Science offers vast systems of knowledge that alter the world and our understanding of it. This change astonishes us. It comes as well with questions for those who call themselves scientists and those who do not. What is science? What are its histories, its futures, its effects, its masters and beneficiaries? The study of science might begin with a consideration of its modes--perhaps unique--of knowledge: its practices of gathering data, for example; of evaluating these; of valuing these selectively; of reaching conclusions. This is the basis of long-standing debates on scientific epistemology (the conditions of knowledge) and ontology (what is real?). But we might ask if all this can be treated as a special case with special modes; it must bear some correspondence with those other endeavors around it. Of keen recent interest is the status of rationality in Western science. What are its particular qualities? How are these linked, if at all, to constructions of gender, for example, race, geography, social class? Are modes of rationality possible other than those most familiar to the overdeveloped world? How might rationality be represented, even produced for us in scientific reports, textbooks, policy, in literature and the arts?
These latter questions would seem to concern culture, to draw together in inquiry science and the culture in which it exists. But here great problems begin--not intellectual problems that might test and intrigue us, but a unique set of social problems. Undoubtedly some persons reading so far have detected maddening code words. Others have found a vague program that skirts vital questions about the contingent and local nature of all knowledge. There are other positions of course, but the most visible late inquiry into culture and science has been conceived and received by interested groups nourished largely in academia, with the twin, unfortunate effects of antagonism and caricature. Cultural critics fault science for its blindness to the social implications of laboratory and clinical research and its links to big government and big business; scientists denounce postmodernists and their embrace of superstition, their denial of materiality. Thus we have what some declare the "science wars," a peculiar manifestation of right-left, conservative-liberal bloodsport. But the metaphor is tendentious. And the questions about knowledge and rationality remain.
What follows we leave unlabelled, though the titles should be intelligible. We begin with an interview of the historian of science Peter Galison, who describes his concern with the various subcultures of physics in the twentieth century and the modes by which these subcultures--of theorists and instrument makers, for example--are inextricably linked. Language is fundamental to the negotiations these cultures wage as they develop scientific knowledge. Galison also annotates a reading list that readers may find useful (24-25).
The mathematician and philosopher Murray Code offers a pointed critique of science writing, the books and articles written by scientists for nonscientists. He remarks broadly on the assumptions and ideologies that underlie scientific popularizations and their claims that are, if we follow him, too vast: "More magic than metaphysics is required," he asserts, "in order to deduce desire, or any other feeling for that matter, from a set of mathematical equations."
Our next contributions explore links between modes of literature and modes of scientific thought. F. William Ruegg examines the poetry of William Blake, the visionary avatar of British Romanticism who grapples with the most important issues of his day, Newtonian science and industrial capitalism. Blake, according to Ruegg, links alchemy, Newton and Descartes, and nineteenth-century chemistry, and questions the very grounds of "modernity as a socio-political imaginary."
This argument is then scrutinized in an exchange featuring a scientist, a literary scholar, and Ruegg. Make of this what you will; we entertain notions that such exchanges--though not necessarily in this form--might spread inexorably. In fact, we can envision an entire journal filled with these moments--heated ones, possibly (which do have their appeal), but also measured, thoughtful ones, contacts between different thinkings. Are these thinkings incommensurate? Perhaps, but we really aren't sure yet.
Suzanne Shimek writes a sort of intellectual history in exploring the rhetorical modes by which the high modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot corresponds with the quantum physics of Neils Bohr. If perception is shaped by language, she asks of both authors' work, how can a new perception evolve out of existing language?
We have as well two book reviews that offer to those from the sciences and those from the humanities a wide perspective on the inquiries and debates at stake in what they scrutinize.
A debut nicely mixes wanton anxiety and unmerited euphoria. We must admit, though, to a single regret. The first issue is filled nearly exclusively with contributions from people in the humanities, and so some aspect of the invidious condition described above can perhaps (but should not) be said to appear in this new journal. But this we will attribute to accident: of our interests and judgment, of those contributors we've reached so far. If Event Horizon has found its way to you, then you are an interested party, and we expect your correspondence; if you have any ambition at all, your contribution. What are your thoughts? What is your perspective? We'd especially like to give audience to scientists. Input may be posted informally to the forum at our website or entered by other means. The covers are open.