Abstract
In what ways can the history of astronomy most usefully inform policy makers? To answer this question Martin Harwit divided Cosmic Discovery into two parts. The first section examines the history of the discovery of significant cosmic phenomena. Harwit then, in the second part, applies his historical lessons to make a series of policy recommendations.
The book’s first figure, Figure 1.1, shows a plot of date against the total of major discoveries (43 of these) and rediscoveries (7) made to that date. Of the significant discoveries, Harwit places stars, planets, and novae in antiquity, and measures a steady rise in the number of discoveries from the seventeenth century on, reaching a near-vertical climb in the second-half of the twentieth century.
Figure 1.1 is the sort of plot that Derek de Solla Price brought to prominence in 1963 in Little Science, Big Science. Price sought to establish a “science of science” and measured the growth of science in different ways. One of his plots displays an exponential increase in the number of scientific discoveries, the consequence, according to Price, of the scientific enterprise picking up steam in a relentless fashion since the seventeenth century. Harwit, however, goes beyond the historical record and computes the number of remaining significant discoveries, arriving at the answer of around 85–90. He also presents Figure 1.8, “Discoveries and Discovery Rate Projected into the Future.” This plot shows the discovery rate peaking around the year 2000 and then declining, but with the total number of phenomena discovered, if his calculations are correct, growing impressively throughout the twenty-first century.
The key to the first part of Cosmic Discovery, then, is the concept of scientific discovery. But what counts as a scientific discovery? Over the last 200 years, scientists, philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science have produced a range of answers to this seemingly simple question. Different replies to this question, for example, helped drive the, at times, explosive dispute over who should get credit for the discovery of Neptune in 1846. Harwit employs a notion of discovery in which the interpretation of an astronomical phenomenon by a present-day astronomer matches that of the person(s) who made the discovery. But how does the modern understanding of, say, a planet, align with the conception of a planet in antiquity? Also, are not many important astronomical discoveries about the transformation of a known sort of body rather than the finding of an entirely new sort of object?
Cosmic Discovery was first published four decades ago and the text of the “Revised Issue” is identical to the original except for a new four-page preface. Historians, I suspect, will not be persuaded by Harwit on discoveries, but it is the second part of Cosmic Discovery that makes it worth revisiting for historians of modern astronomy. Here, Harwit exploits his historical analyses to decide on the most effective ways to keep the astronomy engine fuelled and humming. He is, therefore, not just providing recommendations on selecting the most promising new instruments, but also on how to train astronomers and to draw more experimental physicists into astronomy, a group he sees as having played a crucial role in astronomy’s development.
Harwit is a very distinguished astrophysicist and was already extremely familiar with the workings of the modern astronomical enterprise in the United States (and it is the United States that is most relevant for the policy segment of the book) when he wrote Cosmic Discovery. That enterprise was, and is, highly cooperative in many respects. But US astronomy was, and is, also enormously competitive, with many excellent ideas for new telescopes, instruments, equipment, and observing programmes jostling hard for limited resources to turn them into reality. The book, completed in 1981, was fundamentally shaped by the policy concerns of the 1960s and 1970s and is best read as a leading astrophysicist’s bold attempt to provide a rational and historically rooted basis for policymaking.