science, the public and american culture: a preface to the study of popular science

Science, The Public and American Culture: A Preface to the Study of Popular Science

Matthew D. Whalen

From the upheaval attendant upon the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species through the cultural aftermath of the orbiting of Sputnik, the American public has experienced nearly a century and a quarter-long relentless, sometimes ruthless, initiation into the mysteries of the scientific enterprise. Exhortations on and exhibitions of the power of a rising empire of knowledge concerning nature whose explanations of human experience historically rivalled in breadth and depth those of church and nation-state further promoted the genteel cultural myth of a n emerging New World civilization, a n Eden-become-Atlantis Arisen,’ in the American public imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The power politics of global warfare, techno-industrial culture shock, and the traditional ideological dialectic of manifest destiny-isolationism has established the place of science in modern American civilization and in contemporary popular consciousness.

At the the core of this genteel, subsequently realpolitik, indoctrination of the public lies an incredible variety of media and mediators dedicated to popularizing science.2 The mediators have self-consciously translated complexities of data and speculation into commonplace language and multi-media presentations, replete with symbols, graphics, even moral tags. The extra-academic, non-textbook, media have ranged from the Centennial Exhibition through a maze of science fairs to the U.S.-U.S.S.R Cultural and Technological Exchange Expositions; from zoological gardens privately controlled, city-sponsored, or affiliated with national exhibitions to federally endowed zoos, aquaria, planetaria and science centers; from “cabinets of natural curiosity” to public museums; from Popular Science News to Science News; from novelistic caricatures of science to sci-fi cosmology and mythology; from the non-fiction prose of John Fiske, Spencer F. Baird, Edward Drinker Cope, E.L. Youmans, and E.L. Godkin to that of charismatic scientists cum public pedagogues, including Linus Pauling, Isaac Asimov, Werner von Braun, Jacques Cousteau and Jacob Bronowski.

In addition, over the last third of this “golden age” of popularized science, radio, television and film have become significant media forums for mass communications between science and the public. Frequently utilizing formats conceived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,s these media have contributed substantially to the general awareness of science as enterprise and social institution. For instance, under federal sponsorship, the “Science Service Radio Broadcasts” over CBS conveyed a

14

Science, the Public and American Culture 15

sense of the vastness of effort that the scientific establishment expended to understand not only the complexities of the physical universe but that of the human microcosm as well4 throughout the depression and World War I1 decades. More entertainment oriented, television offered the highly popular “Mr. Wizard” series to a Cold War public (a format periodically suggested for revival in the 1960s and 1970s) as well as docu-dramas and “specials” on scientists and scientific research. TV also conveyed science news through the voices and faces of established broadcast personalities and interviewers in an era pre-dating specialized reportage that would become permanent fixtures on the small screen during the race for space. Indeed, even the commercial aspect of television has served the cause of mass popularized science.5 Finally, the movie industry has offered, among other noteworthy contributions, portraits of the scientist himlherself as vehicles for entertainment and enlightenment, ranging from “Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet” (1940) through film biographies of Pasteur and Curie; and, even has a popular science genre that dates, at least, from 1936.

From the earliest years of modern popular science, the formal translators of science to society6 themselves have included “the ablest scientific men of different c~unt r ies ,”~ professional writers and journalists, as well as administrators of various branches of the scientific enterprise and its extensions. However, “amateur” scientists and activist lay persons, the “devotees”8 of science, have played critical roles in the conveyance of images, myths and morals inherent in scientific versions and visions of the quest for rational order among men.The formal translators may be described in terms of generations, based less upon chronology than upon content, style and approach in regard to each’s chosen media for popularizing science.

E.E. Slosson, a contemporary of the earliest translators of modern popular science, for example, not only wrote “newspaper science” but established the Science Service with federal backing. Unlike his historical contemporaries who sought to publicize science through private entrepreneurial schemes, Slosson favored direct government assistance. A generation and more chronologically removed from Slosson, Isaac Asimov serves as another instance of a publicist for science whose kinship lies not only with his contemporaries but with his popularizer-antecedents a s well. In the spirit of rugged individualism, Asimov established himself as a one man enterprise of popular science in the early 1950s, akin to a n earlier century’s publishing barons including Paul Carus, E.L. Youmans, J. McKeen Cattell and Benjamin Lillard, two chronological generations or more his senior-although in different media presentations, by and large. And Bronowski, Pauling and, most recently, Carl Sagan deeply share the spirit and style of their historical colleagues Alfred Russel Wallace, Ernest Haekel and Thomas Henry Huxley uis a uis the popularization of science for the sake of edification and education.

Throughout this golden age of the publicizing of science the sense of one’s audience has been an uppermost concern for the translator. For the genteel translator of fin de siecle America, a “general audience” defined as inclusively as possible meant “generally educated classes ... [whose] culture

16 Journal of American Culture

is generally literary, with but a small portion of elementary science; but ... [who] are active-minded, and competent to follow connected thought in untechnical Engl i~h.’’~ By the 1920s the audience became identified in similar but not overtly socialized terms: “the intelligent student-citizen, otherwise called the ‘man in the street’.’’l0 For the informal translator, like the Chautauqua or Lyceum lecturer and the “yellow” journalist, the audience’s literacy and intelligence were less critically important. Nevertheless the shared sense of audience that underlies the translator’s perception of his popular science presentation was inextricably linked to the assumed mission of science to uplift the masses through education, edification or, at very least, entertainment. That science could provide titillation, they seemed to take for granted, if only because it offered a “new manner of life,” in the ideological jargon of these early modem periods.

From the depression decades through the post-Cold War era, the audience for science became even more of a self-conscious concern for translators. This American public for science news and entertainment may be characterized through a n elaborate network of “overlapping audiences”11 whose needs are addressed by publically sponsored efforts and privately endowed presentations within and without the scientific enterprise proper. Self-conscious analyses of these audiences have resulted in a panoply of phrases that typify the contemporary sense of the popular science audience in general and the kinds of science particularly appealing for public consumption. These phrases include, for instance, “science and its public” the public’s image of science,” “the public’s understanding of science,” “humanized science,” “science and the common man,” and “public and private science.” Each emphasizes, in its own particular fashion, the general relation between science and contemporary culture, levels of involvement between science and public life (i.e., the appropriateness, or otherwise, of separation of domains), and the types of goals to be established by public decree, by the scientific community’s willingness to sponsor accessibility, or by national governance mandate for communications between the citizenry and the established institutions of rational knowledge.12

In short, formal translators of science, whether bureaucrats or professional science writers, among others, seem to have tended to define their audience in terms reflective of opinion poll demographics and political rhetoric over the last thirty years. This is most strikingly represented by the undertaking of two surveys in the late 19509, one sponsored by the A.A.A.S. and conducted by Margaret Mead, the other jointly by the National Association of Science Writers and New York University (summarized by the noted student of science journalism, Hillier Kreighbaum),13 specifically geared to ascertain science’s “public image” and the sources of that composite portrait.

The scientific subject matter available for translation throughout the course of this centurylgolden age has tended to be wide-ranging; and as the media quickly proliferated, the matter also accumulated. Moving, in general terms, from foci on nature as within and surrounding human experience, through the interplay of micro and macro worlds that defied the


unaided human sense, towards the engineering and technologizing ofman- sized spheres, popular science subjects culminated in the inclusion of the scientific mind and endeavor per se, that is, its universal vocabulary, “common sense,” institutions, enterprises, techniques of analysis and experimentation, even its methodological logic. Explicit within these matters has often been the reconciliation of science and religious faith (whether Darwinism with fundamental Christianity or physics with Buddhism),l4 as well as of science and society, particularly an emphasis on the relation between science and local, national or global management. Unfortunately, self-conscious critiques of the politicization of popular science, with the exception of the medium of science fabulation, generally failed to mature early-and the delay has proved costly to both science and American society. The idealization of science as apolitical or utopian (and therefore trans-political) still abides in popular science media presentations without adequate critical evaluation either by or for the ~ub1ic . l~

Such idealization is the one key factor in the public’s monolithic image of science that has provided popular science with subject matter as well as with its seminal problem. Despite the translators’ attempts to explicate complexities of nature in terms of analogies to commonplace experiences and mental activities (like discovery by trial and error or “serendipity”), the actuality of systematic methods of inquiry and the interlocking directorates of sub-specialized knowledge had also gradually been conveyed, frequently indirectly or inadvertently, to the public, transforming scientific activity of whatever dimension into further instances of mental elitism of monopolistic proportions. The scientist, too, appeared to embody the extremes of human personality, chiefly Prometheus-turned-Faust, surrounded by icons of tyranny and madness.’6

Further, beginning in exaggeration during the later nineteenth century, science’s monolithic image in public consciousness included a particularly powerful metaphysical aspect, doubtlessly impelled by the furor over evolutionary theories, including as key cultural consequences the rise of the “metaphysical movement”’ dedicated to scientizing religion and spiritualizing reason; the flourishing of syncretic religious institutions; the spread of sublime pantheism18 fostered by Nature Study, Chautauqua, and Country Life circles; not to ignore the popularity of pseudo-science and ‘folk’ medicine with explicit metaphysical overtones. The attempts to reconcile the “new knowledge” with tradition resulted in a potent identification in the popular imagination between the rational study of nature by science and ultimate Truth.

In this sense, the scientist began to assume, or was forced to assume, the roles of shaman, wizard and prophet in addition to inspired, frequently evil, genius. As the enterprise of science organized, even the architecture of and formal social structure within museums and academies came to be described to the public in terms not unlike those ascribed to the ecclesia, albeit with the secular overtone of the philosopher’s grove.19 Moreover “popularized science” itself, as G. Stanley Hall noted in the early 1870s, had already come to mean metaphysical philosophizing.20 And this facet of the monolithic image of science enterprise has continued in popular science


artifacts, to judge from the reverential awe of both translator and public that attended Jacques Cousteau’s or Jacob Bronowski’s audio-visual quests for truth as well as Isaac Asimov’s scientific xexegesis of the Bible.

Certainly, popularizations of science had created and nourished such transcendental illusions ofgrandeur at serious peril to the assumed ideal of public education, in the name of personal edification, and to the reconciliation of the “two cultures” within human experience. In these respects, popular science may more appropriately be called popular scientism to distinguish its artifacts from less inaccurate, or better, less encompassing, representations of science for the public. Nevertheless, popular impressions of science from whatever source are a meaningful body of data through which to ascertain the impact and expression of science as news, enterprise, and institution for a given cultural reality.

I1 Toward a definition and cultural interpretation of popular science,

Oscar Handlin has offered the following prospectus:

Since the explanation of the scientists was remote and incomprehensible, a large part of the population satisfied its need for knowing in its own way. Side by side with the formally defined science there appeared a popular science, vague, undisciplined, unordered and yet extremely influential. I t touched upon the science of the scientists, but did not accept its limits. And i t more adequately met the requirements of the people because it could more easily accommodate the traditional knowledge to which they clung.2’

Popular science, in this early modern historical perspective, was definable largely in negatives: that is, it had no canon of ordered knowledge, no tests for validity, nor necessarily logical limits; and, therefore, no supportive structure for its speculations or expectations. In short, it was not science at all. Clearly Handlin, and, in particular, those “new humanistis” who are in the present obsessed with defining the “popular” realm in contrast to an elite culture, must be, of necessity, correct in this approach simply because he, and they, eliminate out of hand a n enormous amount of material that derives from a n interplay of “high” cultural modes of thought and styles with concerns for the populace at large. What he, and they, are actually defining, in essence, is popular scientism, admittedly a major source for public images of science, but certainly not the sole one.

To interpret the relationship between science and the public one cannot place undue emphasis on either the enterprise/institution or the audience. Rather, both must be taken into account along with the communicational dimension between them. Popular scientism includes particular kinds of media-presentations tha t defy simply categorization as solely entertainment-oriented; for, education (and utilty and edification as well) frequently are intentional by-products of the translators who work in these modes of popular science, as Handlin himself has noted by encompassingin his version of popular scientism an accommodation between traditional ‘faith’-knowledge and the ‘new’ rational knowledge of science2 that meets a public need for understanding “in its own way.” On the other hand, popular


science ‘proper’ (if 1 may use this ascription to mean the “science of the scientists” made publically available), while emphasizing rational knowledge as information systematized by a particular method and logic, is not by its nature solely educational, avoiding at all cost the entertainment, commercial, utilitarian, or edificational values inherent in science. A case in point: science fabulation may serve as a n instance of both popular scientism and popular science proper, depending on the science fiction translator (as formal or informal in his translation), the perceived audience(s), and the historical context; or, at base, the intentionality of the media-presentation, itself a product of the communicational bond between mediator and public given a specific context.

The distinction between popular scientism and popular science proper dominates the modes of stylistic approach that are the tradition behind science’s relation to the public and its cultural context. Therefore, investigations into the publics’ images of science, the media for image conveyance, and the translators of science for mass consumption must confront this dualistic separation first and foremost. However, it should be apparent that any audience’s imaginative sense of science ultimately arises from both popular scientism and popular science proper. And, in this sense, while all too easily verifiable, this duality is at core specious.

Historically, in the waning decades of the nineteenth century, a hard and fast separation was made between popular science and “vulgar science” (or popular scientism): indeed, so thoroughly made that in 1929, the science editor of Literary Digest, Arthur Bostwick, still maintained media- based separate classifications for science news as in either “secondary” magazines (which he analogized to public libraries as sources of accurate knowledge) or in the daily press’ “newspaper science” with its emphasis on “scientific marvels ... treat[ed] as wizardry.”’3 The former primarily copied information sanctioned by the science enterprise represented by properly credentialed voices of authority; the latter, “leaving the task of informing the general public to uninformed writers, or to scientific quacks, or to journalists in search of sensation^."^^ Quackery in medicine or journalism held particularly offensive connotations for turn-of-the-century arbiters of public entertainment, symbolizing in particular a random, frontier-like state of culture and society inappropriate for America as the new Atlantis.

Similar media-based distinctions were applied to “lectureship science” and expositions as well. The imageideals of the Lowell Institute lyceums and the splendor of national exhibitions contrasted sharply with the public speaker’s bureaus, Chautauqua circuit lecturers and small town or city fairs in the minds of the genteel culture’s official translators of science for public edification. Circuses and private entrepreneurial ventures into zoological gardens and cabinets of curiosity lay totally beneath the serious consideration of these devotees of civilization who included the powerful editors and staff of established Eastern periodicals and journals, scientists who presented their cases to the public and to private interests for funding support, and armchair amateur scientists-until, of course, P.T. Barnum, and others, became an obvious source for necessary funding or for artifacts to assist a museum, university or public 2 0 0 . ~ 5 But even in these instances, “vulgarized science” merely assisted popular science proper. This mere


assistance, of course, was and is crucial to the development of public images and understanding of science, not only from the point of view of financial support but also from the perspective of stimulating genuine curiosity in things scientific.

Downplaying or explicit dismissal of the entertainment, wonder- inspiring, even utilitarian values of science itself led proponents of traditional popular science proper to assert barely tenable positions in the face of the expansion into audio and visual media and the proliferation of illustrated magazines. And, it is at this juncture that an alternative historical perspective to the dualism of popular scientism and popular science may be introduced.

Early in the career of Science Service (founded in 1921), a federally sponsored science information agency presided over initially by Edwin E. Slosson, a most proper exponent of popular science proper, then by Watson Davis, who also had dedicated himself to the public’s understanding of science in similar fashion, a format for radio broadcasts on science was worked out with CBS.2fi The weekly spots of about fifteen minutes each were mini-lectures delivered by representatives from the extended scientific community on topics ranging from cosmology to bee~t ings .2~ News of scientific achievement took second place to useful information and brief summaries of the scientific perspective on the life and society within which the public dwelt. Nevertheless, the grandeur of the scientific mission and enterprise also became communicated if only by the incredible range of agencies and institutions that contributed speakers. To uplift the “newspaper science” of the twenties, thirties and later decades, the Service also published a weekly summary of noteworthy scientific investigations and news in general, including items geared toward an editor whose penchant for marvels and wonders dictated his paper’s coverage of science.

During and shortly after World War 11, two similar ventures were undertaken by McGraw-Hill and the radio networks in order to bridge the gap between science as wonder and pure science as information and education. Science Illustrated, though it had failed by 1949, served the mass public with short articles, photographs, and succinct items that had come to characterize the Time-Newsweek era of “general” magazine journalism now applied specifically to science.28 It contrasted sharply with the older popular science periodicals that survived through its period of flourishing, Popular Science Monthly, American Naturalist, and Scientific Monthly (in 1957, taken over by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s publishing outlet Science), in particular. “Science Magazine” offered a war-engaged America a commercialized version of the depression- era inspired “Science Service Radio Talks.” Even popular science proper assumed a more wide-ranging stance with the post-war Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and Science Service’s already two-decade old Science News, yet maintained the overall perspective of a science of the scientists for public glimpsing.

This became true also for Science, the organ of the A.A.A.S., whose “Amateur Scientist” column, though broadly based in the early fifties, quickly became a forum for the scientistexpert who dabbled in other facets


of the techno-scientific enterprisein his spare time. Science Digest (begun in 1937) prevailed throughout the decades of the forties and fifties as a periodical for popular scientism and science proper, the single most successful instance of an alternative to the popular science dualism.

Regarding a n alternative style for the translator independent of media concerns per se, Waldemar Kaempffert, a n editor of Popular Science Monthly for a time who had a keen sense of the marvellous amid pure science and technology, argued cogently for a conciliation between presentations dedicated to conveying scientific knowledge through wonder, employing chiefly descriptive devices, and those emphasizing science’s philosophical implications for society, governance, and human experience. While agreeing with Arthur Bostwick, the science editor of Literary Digest for over a quarter century, that popular science should be informed, accurate thinking about the science of the scientists, he chose not to find in Science Service nor E.E. Sloson the agency of public salvation; nor, for that matter, the host of British, French and Italian periodicals Bostwick had cited in 1929 as superior to any American popular science proper journals. “A good popularizer should be but need not necessarily be an authority on some subject,” he maintained; and “the popularization of science is to be regarded ... as an aspect of literature” rather than exclusively or simply a n “aspect of scien~e.”~g

In essence, Kaempffert stood for an aesthetically crafted popular science replete with human interest, wonder and symbolic import. Whether writing on the history of science, logical empiricism, science and society, or speculative technology, the translator, for Kaempffert, had to be not only accurate and dispassionate (in the sense of eschewing “propaganda”) but also dedicated to the popularization of ‘what should be known’ (to paraphrase his personal model, Jules Verne) by the public-which the great French fabulist himself, Kaemffert suggested, chose to convey in a fiction “about some aspects of science, chiefly the kind that arouse wonder.”1° Lamenting that “good writers of fiction soon abandon science as the main theme of their romancing,” he encouraged American novelists to follow the lead of Sinclair Lewis in Arrowsmith and H.G. Wells’ romances in order to present realis tically, yet in imagination-grabbing plots, the complexity of science as method, enterprise and research; not simply as information:]*

Such a broadening of the viewpoint of genteel popular science proper on the educational and edificational values of science for the public allowed not simply for a tenuous synthesis of scientism and science but for the development of popular science media-presentations that entertained and provided useful information as well. This broader approach as alternative to the dualism within popular science underpinned even early television programming dealing with science and has been particularly reinforced by Educational and Public television and radio offerings since the mid-1950s and early 196Os, respectively.

One need only think of the range of sources of the public’s impressions of science from the forties and fifties to the present, including, according to a 1957 National Association of Science Writers survey, General Electric commercials (later, also those of Esso/Exxon, RCA and the Bell System), docu-dramas in the “Omnibus,” “Science Fiction Theater,” and “Telephone

22 J o u r n a l of American Culture

Hour” series, science-oriented specials (including those done by National Geographic or the Bell System), adventure series, like “Medic” or childrenladult fare of the calibre of “Mr. Wizard” and (‘Zoo Parade”-all of which genres have contemporary heirs in the sixties and seventies.32 How far the conciliation between popular scientism and popular science proper has continued to advance is iconographically depicted in the January 22, 1977 “Wonder Woman” (ABC) episode. A scientist liberated from Nazi imprisonment by the amazon-turned-American ally must return to his laboratory in the prison to find not simply his mysterious formulation for revolutionizing the chemistry of rubber but for the “supportive research journals” that represent the theory behind the secret formula, that iconic staple of scientism formulation.

Even for mass commercial ventures, like television and science fiction, verisimilitude and the use of science as the basis for a contemporary cultural mythology33 are crucial elements in a popular science that entertains and, frequently inadvertently, enlightens. Traditionally, this alternative course for popular science has indeed been kept alive through media presentations frowned upon alike by popular science proper and the scientific establishment itself: audio/visual translations that have included World’s Fairs, news coverage of expeditions, aviation feats, or space explorations, the lectureship wizardry of lyceum orators through Buckminster Fuller or a random physicist or and sci-fi horrors and epics brought to both big and small screens.

Since 1959 the media and translators of popular science have significantly tended to chart this alternative course between popular scientism and popular science proper, developing an attitude that the monolithic image of science for the public is a serious cultural problem based on the dualism of science for the scientists condescendingly made widely available and science as source of awesome knowledge and rationalized miracles. No longer faced with ostracism from the scientific sources of information that are the seedbed of larger speculations and social implications, the contemporary media and translators frequently offer objective criticism, construct enlightening yet entertaining artifacts, and comment freely regarding the impact of science on the range of social patterns and institutions that constitute public life for the common citizen. Doubtlessly, this alternative course has become dominant as the result of the marketability of science, the increased sophistication and interest of audience, and, no less crucial, the necessary recognition on the part of the scientific community and its enterprises that they carry immense responsibility for communicating to the public about the nature of science (a result, in turn, of a cultural complex of popular disillusionment and pragmatic necessities).

A keynote struck at the bicentennial forums conducted under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences was that “inclusiveness and not authority is the implied requirement of science done in public.”3s In a similar vein, the late Jacob Bronowski’s highly successful “Ascent of Man” series stressed not only the different frames of cultural references between scientific progress and the courses of belief-systems of religion and


theology, but also the “principle of uncertainty” lying within each modern scientific exploration of reality, as well as the social responsibility science must assume for its investigations. Further, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould have boldly forayed recently into the realms of bio-physical science to speculate on the relationships between human and animal natures.36 And the late Loren Eisley has composed a n autobiography that stands as a monument to the human pain and consternation accompanying pursuits of truth during a scientific career.37 Each of these contemporary popular science translations, I argue, testify to the serious reconsideration of undertakings on the part of practitioners of science for public consideration toward a realistic yet imaginative popular science. ‘‘Inclusiveness” not authoritarianism, useful distinctions between science and spirituality that imperil the fundamental meaning of neither, accurate speculations beyond what may be narrowly defined in scientific investigations, acknowledgements of limited certainty within science, and the socially- concerned being within the scientist characterize the contemporary state of “science done in [and for the] public.”

Indeed the phrase “science done in public” representspar excellent this alternative course, in contradistinction to “science and its public” or even “the impact of science on society.””A Science does not dictatorially rule society; and science in a democratic system is learning that to set itself apart from popular participation, any more than other facets of such a political culture can afford to do, imperils its credibility, jeopardizing its rightful place in the construction of a sane civilization.

Notes ‘C.F. Matthew D. Whalen, ‘‘ ‘Atlantis Arisen’ in America: A Mythos for Culture, Scienceand

Society in the Age of Energy,” Unpublished manuscript; for a n earlier, and more accessible version of this essay, seeMatthew D. Whalen, “AmericanScience, Society, and Civilizationin the Age of Energy,” Ph.D. diss. University of Maryland, 1978, chapter 111.

2By media, I mean print, audio-visual, and expositional/artifactual presentations dealing with science in a directly ascertainable fashion for public consumption. Hereafter I shall use the term “translator” to encompass the variety of individuals who act as mediators between science and the public; see note 8. The breadth of definitions of popular science arediscussedgenerally in the second part of the present essay.

‘Regarding the late nineteenth andearly twentieth century formats for popularized science, I am indebted to Mary F. Tobin, a colleague in American studies, presently of the University of Maryland, and to articulation of them in a n unpublished paper entitled “The Public Image of Science in America, I, 1860-1910: Periodicals and Popular Science.”

‘These “Talks” appear in print in issues of The Scientific Monthly (for 1930 through 1936); selected programs for 1930 also appear in Watson Davis, ed., Science Today: A Layman’s Handbook of Recent Discoveries by Various Eminent Men of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931).

‘For a n early recognition of the impact of commercials and advertisement on the public’s awareness of science, see The Public Impact of Science in the Mass Media: A Report on a Nation- Wide Survey for the National Association of Science Writers (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Institute, 1958).

hunderpinning my understanding of the “translator” a s cultural transcriber of science for the public are the insights of George Steiner, After Babel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975) chapter one, “Understanding as Translation;” Herbert Marcuse, “Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture,” in Gerald Holton, ed., Science and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), pp. 223-4; and Arthur E. Bostwick, “Science in Periodical Literature,” Library Journal, 54 (1929). p. 927.


7E.L. Youmans, “Purpose and Plan of Our Enterprise,” Popular Science Monthly 1 (1872). p. 113. This tradition of the “ablest men of science” writing for “non-scientific people” a s Youmans suggested continues through the present based on the belief that those who “create” science should assume responsibility for “diffusing” it a s well.

HFollowing Mary F. Tobin’s analysis (q.v., pp. 2-4). a n elaboration of Nathan Reingold’s typology of the nineteenth century scientific community and its extensions (see, his essay in Aleandra Oleson and Sanborn C. Brown, eds., The Pursuit ofKnowledge in the Early American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 38-55, I have utilized, and extended, the notion of “devotees” of the science enterprise in the light of popular science in particular.

”’J. Arthur Thomson. Outlines o f Science (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1922). I. D. iii. “For the notion of “overlapping audiences” a s integral to American Culture Studies, I am

indebted to Professor Kay Mussel1 of The American University. A related conceptualization is that of “audience flow” (“the extent to which viewers of a particular programme are also viewers of another programme”-when speaking of the television audience in particular). However, the pluralism of the audience, in part very much a culturally loaded idea, must be emphasized when “audience flow” is employed, for audience may be falsely represented as a homogeneous mass of an average. Therefore, the analytical value of “overlapping audiences” lies chiefly in the implied conceptualization of a diversified public, all too frequently pidgeon-holed into catagories of viewers by education, class, color, and status, that, as individuals, represents “audience flow” patterns of numerous variations. For “audience flow” see G.J. Goodhardt, et al, The Television Audience: Patterns o f Viewing (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975), chapter 2. An early recognition of the pluralism of the audience is Gilbert Seldes, The Great Audience (New York: Viking Press, 19,W). For a n example of an elaborate study typically ignoring the reality, not to mention usefulness, of a n “overlapping audiences” schema of analysis, see Gary A. Steiner, The People Look at Television: A Study of Audience Attitudes-“A Report of a Study a t the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University-(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). Mussell’s own perspective is indebted to Peter L. Berger andThomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).

“The phrases listed in the text are culled from the following sources in part: Gerald Holton and William A. Blanpied, eds, Science and its Public (Boston: D. Reidel, 1976); Louis Galambos, The Public Image o f Big Business i n America, 18801940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1975); Barbara J. Culliton, “Science’s Restive Public,” Daedalus 107 (1978), pp. 147-55; I,. V. Berkner, The Scientific Age: Zmpact o f Science on Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); Ritchie Calder, “Science and the Common Man,” UNESCO Courier 18 (February and March, 1965), pp. 4-8 and 17-22; and Sir Sally Zuckerman, Beyond the Ivory Tower: TheFrontiers of Public and Private Science (London Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970). Emphases are mine.

I ’Both surveys are reported in the A.A.A.S. journal Science. C.f., Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux, “Image of the Scientist among High School Students: A Pilot Study,” Science 126 (1957), pp. 384-90; and Hillier Krieghbaum, “Public Interest in ScienceNews,” Science 129 (1959),

1lDuring the period under study, relations between science and religion have been characterized in terms of overt “warfare,” syncretic conciliation, or parallel, but separate, systems of knowledge, Attempts to reconcile each to the other in this last cited fashion have resulted in elaborate analyses of underlying ‘logic’ methods, and social ramifications of both science and religion uis a uis the larger intellectual, cultural, and universal parameters within which each participate. For interactions between Darwinism and Christianity, see Edward A. White, Science and Religion i n American Thougth: the Zmpact ofNaturalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952) and John C. Greene, Darwin and the Modern World (Baton-Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961). Since the 1950% several studies have focused on modern physics and eastern religions, but see, principally, the overview work of F.S.C. Northrop in these regards, especially The Meeting o f East and West (New York: Macmillan, 1946) and Man, Nature and God (New York Simon and Schuster, 1962). For a n intriguing example of the in-depth analytical approach that is still extremely readable, see Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparatiue Study in Science and Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

“C.f., for example, Marcuse, in Holton, Science and Culture, pp. 218-35. ‘“Popular culture “icons” of science have been generally ignored by ‘(new humanist” studies,

but see G o r g e Basalla, “Pop Science: The Depiction of Science in popular Culture,” in ~~l~~~ and Blanpied, Science and its Public, pp. 261-278. On the general topic of iconography and its

pp. 1092-5.


methodology, see E r w n Panofsky, Studies m lconology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939) and Marshall Fishwick and Ray B. Browne, eds, Zcons of Popular Culture (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1970).

“C.f., this author’s unpublished article and dissertation for discussion of the “metaphysical movement” in America a t the turn of the century and a bibliography.

l*On “sublime pantheism” in general, see M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971). for instance; on American syncretic religiosity specifically, see issues of The Open Court throughout the decades of the 1880s and 1890% the years surrounding the World’s Parliament of Religions Movement.

I‘Cf., for example, Roger Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). particularly the chapter on Louis Agassiz and the Museum of Natural History a t Harvard. A similar impulse may be noted in the architecture of even the Chautauqua public assembly buildings on Lake Chautauqua constructed a s models of the new society of modern democratic culture impelled by the ‘scientific spirit of the age.’

21‘G.S. Hall, “Popular Science in German,” Nation 28 (1879), pp. 179-80. ”Oscar Handlin, “Science and Technology in Popular Culture,” in Holton, Science and

JX.f. , also, Handlin, pp. 1856, 189-91, and 197. ”Bostwick, p. 931. ”Bostwick, p. 927. ‘C.f., John Richard Betts, “P. T. Barnum and the Popularization of Natural History,”

‘ C f . , Watson Davis, “The Rise of Science Understanding,” Science 108 (1948). pp. 239-46. -‘;For a sample of the “Science Service Radio Talks” see Scientific Monthly issues from

September 1930 through May, 1936. Transcripts were published here each month for almost six years. The series did continue after 1936, but were unrecorded by SM.

“C.f., Gerald Wendt, “The Return of Fear,” Science Illustrated 1 (1946), p. 10. Wendt, the editor, writes in this column that explained the reasons for publishing SI after World War 11: “Fear is always fear of the unknown.. . . The world of science has been a world apart.. . . Whether we like it or not, science is a tremendous social force.. . .Isolationism from science, too, must end. We can no longer merely use its products; we must understand them. Because this makes sense, and because so many people now realize that it does, thismagaziis now in your hands. SCIENCE ILLUSTRATED is not a technical magazine of science. Rather it is a general magazine from the science point of view.. . . It will be concerned always with the impact of scienceupon us and what we can and should do about it.” Note, in particular. in Wendt’s comments the emphasis on the general nature of SZ, placing it in a long-standing tradition of popular science. Because of the concern with the social implications of science, the education of the public, and especially with the illustration method of communicating each, SI may serve a s a critical instance also of the post-War conciliation between popular scientism and popular science proper.

‘“Waldemar Kaempffert, “Popularizing Science,” in Louis R. Wilson, ed, The PracticeofBook Selection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), p. 116.

‘“Kaempffert, p. 134. “Kaempffert, p. 135. “Television specials, docu-dramas, and series of the 1960s and 1970s that continue these

traditions include, among many others, “Men and Microbes,” Jacques Cousteau specials, “Nova,” “People in the News,” “Star Trek,” “Small World,” “Animal Kingdom,” IBM commercials, “Isis,” “Men in Space,” “Walt Disney Presents/ Wonderful World of Disney,” and special network coverage of major scientific (especially, astronautics) explorations or documentarylreport special broadcasts (e.g. “CBS Reports”). I am a t present compiling a more inclusive list for future analysis in a book-length manuscript, entitled “Science, the Public, and American Culture.”

”C.f., Stephen Tonsor, “The Image of Science and Technology in Utopian and Science Fiction Literature,” Modern Age 20 (1976), pp. 86-7. In this excellent article, Tonsor outlines a critical stance toward interpreting the science within science fiction and utopian literatures. It is a 1970s essay parallel to Kaempffert’s of 1940s.

“A recent Washington Post article, notably placed in the “Amusement”section, focused on a young professor of physics (a teacher of introductory courses a t a major university) who made a presentation before the annual meeting of the A.A.A.S. His “show” included slides, demonstrations, and other attention grabbing techniques to explain basic principles of physics.

Culture, p. 197.

Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959), p. 368.


He intends to market the package, with grants-in-aid from science foundations and A.A.A.S., believing that his ‘wizardry’ techniques are particularly suitable for modern students of higher education.

.I5Philip Morrison, “Forum 11: The Citizen and the Expert,” in Science: An American Bicentennial View (D.C.: National Academy of Science, 1977). p. 5.

WC.f., Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Euolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Ballantine, 1977). and Stephen J a y Gould. Euer Since Ilurwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977). Note that Sagan’s book is published in soft cover by a press renowned for its fantasy and sci-fi lists; also that Gould’s work is composed of miniessays, some published first under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History, a n institution that has served a s a source for other mass media presentationsof science, including the “Adventure” series over CBS in the 1950s.

W.f., Loren Eiseley, All the Strange Hours: The Excauation of a Lifr (New York Scribner’s. 1975).

%ee note 12, above.

Matthew Whalen is with the General Honors Program, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.

science, the public and american culture: a preface to the study of popular science

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