Terry Shinn

T. Shinn

B. Joerges

This book explores a little-studied arena that exists between science and technology, an arena in which a singular and important variety of open-ended, multi-purpose instrumentation is developed by practitioners (neither scientist nor engineer, call them research-technologists) for use in academia, industry, state metrology and technical services, and considerably beyond. The generic instrumentation designed in this almost subterraneously institutionalized/professionalized, interstitial arena fuels both science and engineering work. This involves intermittent crossings of the boundaries that demarcate and protect the conventional cognitive and artefact cultures familiar to many historians and sociologists. Research-technologists thereby comprise a distinctive (but never distinct) transverse science and technology culture that generates a species of pragmatic universality, which in turn provides multiple and diversified audiences with a common repertory of vocabularies, notational systems, images, and perhaps even paradigms. Research-technology practitioners deliver a lingua franca that contributes to cognitive, material, and social cohesion. Research-technology is about the complementarity between boundary-crossing and the stability/maintenance of boundaries.

Instrumentation Between Science, State and Industry

Anne Marcovich

Imagine Galileo pointing his telescope not toward the sky but instead toward molecules, and discovering there a hitherto unimagined world. This is the adventure of nanoscale scientists exploring single molecules and moreover controlling them at will. This book presents key historical moments in the birth and evolution of nanoscience in the last thirty years. It narrates the genesis of revolutionary instruments and new species of molecule size objects. Nanoscalescientific research has not only powerfully affected the amount and orientation of knowledge, it has perhaps even more significantly redirected the ways in which much research work is carried out,changed scientists' methodology and reasoning processes, and influenced aspects of the structure of career trajectory and the functioning of scientific disciplines. This book invites the question: to what extent does nanoscale scientific research constitute a kind of 'scientific revolution'?

Terry Shinn

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