Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 572.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 07:49:36 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: lone scholar vs the collaborative
Thanks to Michael Sperberg-McQueen for pointing out the ambiguity of "lone"
in my message quoting Einstein -- as well as for the connection to geek
mythology. I thought that as we seem currently to be elevating
collaborative work from the status of a good thing (which I for one
certainly think it to be) to a superior thing, it might be salutory to
reflect on patterns of work in the sciences, which many think to be a model
for us.
As a much younger fellow I worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, on
"the Hill" in Berkeley, California, part of the time as a "scanner" for
Louis Alvarez, part as programmer in the Chamberlin-Segre group -- in other
words, at the heart of the industrialized, good-enough physics which Peter
Galison describes in Image and Logic. Galison talks about the factory,
mass-production model that Alvarez so successfully implemented in the
search for elementary particles. It got the job done, but as I know from
many conversations with graduate students, junior and senior physicists
(esp Willy Chinowsky, a fine and melancholy man), many were quite unhappy
for the loss of direct engagement with experiments, themselves "alone" in
their own laboratories. Yes, they were romanticizing an older-style
physics, but it is also true that they were not unlike factory workers
doing what was theirs to do as it came off the production line. Chinowsky,
for example, wanted to deal with some basic theoretical problems but didn't
have time, or so he said.
Again, it's salutory to examine the models we're given. Perhaps we can do
better.
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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