Cyrus C.M. Mody

The Sounds of Science: Listening to Laboratory Practice

Works in science and technology studies (STS) have repeatedly pointed to the importance of the visual in scientific practice. STS has also explicated how embodied practice generates scientific knowledge. I aim to supplement this literature by pointing out how sound and hearing are integral aspects of experimentation. Sound helps define how and when lab work is done, and in what kinds of spaces. It structures experimental experience. It affords interactions between researchers and instruments that are richer than could be obtained with vision alone. And it is a site for tacit knowledge, providing a resource for the replication of results, and the transmission of knowledge, and the construction of social boundaries within instrumental communities.

Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

The larger world of nano

Research in the social sciences and humanities can help scientists and policymakers to better understand the nanotechnology enterprise and to make it more transparent to an enthusiastic but cautious public.

'A Towering Virtue of Necessity': Interdisciplinarity and the Rise of Computer Music at Vietnam-Era Stanford

Stanford, more than most American universities, transformed in the early Cold War into a research powerhouse tied to national security priorities. The budgetary and legitimacy crises that beset the military-industrial-academic research complex in the 1960s thus struck Stanford so deeply that many feared the university itself might not survive. We argue that these crises facilitated the rise of a new kind of interdisciplinarity at Stanford, as evidenced in particular by the founding of the university’s computer music center. Focusing on the “multivocal technology” of computer music, we investigate the relationships between Stanford’s broader institutional environment and the interactions among musicians, engineers, administrators, activists, and funders in order to explain the emergence of one of the most creative and profitable loci for Stanford’s contributions to industry and the arts.

`A New Way of Flying' Différance, Rhetoric and the Autogiro in Interwar Aviation

The autogiro, a rotary-wing aircraft driven by a propeller, was created after World War I as a safe alternative to the airplane. Its resemblance to helicopters and airplanes made differentiating it an important rhetorical task for its supporters. With time, the autogiro took on new interpretations, and with them new processes of differentiation. The autogiro, airplane and helicopter all evolved, leading to instabilities of meaning, fixed temporarily by mechanisms of closure. I explore the relevance of Derridean différance for constructivist views of technology in tracing the flexible, differential meanings of the autogiro.

Academic Centers and/as Industrial Consortia: US Microelectronics Research 1976-2016

Abstract In the U.S., in the late 1970s and early 1980s, academic research centers that were tightly linked to the semiconductor industry began to proliferate – at exactly the same time as the first academic start-up companies in biotech, and slightly before the first U.S. industrial semiconductor research consortia. I show that some of the same factors stimulated institutional entrepreneurs to found both industrial consortia and academic centers. But industrial consortia and academic centers were not just co-emergent. They were also commingled organizational forms – consortia took advantage of ties to academic centers and vice versa. Thus, any understanding of the one must account for the other as well. However, academic microelectronics research centers possessed greater flexibility to forge alliances with other industries than did industrial consortia – a flexibility they increasingly took advantage of in the 1990s, as their importance to their original patrons in the semiconductor industry receded.

Between research and development: IBM and Josephson computing

For years the dream of turning the semiconductor industry into a superconductor industry has been only that. In the 1970s IBM—with help from the National Security Agency—made a run at turning that dream into reality.

Fabricating an Organizational Field for Research: US Academic Microfabrication Facilities in the 1970s and 1980s

In the mid-1970s, the tools needed to make leading-edge microelectronic devices were becoming prohibitively expensive for university researchers to buy. Increasing competition from Japanese firms, however, led government and industry to urgently seek a way for US academic microelectronics researchers to keep up. One solution, initiated by the National Science Foundation, was a new form of organizing research: the “campus user facility” that would provide tools to—and share costs among—a large customer base. Cornell, Stanford, and MIT’s facilities, in particular, established models for interdisciplinary university–industry interaction that spread quickly to other campuses in the 1980s. This chapter follows the diffusion of the microfabrication user facility as a new organizational form and its evolution in response to changes in the microelectronics industry in the 1980s and 1990s.

What do Scientists and Engineers Do All Day? On the Structure of Scientific Normalcy

Most of the debate following from Structure of Scientific Revolutions has focused on revolutionary science and paradigm shift. However, both in Kuhn and his successors in science studies, arguments about revolutionary science are built on a foundation of mostly hard-to-contest observations regarding normal science. I survey some of the ways different traditions in science studies have provided fine-grained portraits of wild-type Kuhnian normal science and summarize some recent findings from historians and sociologists regarding normal science. A textured approach to normal science is important because normal science proceeds, despite the cogent objections that can be raised against a given paradigm, in part because scientists and engineers are able to make normal science workable, on a quotidian basis, with respect to some ever-shifting set of aims promulgated relative to their professional communities and/or to various constituencies in the societies of which they are a part. That is, normal science keeps going, despite obvious anomalies and ignoration of open questions, because normal science achieves many more goals than just the clearing away of anomalies and open questions.

Visions of Plenty in the Age of Scarcity

In 1972, the Club of Rome published its now famous pessimistic economic forecast, The Limits to Growth, to instant acclaim and criticism. The Club, largely composed of European intellectuals and industrialists, had commissioned the report from a small team of recent Ph.D.s from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Despite the report’s then esoteric methodology of computer modeling and economic forecasting, The Limits to Growth became one of the more important bestsellers and intellectual jousting grounds of the 1970s. Together with other high-, low-, and middlebrow contributions of the era—from Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle to Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb to films such as Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, and Silent Running—The Limits to Growth put resource scarcity squarely on the agenda for political and public debate. Historians are just beginning to highlight the importance of The Limits to Growth and the larger scarcity debate. In Europe, the report’s conclusions have become an enduring part of the political and even literal landscape—for instance in steering the final design of the Dutch Oosterschelde storm surge barrier in a more ecosystem-friendly direction. In the United States, the report at first benefited from the timing of its publication—just before the 1973 oil embargo and only a few years after shocking environmental disasters such as the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill—but as those events receded its conclusions were swamped by a visceral backlash. That counterreaction was partly of the authors’ own making. Their 1972 computer simulations were still clumsy and, in particular, did not sufficiently factor in the power of market forces and technological innovation to overcome resource scarcity in the short term. Some of their predictions of commodity price spikes soon fell flat, most famously with the oil glut of the 1980s. The Club of Rome team’s later, more sophisticated, models corrected some of these errors, but the damage was done. The rawness of their initial models gave the Club’s critics free rein to ignore later versions and insist, often quite dubiously, that Limits to Growth had been “refuted.” In The Visioneers, Patrick McCray follows one colorful and influential strand of this backlash. He examines a group of technological enthusiasts who reacted to the Limits to Growth by pointing out that the Earth is not a closed system, and who set out to promote high-tech ways to overcome scarcity by gaining access to exotic sources of energy and resources. McCray identifies the members of this group as part of a larger class of “visioneers”—technically-minded people (often trained scientists and engineers) who articulate long-range technological plans, recruit like-minded enthusiasts to advocate those plans, and even build working models of parts of their proposed technologies in order to demonstrate the feasibility of their larger visions. Most of McCray’s visioneers initially became technological enthusiasts in the