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"During World War Two, members of the Cambridge Psychology Laboratory were commissioned to study pilot fatigue. They set up a Spitfire cockpit in the laboratory, turned it into a piece of laboratory apparatus, and carried out a series of important experiments which appeared to dramatically confirm the dangers of fatigue. Historians of psychology are aware of this episode, but the experiments, the events surrounding them, and the scientific reasoning involved have never been studied in detail. By going into the episode in depth, and by looking behind the scenes at considerable archival material, David Bloor is able to offer an analysis that is both original and more penetrating than anything that has been said before on the topic. Bloor describes the Cockpit experiments themselves before turning to the theoretical interpretation of the results and the intellectual resources that informed how they were viewed. Bloor then explains a major empirical and theoretical challenge to the Cambridge Cockpit work drawn from a field study of landing accidents. This opposing work concluded that fatigue-effects were operationally negligible. Bloor delves into the consequences of this challenge, and the Cambridge reaction to it, in the post-war years. As the book makes clear, echoes of the dispute can still be detected in today's thinking about fatigue"--
About the author
David Bloor is professor emeritus in the sociology of science at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of
The Enigma of the Aerofoil: Rival Theories in Aerodynamics, 1909-1930 and
Knowledge and Social Imagery and the coauthor of
Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
