Government and Science in an Age of Scientific Revolution

Abstract

A revolutionary change has occurred in institutional relations between science and the federal government. A. Hunter DupreeAll the many evocations of the figure of the scientific revolution as a description of this or of any other age are metaphors based upon metaphors. Between the changes in ideas which make up a scientific revolution and the turning wheel lie the great political and social upheavals of history, of which the greatest and most fully developed model is the French Revolution. The meaning of revolution in political and social terms has never ceased to attract and to baffle the profoundest of scholars. Hence it is little wonder that we seem to live in the midst of a superfluity of scientific revolutions that overlap and sometimes contradict one another, each related in a different way, by analogy, to political revolution. J. Stefan Dupre and Sanford A. Lakoff, in Science and the Nation: Policy and Politics (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962. 181 pp. $1.95), have taken pains to delimit their revolution. They keep well clear of the changes in the body of scientific understanding itself and only imply the significance of both the classical industrial revolution and the changed relation of science to technology. In a qualified way they recognize these last two revolutions, in the sense that C. P. Snow described them in the Two Cultures and the Scientific

Hiram Martin Chittenden: His Public Career

“…Nature herself has helped to perpetuate this memorial, for the prairie winds, year by year, carve the furrow more deeply, and the wild sunflower blossoms along its course, as if in silent memory of those who sank beneath its burdens." 91 In the frontier era Chittenden discovered a period in which the individual had large scope to govern his own destiny, a power which Chittenden saw possible in his own career. Although he saw many imperfections in the frontier period, as in his own, Chittenden neither in past nor present ever acknowledged that the individual of character and ability was helpless to set his own course.…”

“…Since the Civil War, taxpayers had been accustomed to supporting government scientists and to witnessing intellectual and bureaucratic struggles among them, and it was thus equally natural for the public to expect that conservation measures would be undertaken by agencies of federal and state governments. 91 Almost inevitably then, both because of its nature and its source of support, the field of forest influences was one in which discoveries would be widely publicized and heatedly discussed. For these reasons alone it would be difficult for scientists in this discipline to maintain a spirit of dispassionate objectivity.…”