ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Spaceflight and the History of the History of Science

• In Event: Scales of the Earth: Space, Science and the Specters of Planetary History 01

English Abstract

Many of the landmark texts in what is now understood as the history of science and technology were written around the onset of the period of planetization, just at the moment when the technological possibility of spaceflight began impacting how people imagined their world. Alexandre Koyré’s ‘From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe’ came out in 1957, Thomas Kuhn’s ‘Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ in 1962, and Michel Foucault’s ‘Les mots et les choses’ in 1965. While the influence of space technology on the practice of science is well-documented, its influence on the historiography of science is less well studied. Placing these works in context, this intervention argues that the epistemic ruptures they announced and generated were deeply influenced by the technological event of Sputnik’s launch. To ground this claim, it focuses on interpretations of Galileo, a figure critical to current discourses on the cosmopolitics of the ‘planetary turn.’ It shows how these historians' framing of his worldview—including the biases of their readings and their theoretical justifications—was informed by their own extraterrestrializing condition. It demonstrates how new historiographical methodologies co-emerged with the more-than-global age, arguing that twentieth-century historical thought, even with respect to its methodology and metaphors, is radically planetary, profoundly influenced by spaceflight even in the absence of explicit mention of spaceships or satellites.

Author

• Brad Tabas, Institut Polytechnique de Paris