Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate

by Lorraine Daston

Overview

Why is the scientific community so unified?

In the last 350-odd years, the international “scientific community” has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global crises: disastrous climate change, and a deadly pandemic. How did “the scientific community” come into existence, and why does it work?

Rivals is an attempt to answer these questions in the form of a brief historical overview, from the late seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries, through the creation of two enormous projects—the Carte du Ciel, or the great star map, and the International Cloud Atlas, pioneered by the World Meteorological Organization after World War II. These new models of intergovernmental collaboration and global observation networks would later make the mounting evidence of planetary phenomena like climate change possible.

Drawing upon original documents stored in Paris, Geneva, and Uppsala, historian of science Lorraine Daston offers a fascinating, lively study of successful and unsuccessful scientific collaborations. Rivals is indispensable both as history and as guidance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798987053560
Publisher:	Columbia Global Reports
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	717,102
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lorraine Daston is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the Universityof Chicago, and a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of several books, including Objectivity, How Reason Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, and Against Nature. She lives in Berlin.

Editorial Reviews

In Rivals, a compact and elegant primer, Ms. Daston leads us through the evolution of scientific collaboration over the past 350 years.” —Wall Street Journal

“Readers will have no trouble digesting Daston’s witty and efficient narrative.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“An entertaining account of the development of scientific collaboration.” —Kirkus Reviews

“In her graceful sweep through four centuries of scientific collaboration, Lorraine Daston recounts how groups of scientists have gotten together to get things done.” —Dava Sobel, author of Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, and The Glass Universe

“No one can disentangle the genealogy of scientific values like Lorraine Daston. In this elegant book, she trains this admirable skill on the very idea of the international scientific community. Scientists and laypeople alike will find in Rivals a lively new way of thinking about how the cosmopolitan astronomy of the Enlightenment has given way to the global climate science of today.” —Ken Alder, author of The Measure of All Things

“How, when, and why did the notion of science as a shared and ultimately a global endeavor emerge—and how is it faring in the ultra-competitive digital age? By exploring these questions with wit, verve, concision, perspicacity and deep learning, Lorraine Daston has produced an essential resource for anyone interested in how science works and how it came to work that way.” —Philip Ball, author of Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything

“Lorraine Daston is as familiar with the perennial tensions that make scientists behave like rivals, not partners, as she is knowledgeable about collaborations in science, even those buried deep in history. Her graceful, short, and compelling account of how and why large-scale scientific collaborations have occurred in the past, how they have thrived (especially without intrusions by governments), and why we need to promote them today is a story that should be read by anyone who does scientific work or benefits from it.” —Harold Varmus, Lewis Thomas UniversityProfessor, Weill Cornell Medicine and Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine

From the Publisher

2023-08-10
A short, lucid history of efforts by scientists to work together.

Daston, director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, writes that modern science began about 400 years ago. Before then, scholars believed that everything worth knowing was already known; their goal was to discover it—in writing by such esteemed thinkers as Ptolemy, Pliny, Aristotle, and Confucius—and pass it on. Beginning with the British Royal Society in 1660, individuals organized to investigate the natural world and exchange information. Members corresponded widely and hosted scientists from other countries, but these were largely national groups, patronized by their rulers. Scholars call this collective the Republic of Letters, the first of three periods Daston identifies. She maintains that it was the first scientific community to attempt to balance competition and cooperation in a quest for knowledge. In the end, “the Republic of Letters was more like a state of nature than a state”—peaceful when little was at stake, quarrelsome and disorganized when faced with complex projects. Daston delivers an amusing account of the 1761 and 1769 expeditions to observe the transit of Venus. Astronomers traveled the world, but these efforts lacked coordination, and the results were worthless. Thanks to the telegraph and steamships, matters improved in the 19th century, when innumerable international scientific congresses convened, leading to extensive collaboration and standardization but less material progress because these were mostly independent of governments and short of money. For better or worse, a genuine international scientific community emerged after World War II, when governments took an interest. With maddening unpredictability, they “helped and hindered scientific collaborations ….happy to bankroll them in the name of national glory, but just as happy to wreck them in the name of national security or frugality or simple indifference.”

An entertaining account of the development of scientific collaboration.

Kirkus Reviews