Ulteriori informazioni
"Looks at how "square" engineers and scientists accomodated their work to a rapidly shifting social and political landscape in the long 1970s"--
Sommario
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
List of Figures xiii
1 Society in Disarray? Professional Societies and Physics in the 1970s 1
2 Turn On, Tune In, Start Up: The Experimental Life in Santa Barbara 53
3 A Federation of Bull Sessions: Interdisciplinarity at Stanford 93
4 Nothing Fails like Success: From Moon to Earth at NASA 135
5 Mistaking the Sunset for the Dawn: Jack Kilby's Solar Boom and Bust 177
6 An End to Exceptionalism: Philips, Signetics, and Global Silicon Valley 219
7 Engineering and Applied Physics in the Age of Fracture 259
Notes 313
Index 389
Info autore
Cyrus C. M. Mody is Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation and Director of the Maastricht University Science, Technology and Society Studies program. He is the author of
Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology and
The Long Arm of Moore's Law: Microelectronics and American Science (both published by the MIT Press).
Riassunto
When ungroovy scientists did groovy science: how non-activist scientists and engineers adapted their work to a rapidly changing social and political landscape.
In The Squares, Cyrus Mody shows how, between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, some scientists and engineers who did not consider themselves activists, New Leftists, or members of the counterculture accommodated their work to the rapidly changing social and political landscape of the time. These “square scientists,” Mody shows, began to do many of the things that the counterculture urged: turn away from military-industrial funding, become more interdisciplinary, and focus their research on solving problems of civil society. During the period Mody calls “the long 1970s,” ungroovy scientists were doing groovy science.
Mody offers a series of case studies of some of these collective efforts by non-activist scientists to use their technical knowledge for the good of society. He considers the region around Santa Barbara and the interplay of public universities, think tanks, established firms, new companies, philanthropies, and social movement organizations. He looks at Stanford University’s transition from Cold War science to commercialized technoscience; NASA’s search for a post-Apollo mission; the unsuccessful foray into solar energy by Nobel laureate Jack Kilby; the “civilianization” of the US semiconductor industry; and systems engineer Arthur D. Hall’s ill-fated promotion of automated agriculture.
