the Needham question then, but with a completely different premise. Needham, for very understandable reasons, the greatest historian of science of the 20th century, for understandable reasons, assumed that the question was, why only in Europe, given the Chinese achievement? Though the what was only in Europe, of course, was never quite defined. But forget about that. Why only in Europe? Well, what if one inverted the question and said, rather, why this temporary and perhaps aberrant change in the intellectual and technical map of the world? And that, I think, would change our whole field, and because of what I've said about disciplinarity, almost all other fields as well.