2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Foundation,” funded by an eccentric New England philanthropist, Roger
Babson. Babson made no secret of his goals for establishing the Gravity
Research Foundation: his undying passion, sparked during his turn-of-thecentury
undergraduate studies at MIT and fostered by his life-long friendship
with Thomas Edison, was to find some means of shielding gravity. On the
heels of World War II, Babson dreamed in particular that industrious American
scientists could harness the powers of gravity to feed the hungry, comfort the
aging—and repel Soviet missiles. The foundation, in other words, was in the
business of looking for “anti-gravity,” a business which nearly all of the
physicists who came to profit from the foundation’s largesse considered
impossible. Even as some of these physicists mocked the foundation among
themselves (as surviving correspondence indicates), they dutifully submitted
essays to the foundation’s annual essay contest, participated in the foundation’s
summer conferences, and worked under the auspices of new gravity-research
centers founded and funded in part by Babson’s group. In the process, the
topic of general relativity gained a new generation of dedicated researchers
and in this process, the conceptual and calculational machinery of general
relativity enjoyed renewed scrutiny. Moneyed interests, postwar paranoia, and
enterprising essay-contest winners thus worked together to put general relativity
back in the minds of American theoretical physicists.
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Evelyn␣ Fox Keller Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Models and Simulations
Nelson Goodman famously observed, “Few terms are used in popular and
scientific discourse more promiscuously than “model.” Much the same might
be said of the term “simulation.” Yet this was not always the case. Both words
have ancient histories, but until quite recently, the meaning of “simulation”
was quite stable, and it invariably implied deceit. Only after WWII that the
word took on the meaning that brings it into its current proximity with models.
Here, the valence of the term changes decisively: now productive rather than
merely deceptive, and, in particular, designating a technique for the promotion
of scientific understanding. The shift reflects a crucial change not only in the
perceived value of simulation, but also, as others have already noted, in the
means of production of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, it is this new sense
of the term that encourages its use in much of the current literature as either
interchangeable with the term model, or as one part of a single composite
noun (as in “models and simulations” ). An obvious question arises, however,
and it is this: do the actual uses of simulation in contemporary scientific practice
in fact warrant such facile assimilation? Or, to pose the question somewhat
differently, does the use of simulation in post WWII science add significantly
new features to the range of practices that had earlier been subsumed under
the term “modeling” ?