Dear Rod,

My reply to your belated reply is belated, too, so we’re even on that score. (Marush and I were in Arizona, so today is the first time I’ve had a chance to really give this the attention it deserves.)

I appreciate your attempt to avoid airing your disagreements with my book in public, but if you should be drawn into discussing it, don’t worry. It’s a legitimate discussion, and your particular objection is an important one. As long as we both avoid ad hominem attacks, what’s the problem? Friends can have honest differences of opinions.

When I say “your particular objection,” I mean, of course, the one about the relationship between science and technology. As I was writing the book, I knew that this would be the primary challenge I would receive, because it goes right to the heart of my thesis and is a very widely held position. But my opposing position on the science-technology relationship is widely held as well (as you must be aware, because you say you’re an Isis subscriber), so it’s a fundamental issue. Most people who hold the view opposing mine, however, will simply ignore my book and won’t bother to dispute it, so by airing your objection you give me an opportunity to take it head on.

When you raised this objection at the book-reading I did in San Francisco, I don’t remember the exact words I used in responding to you. Extemporaneous speech is often imprecise, so if I really did say that there is no distinction between science and technology, I hope you won’t hold me to that formulation. Of course there’s a distinction; the two words aren’t synonyms. So although I do want to argue in favor of an intimate connection between science and technology, it isn’t my intention to simply “lump them together.”

Even though science and technology are not the same thing, they are not nearly as separate as you suggest. One problem, I think, is that you have an exaggerated view of the purity of science, and tend to idealize it. When you say, “It has been reasonably assumed that the laws of science apply throughout the universe; they have worked before us and will work after us,” I think you are confusing the regularities of the externally existing world of material reality with what you call “our formulation of the laws,” which you acknowledge “may be wildly incorrect.” Science is the formulation, produced by fallible humans, not the external reality itself. Science (as you point out) is a collection of ideas, not material reality.

The question for historians of science is: Where did those ideas come from? Is the gospel according to St. John correct in saying that in the beginning was the word? Or was Goethe correct when he replied; “The word? No, in the beginning was the deed!” Since both you and I consider ourselves Marxists, I think we should be able to agree that we side with Goethe on this issue. The notion that the word is prior to the deed is consistent with Platonic idealism and theistic religion, but not materialism.

The deeds that produced the ideas of science are the activities collectively described as technology. This is not a proposition that I adopted as a matter of “convenience” or to “fit in with my thesis,” it is a historically demonstrable relationship. What this means is that there can be no history of science that does not pay very close attention to the history of technology. That is what I set out to do in my book: to demonstrate the historical dependence of science on technology, and I believe I successfully accomplished that. As a corollary, I showed that ordinary working people—the “deed” people—played a more fundamental role in the history of science than the elite theoreticians—the “word” people.

This historical relationship also means that technology must be accorded ontological priority over science. In simpler terms containing an implicit value judgment: technology is more important than science, at least from a historical standpoint. As much as it galls those who would like to portray science as a prime mover of historical change, it is simply untrue.

From our twentieth- and twenty-first-century perspective, it may seem that science precedes technology, because in some spectacular instances—the creation of nuclear bombs, for example—it has indeed been the case that the “word” (theory) preceded the “deed” (the practical application). But throughout tens of thousands of years of human history the relationship has been just the opposite: science lagged behind technology—usually far behind. The classic example is the steam engine. Idealists might assume that brilliant theorists worked out the laws of thermodynamics, applied them, and voila!—the steam engine was invented. But in fact the steam engine was invented by empirical means, by artisans, and the laws of thermodynamics were produced after the fact by theorists trying to figure out how it worked. For a twentieth-century example, consider the airplane. Was it created through the application of theories of aerodynamics? No, quite the opposite. It was invented by a couple of bicycle mechanics in face of the collective opinion of theoretical physicists that it was impossible, and after the possibility was demonstrated, the theorists studied the mechanics’ accomplishment in order to create aerodynamics as a new scientific discipline.

I used the word “empirical” in the preceding paragraph. That’s a key concept in this discussion. Is knowledge produced by empirical means not science? I think it would be difficult to defend that proposition. One of the central themes of my book is that the main achievement of the Scientific Revolution wasn’t the progression of ideas from Copernicus to Newton that the traditional narratives celebrate, but was the emergence of the experimental approach to investigating nature that emerged from the workshops of artisans. Those who define science to include only theoretical endeavors and deny that empirical methods are part of science can of course draw a rigid line separating technology and science, but they are operating with a very narrow, ahistorical definition of science.

So that’s my position, Rod. I don’t expect to “convert” anyone to my way of thinking on this issue, because I think the exaltation and idealization of science derives from an inner need to find a “rock of eternity,” a source of absolute authority. But there are no absolutes, and science is a particularly shaky rock to try to stand on.

Cliff