Months Later...

So, I've been busy. I've been busy apprenticing. Now I can look back over the blog posts from last September and October and toss my head in a derisive way and say, "ha, what a very little did I know then! How simplistically did I view the history of science!"

In my first post, I wrote,

(For the sake of efficiency, let’s assume that ‘elegant’ ‘puzzle’ and ‘science’ are all overly simple or trite terms for what is in reality complex and difficult. Already I am making errant assumptions.)

 How right I was! Science is rarely elegant. It has a kind of difficult elegance, on occaision, when things finally seem to work-- if they ever work. The 'puzzle' of science--a thousand philosophers of science just cringed--is a collection of abstract puzzles, with overlapping pieces and miscut connections and no easy edges or corners to lay down first. And science?

Because I'm not a scientist, I find myself drawn to the human side of science--as do many historians of science. There is somewhat of a disconnect between science historians and historians of science, or the internal and external views of the history of science. Both are needed: we need the technical histories that trace what-happened-next so we can see how the bits fit together. We need the historians of increasingly broad subject area of 'science' to understand how the heck science fits into the rest of world, without the clear break--or any break-- from it technical histories can imply or even overlook. 

There is much more to be said on that topic, but you get the general idea.

I like both kinds of history. My sciencey brain longs to be able to track technical histories, but I am not a scientist or a mathematician. I fall firmly into the history side of things, walking the bounderies of natural knowledge, technical knowledge, and human society.

But that, I should point out, is absolutely fascinating. And so, we go on...