Abstract
This article looks at the relationship between historical treatments in science museums and the academic history of science. It argues that the wide audience of museums means that they need to take a distinctive approach to their narratives, engaging with the feelings about science brought by the visitor as well as the insights of academic historians. Reviewing the experiences of several exhibitions published in recent years, the article highlights the difficulty of balancing truth-telling with the assumptions and concerns brought by the public. It proposes a solution drawing upon the awe and fear inspired by the power of science, the senses of trust and distrust in the institutions of science, and the mixed attitudes of belief and disbelief towards scientific findings.
Keywords
Introduction
Historical science museums, whose roots extend back to the nineteenth century, still attract millions of visitors today, particularly in North America and Europe. Correspondingly, shaping their content to make them even more useful in an era of social and cultural transformation, marked by deep controversies over science, should attract proportionate attention (Janes, 2024). These institutions have a scholarly counterpart in university departments of the history of science, which have defined a great discipline. The translation of learning between these contexts is complex and requires much more reflection than it has received in the past. This article therefore explores how museums should apply the rich literature and important findings of the discipline of the history of science in order to offer meaning to the wide communities concerned about science today. It argues that, rather than seeking to communicate messages derived from canonical texts in the history of science, museums should take a distinctive, if related, path.
Many museums conduct detailed surveys and analyses of their audiences and their needs. The Netherlands’ Museum Boerhaave, which was awarded the European Museum of the Year in 2019, planned its twenty-first-century reinterpretation to address what it depicted as three likely types of visitors: ‘Willem, the somewhat older, educated, culture-loving visitor, who is looking for depth; Sylvia, a not particularly culture- or science-minded parent, who is mainly looking for an entertaining learning experience for her children; and, finally, the postmodern thrill-seeker Jasper, who will most likely visit the museum for exciting special events and festivals and is attracted to immersive interactives’ (Maas, 2017: 362–363). Since the great growth of concern with museum audiences in the 1990s, such classifications have become widespread among museums (Falk and Dierking, 2013; Morris Hargreaves McIntire, 2007). In many societies, museums meeting the challenges of the Willems, Sylvias and Jaspers and prompting intergenerational conversations between such visitors through objects and exhibits play a major role in strategies for fostering public reflection on science.
The diverse and large museum audiences, their distinctive needs, high expectations and brief engagement, with just a few minutes devoted to a single gallery, are very different from the university context of the history of science. Anna Mayer and Tom Scheinfeldt have documented the bifurcations between the specialist's history of science and its populist museological counterpart that emerged between World Wars I and II in Europe and the US (Mayer, 2005; Scheinfeldt, 2003). In university departments, the subject was increasingly becoming a history of ideas. Of course, the academic discipline, as subsequently developed, has several roots, but all share the soil of elite university education. Over the decades, it has engaged closely with the special intellectual and social characteristics of refined images of science. Such historiography has foregrounded abstract notions such as the ‘Second Scientific Revolution’, professionalization, discipline formation and Big Science, which are useful frameworks for addressing problems that have been precisely identified and long debated. These, however, have not been the concerns of laypeople interested in science and buying books about its history.
The challenge for museums seeking to present a history appropriate to their audiences can be clarified by parallels with the anxiety expressed by the philosopher AN Whitehead a century ago that ‘nature’ was bifurcating. On the one hand, there was an understanding of science that regarded it as being solely concerned with identifying abstract solutions to abstract problems (Frank et al., 2024; Whitehead, 1971). In this view, ‘nature’ was interpreted as the home of such theoretical entities as electrons. On the other hand, Whitehead observed what seemed to be ‘another’ nature, which the observer perceives as holding ‘within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet’ (Whitehead, 1971: 31). In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead (1971) argued that there should be no necessary philosophical distinction between these two. I do not suggest that there should be philosophical distinctions between interpretations of the past either. Nonetheless, there are, and should be, differences in emphasis between academic historians of science and their museum colleagues engaging with history in various ways.
If we think of science as a complex system analogous to Whitehead's category of nature, we can also see the distinction between the analytical approach of the trained observer and the layperson's perceptions and lived experience. As in the case of nature, the curator should not regard the layperson's categories as merely secondary phenomena. We know that many citizens are troubled by the authority of science as they encounter it on the internet and on the political stage. For over 30 years, observers have agreed that addressing the public understanding of science requires more than simply making more knowledge available (Levinson, 2011; Yearley, 2000).
Drawing on rules of thumb based on lived experience, sceptics distrust scientific ‘knowledge’ itself, the methods used to generate it, such as climate modelling, and the institutions promoting it. In the era of genetic modification, unfamiliar vaccines, threatening climate models, gender fluidity, artificial intelligence, and requirements to change our lifestyles on the latest advice of scientists, modern societies face substantial challenges. In response, I argue that museums should take responsibility for addressing this confusion of categories. How can we help our visitors make sense of their disoriented worlds?
There should not be philosophical differences between the mainstream discipline of the history of science and the historiography developed within the museum, nor should there be a wall between them. A healthy interaction benefits both. Yet museums’ characteristic engagement with users from a wide variety of backgrounds requires distinctive approaches. To address societal priorities effectively and stimulate visitors, museums cannot rely on traditional narratives nurtured by the teaching of students, the training of scholars and the writing of monographs. Their lonely journeys require historiographic innovation in distinctive directions—which certainly does not mean capitulating to outdated, simplistic models of discovery, innovation and development.
Fortunately, we can draw upon the experience of pioneering exhibitions that have plotted distinctive paths. Important articles have reflected on the consequences for the organization of such exhibitions and reported on their implications. I shall discuss some of these below. Accordingly, this article suggests how curators can use the resources of the discipline while asserting historiographical independence in their interpretation of the history of science and technology, thereby engaging in a scholarly reconsideration of the past appropriate to their medium.
The argument proceeds in three stages. First, it highlights the tensions between academically informed expectations of what should go into an exhibition and visitors’ expectations of what will be included in ambitious projects. Having identified this enduring problem, the article then outlines one possible resolution: a general approach to the choice of issues to study and exhibit, which has implications for historiography in both the university and the museum. In the final stage, it suggests how museums might implement such an approach.
Stage 1: The problem
The museum context has raised two problems: people and objects. In the late 1990s, anxiety swept across the community of academic historians of science. Science writer Dava Sobel's new book Longitude—about eighteenth-century horology—attracted many readers who had not previously engaged with the work of professional historians (Sobel, 1995). With much simplification, Sobel told a story about conflicts among eighteenth-century people, some very good, associated with addressing a scientific problem. At its heart was a hero, John Harrison, who developed a clock so accurate that it enabled British seamen to determine the longitude of their ships, combating a host of critics. University of New South Wales historian David Miller called the response of publishers eager for such oversimplified books the ‘Sobel Effect’ (Miller, 2002). Although that debate is now a generation old, its message remains relevant. Once again, in November 2024, a new Sobel-authored volume, this time on Marie Curie, became a bestseller, outranking in Amazon's ‘History of Science’ category any work by an academic historian of science (Sobel, 2024). 1 Journalist (and Science Museum Head of Science) Roger Highfield has described the attraction of such hero-based stories as powerful metaphors presenting ‘a convenient truth’ (Highfield, 2012). Rather than denouncing such accounts, he argues that science communicators should use their attraction for laypeople. Few issues so clearly highlight the tension between the historical accounts that reach large numbers of laypeople and the academic discipline itself.
An exhibition mounted in 2014 by London's National Maritime Museum, ‘Ships, Clocks, and Stars: The Quest for Longitude’, offered an alternative to Sobel's appealing Longitude narrative of a breakthrough made by an outsider genius overcoming the bureaucratic lethargy imposed by a prejudiced establishment. In a groundbreaking symposium published for historians of science in 2017 under the provocative title ‘Why Science Museums Matter: History of Science in Museums in the Twenty-First Century’, the curator, Rebecca Higgitt, recounted her experience (Higgitt, 2017; Maas et al., 2017). She highlighted the ‘tension’ between her museum's ‘desired narrative’ with its rich array of actors, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ‘popular version of the story’ (Higgitt, 2017: 2). She showed that, while the scholarly curators wished to present an account involving many stakeholders and a complex process of interaction between inventive ideas and practical implementation, the visitors sought out the heroic Harrison of Sobel's story. They queued to see his clocks, which the curators had purposely displayed away from the exhibition's centre, while overlooking the less famous actors whose contributions the exhibition wished to foreground.
A rewarding exhibition for many, ‘Ships, Clocks, and Stars: The Quest for Longitude’ was also an outcome of a research project shared with Cambridge University's Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Accordingly, Higgitt's paper served as a report on an innovative experiment in academic–museum collaboration. One key takeaway from her experience is the difficulty of integrating the findings and concerns of academic history in a narrative in which both academics and the public bring strong and competing assumptions and narratives to a story of innovation. As Higgitt observed, ‘the title of the New York Times review—“The Race That Changed the World and Made the Watch”—shows the durability of the heroic narrative’ (Higgitt, 2017: 379).
The expectations and interpretations of many visitors thus stand in contrast to those of professional historians of science, who have shared the sense that science has been shaped not principally by a few heroes but by a wide range of diverse stakeholders. Historian Lynn Nyhart has reflected on the changing nature of her subject. She suggests that, a generation earlier, the discipline ‘might be captured by the image of a tree of scientific ideas rooted in the base of Western culture (perhaps extending downward earlier to ancient Egypt and Babylonia); the task of the historian of science was to trace the tree's growth and branching’ (Nyhart, 2016: 7). It is worth putting this in its social context. Such an approach enabled audiences of science students to understand their intellectual genealogy, and it did identify heroes at key points of growth. Now, however, Nyhart argues, the discipline has become much more complex. Her essay concludes with a contrasting image of the present challenge: ‘Today a more fitting image would be of the history of science as a densely tangled bank of people and material things teeming with social, cultural, economic, and religious life, that covers the globe’ (Nyhart, 2016: 7). This description does justice to a rich and complex discipline, even if in practice material things have attracted only limited attention.
If Nyhart's rich and informative essay testifies to the wealth and potential of the work of historians, it says less about audiences. She ends with the ambition ‘to invite others, not always historians of science, to come along with us’. Her formulation leaves implicit who those ‘others’ may be. However, she does specify a range of tools characteristic of the modern media landscape, from which we can infer categories such as students, museum and other visitors, and consumers of a wide variety of media. Yet the differing needs of these audiences, and the problems raised by their expectations, remain implicit in her account.
Though museums have reflected obsessively on the needs and interests of their visitors, most of this analysis has focused on the mechanics of communication rather than its content. Nonetheless, as Higgitt's account suggests, we are beginning to benefit from richer analyses of history's engagement with the public in museums. Writing in the Routledge Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology, Bernard Schiele, himself a distinguished museum professional, cites the commitment of the Paris Cité des Sciences to nourishing reflection on the interrelation of science, technology and society (Schiele, 2021). The most famous example of this approach remains the National Museum of American History's 1994 12,000 m2 exhibit, ‘Science in American Life’.
At the opening, the website of the National Museum of American History announced: ‘The exhibition demonstrates how science has changed the way Americans have lived over the last 125 years. It is the first major effort of the museum to examine science in a social and cultural context’ (Smithsonian Institution Archives, 1994). Its treatment of what critics denounced as uninspiring aspects of science, from controversies over priority among scientists to the nuclear bomb shelter, drew criticism from its sponsors (Flam, 1994). Sociologist Thomas Gieryn, who had been on the advisory board, interpreted the disagreement in terms of ‘boundary work’ distinguishing science from non-science (Gieryn, 1996). Lead curator Arthur Molella saw the attack on his team's work as rooted in a confusion between claims for the relevance and social engagement of science, which were inevitably susceptible to socio-historical interpretation, and claims for the purity and specialness of science, which presumably should not be (Molella, 1999). Reflecting on debates over the domestic nuclear fallout shelter exhibit, he observed: ‘They rebuffed any notion of the artifact's validity as a representation of public reactions to the applications of physical theory’ (Molella, 1999: 112).
Beyond rhetorical sparring, the Smithsonian Institution responded with an evaluation. The report showed that visitors spent an average of 16 min in the exhibition. This was normal for a museum visit but far shorter than engagement through other media, such as lectures or books, though perhaps comparable to a magazine article. The evaluation concluded: ‘In our view, the exhibition influenced some people insofar as it led them to think about issues of history, ethical responsibility, and the public role of science. The less thought individuals had given to these issues before visiting the exhibition, the more opportunity they had to be influenced by the exhibition’ (Pekarik et al., 1999: 126). However, in general, the fears of the sponsors seemed to have been unjustified. For all its controversial reputation and its exposure of the human side of scientific interactions, the exhibition did not undermine the generally positive views of visitors towards science.
The experience of the Smithsonian was still fresh in the minds of staff at the Chemical History Museum, which was installed by the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute) in Philadelphia in 2006. The professionals responsible for the museum had to compete with the assumptions of retired chemists and their non-curatorial colleagues about what should be displayed. Jennifer Landry explained: ‘The museum's primary objective is to encourage visitors to want to learn more about how science, especially chemistry, intersects with and matters to their everyday lives’ (Landry, 2017). Landry pointed to tensions with those wishing to prioritize professional interest groups over this citizen-oriented approach.
Landry and Cook (2019) later explored the evolving role of objects in the thinking of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. They described their experience of developing a collection strategy that integrated artefacts, existing collections and stories, a process that was conflict-ridden and time-consuming. Unlike many of their scientific colleagues, they were seeking not only to engage professionals who had immersed their careers in chemistry but also to draw in, enthuse and inspire members of the public visiting their city-centre location. Ultimately, they found an acceptable balance between pursuing local audience engagement with historical significance and professional nostalgia.
These studies highlight a persistent issue. Historians emphasize the diversity of actors; evaluators and commentators stress the importance of characters with whom visitors can identify; and, at the same time, there remains a special attractiveness in heroic narratives of invention and discovery (Higgitt, 2017: 374‒375; Jordanova, 2014).
I have already suggested that the interpreter of science can usefully examine the tensions between analytical and day-to-day interpretations of nature. A recent paper described this dissonance with the evocative term ‘the blind spot’ (Frank et al., 2024). We can see an analogous blind spot in the perception of science, but, in communicative historic objects, curators have found a powerful tool to address the problem. Thus, in the mid-twentieth century, Science Museum director Frank Sherwood Taylor highlighted the power of the famous or the beautiful artefact (Boon, 2023). By contrast, objects have been peripheral to university teaching and research. Even if historians of science and technology have spoken of the virtues of ‘the material turn’, few have fully embraced it (see Ackermann et al., 2014). Sam Alberti, a distinguished historian and chief curator at the Royal Scottish Museums, and his coauthors have analysed the lack of artefact focus in key professional journals, Isis and Technology and Culture (Alberti et al., 2024). They found that, although academic historians found objects stimulating and their thinking enabled, they rarely used the objects in their arguments. Objects are conceptually slippery, and their impact is difficult to interpret or control. Modern instruments are often opaque black boxes, uninspiring even for curious visitors, while many advances, such as those in artificial intelligence, are difficult to display through artefacts. Even in museums, there was a long period when the use of objects declined. In 1997, Smithsonian curators expressed concern about the dominance of stories over objects in their institution (Post and Molella, 1997). The following year, a former colleague, then Director of Dearborn's Henry Ford Museum, suggested that museums see themselves as ‘experience providers’ (Skramstad, 2000). Curators, however, fought back in internal arguments within institutions and, occasionally, with public rebuttals (see Bennett, 1995; Cain, 2017; Roth, 2000).
For almost 30 years, the nature and role of artefacts in museums have been discussed in the meetings and publications of the Artefacts Consortium and the Scientific Instrument Commission, and in museological and science centre contexts such as ECSITE (The European Network of Science Centres and Museums). Many of these contributions, such as the Artefacts volumes Challenging Collections and Behind the Exhibit (Boyle and Hagmann, 2019; Canadelli et al., 2019), show a refined sense of the contradictions between the expectations of public and private sponsors and audiences and the analytical view of scholars. Curators have found that artefacts can serve as stimulating ‘boundary objects’ (Carr et al., 2012; Johnson et al., 2017; Singh, 2011). Rather than simply affirming boundaries, artefacts can make them visible and interesting. They may serve as focal points through which the nature, trustworthiness and credibility of the ‘hero’ can be explored. Nonetheless, invention and discovery will continue to be contested territory over which the culture of the public, journalists, practising scientists and historians conflict.
Yet, invention and discovery do not have to be the focus of successful museum exhibits. Boon (2011) has described how objects were used by the Science Museum to tell stories of technological life as experienced by its audiences. Beyond the world of science museums and science centres, a highly successful genre of exhibitions devoted to the experience of laypeople can also date its origins to the late nineteenth century. The popular exhibits of folk museums allow visitors to empathize with people like themselves (Lowenthal, 2015). Historians of science and science museum curators have long recognized the potential of this genre. In 2016, Spanish historian Agustí Nieto-Galan published Science in the Public Sphere: A History of Lay Knowledge and Expertise (Nieto-Galan, 2016). This volume, and the literature from which it emerged, highlighted a historiography of science in which the layperson has been an important actor. The historiography of medicine has long taken seriously the views and actions of laypeople and their interactions with expert advice (see Cooter and Pumfrey, 1994; Porter, 1985). Similarly, museum galleries dealing with the history of medicine have increasingly foregrounded patient perspectives (Bond et al., 2020; Fleming, 2017). These curators and historians also point out the complex patterns of interaction between experts and lay stakeholders, requiring us to explore the distribution and deployment of power.
Stage 2: The layperson
In democracies, it is the lay citizen who ultimately controls politics and therefore the regulation of state policies and, indirectly, the national cultures of science shaped by those policies (Bud, 2024; Webb and Kurtz, 2022). Yet, in the era of professional science, the role of the non-scientist has been thrown into doubt. Science often seems well beyond the individual's grasp and authority. The public's wish for validation of alternative perceptions arose early in the twentieth century, when the popular French philosopher Henri Bergson challenged the authority of the physicist as interpreter of time. In a famous 1922 debate with Einstein over relativity, Bergson argued that the individual human had a legitimate experience of time, shaped by memory and experience, with an authority distinct from the technical clock measurement of the scientist (Canales, 2016). Not only the physicist's reasoning but also the living subjective experience of durée needed to be taken seriously in society.
Beyond philosophy, there is the question of power. By the end of the twentieth century, a series of crises in the public relations of science—ranging from controversy over the purported side effects of the MMR vaccine to the use of genetically modified organisms and efforts to mitigate the threats of ‘mad cow disease’—had challenged the expert model of ‘public understanding of science’. When this phrase became popular in the 1980s, it represented experts compensating for lay ignorance. It subsequently became clear, however, that laypeople had opinions and wished to be consulted rather than lectured. Britain's House of Lords suggested that the times required more public engagement than public instruction. ‘Public engagement’ with science superseded ‘public understanding’ as the preferred term and practice, which had implications for museums (Gregory and Lock, 2008; House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, 2000).
Introducing a book on science museum collections in 2017, Dominique Pestre reflected on the limited number of stories that tended to ‘underpin science-in-society narratives’ (Pestre, 2017: 3; see also Pestre, 2005). One is concerned with human responsibility for environmental destruction. The other is the disappearance of trust in science. In his piece, Pestre argues for a proper historical understanding of these issues, which, he claims, have often been interpreted ahistorically, with a Manichean break between past and present. He suggests we take account of the emergence since 1800, the era of modern science, of: links between these diverse entities that I provisionally labeled new knowledge, sciences, techniques, society, institutions, production, markets, states, regulations, and democratic forms. These links are complex and structured around points of convergence, as well as conflicts that may be systemic and that remain more than ever at the heart of today's great issues (Pestre, 2017: 9).
Stage 3: Implementation
This section suggests ways in which curators can act. I propose that there are three categories of special interest to the lay public with which curators can engage and whose history they can portray. These are: trust and distrust in the institutions with which science is associated; awe and fear of the power of science; and popular belief, and disbelief, in the results of science. In the momentous seven years since the publication of Pestre's paper, the importance of trust and distrust in science has grown. In the wake of the COVID-19 vaccine crisis, the issue of trust in science has also become more precisely understood (Breeze, 2021; Rutjens et al., 2021). Thus, Achterberg et al. (2017: 704), among others, have shown that ‘some people place great trust in scientific methods and principles, but simultaneously distrust scientific institutions’. The continuing significance of climate hesitancy in the United States is just one case indicating the relevance of such institutional suspicion (Pasquini et al., 2023). The distinction to which these authors point has a long history and deep social roots (Millstone and Van Zwanenberg, 2000). Yet even this distinction highlights the value of Pestre's approach.
The two further issues have also proved important. Like trust, they affect visitors today both individually and collectively, but also, as Pestre has suggested, they have a past from which the modern situation has developed. Like trust, the awe and fear evoked by the power of science are not simply matters of one-way popularization but of engagement. For instance, the achievements of the orbiting James Webb telescope and the potential of artificial intelligence have highlighted the mixed feelings of admiration and apprehension that science can inspire even in the most hardened of citizens (Untea, 2017). Such ambivalence is not new: when, in 1939, Madge and Harrisson turned their attention to British people, these pioneers of the Mass Observation ethnography project identified similar patterns of confused admiration and anxiety among the British public (Madge and Harrisson, 1939: 7‒22).
The third issue is belief in the findings of science. Such belief is separate from, but related to, the question of trust in the institutions of science. A recent preprint by distinguished authors, based on studies in 68 countries, links disbelief in the legitimacy of scientific knowledge to doubts about the trustworthiness of scientists as individuals (Cologna et al., 2025). Such scepticism is, of course, not new.
The debates over the acceptability of Darwinian evolution in the United States in the 1920s, which culminated in the famous Scopes trial of 1925, testified to the problematic status of science as a unique source of truth (Larson, 1989). The state of Tennessee, where fundamentalist Protestants were influential, had banned the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public high schools. When a teacher, John Scopes, defied the law, the state prosecuted him in a trial of worldwide notoriety. Scholars disentangling the issues at stake, particularly the role of the populist politician and lawyer William Jennings Bryan, who led the prosecution, have highlighted the interaction of local political conflicts, ambitions, culture and religion behind critiques of science in particular contexts. The trial may have seemed to represent a clash of civilizations, but it also reflected the issues particular to Tennessee at that moment. The later emergence of ‘Creationist science’ testified to attempts to achieve the same goal of repressing Darwinian teaching, but through distrust in the institutions of science rather than in its methods.
The scope of esoteric mathematical methods, widely taken to be at the heart of science, has been remarkably influential but also widely doubted. In the 1920s, even physicists questioned the accuracy of Einstein's interpretation of the physical world, calling it a mathematical rather than a physical interpretation (Ryckman, 2005). Certainly, numbers can deliver a powerful rhetorical punch to the layperson. Mathematical epidemiological models led British politicians to order the culling of six and a half million animals in Britain in 2001 during an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease. Whether these models were locally cogent descriptions of farmers’ situations, without taking account of local ‘lifescapes’, was controversial for years (Convery et al., 2005; Mansley et al., 2011). Here, the issue is the very existence of these arguments rather than their justice.
Trust in institutions, the awe and fear inspired by the power of science, and belief in science are matters of public interest today. As any news-watcher knows, these are not merely theoretical or imposed categories. They describe the worries and experiences of people like Willem, Sylvia and Jasper, characterized at the Boerhaave. Whether we consider the control of carbon dioxide emissions to mitigate the risk of climate change, or limiting the impact of virulent viruses or antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the decisions of individual citizens will affect the public good. They are an appropriate challenge for treatment by a science museum exhibition. The experience of ‘Science in American Life’ shows that dealing with complex issues associated with science does not drive visitors away from an appreciation of its significance or value. In exhibitions, narratives, artefacts and contemporary concerns can be linked allegorically. After all, deploying and deconstructing myths are among the most powerful tools at the disposal of museums. As Jordanova has explained, ‘By myths, I do not mean claims that are untrue, but rather compelling stories and ideas that are capable of being easily understood and exercising allure, and do not necessarily manifest themselves at the level of individuals’ (Jordanova, 2014; see also Bud, 1995).
Therefore, this article suggests the importance of interpreting science in museums through the real and sharable problematics of public engagement with science. Such studies are, of course, not new. Shapin and Schaffer's classic account of experiments with the air pump is an exploration of trustworthiness (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985). Many of our museum artefacts were preserved as testimony to the credibility of scientific work. Thus, the Science Museum holds the reconstructed metal double helix model, built specifically to promote the credibility of Crick and Watson's work (Chadarevian, 2003). The work of Naomi Oreskes on the confusion purposely sown around the dangers of tobacco and climate change testifies to the importance and viability of studying trust (Oreskes, 2019). However, today, curators often lack the detailed discipline-generated resources to interpret these themes properly. Academic historians have not yet followed up on the work suggested by Pestre's outline, and their museum-based colleagues have not yet taken the independent lead. 2 Such lacunae merely highlight the need for historians within the museum community to take the initiative. This work requires resources and is time-consuming. Nonetheless, exploration of multilayered public attitudes to science and its institutions has been made easier by the new opportunities of searching digitized newspapers for locally resonant stories through such databases as the British Newspaper Archive, the French ‘Retronews’, and America's Library of Congress collection ‘Chronicling America’. In the future, as museums digitize and link their rich but hidden and compartmentalized resources through projects like the British ‘Congruence Engine’, linkages between a wide variety of knowledge claims will emerge (Boon, 2022).
In my own historical work, I have explored the history of an enduring issue of contemporary relevance to laypeople and scholars alike: the classification of science (Bud, 2024). Over two centuries, the category of applied science has had special significance for the public, politicians and the scientific establishment in Britain. Although this work focused on the British context because that alone was sufficiently complex for a single volume, the issues it raised had close counterparts elsewhere. Indeed, it highlighted the importance of the discourse local to Britain, in which, in Pestre's words, the links between ‘new knowledge, sciences, techniques, society, institutions, production, markets, states, regulations, and democratic forms’ had distinctive convergences and conflicts. However, it was apparent that this category was not imposed and defined from above but was constructed through the interplay of popular culture and scientific policy in the public sphere and the corridors of power. This study shows how British conceptions of, and dreams for, applied science were shaped by the very categories of trust, power and belief discussed here, within a context of deep and enduring distrust of government engagement in the market. Although objects were not the focus of this work because it was a book and not an exhibition, an exhibit could draw upon it. To take another example, the place of materialism, which was so characteristic of mid-twentieth-century scientific treatments of ‘living processes’ in Britain, had been honed in a highly localized debate with religious advocates (Bud, 2013). Again, this was not just an abstract argument about detailed ideas but also deeply interconnected with attitudes towards science's institutions and credibility more broadly. My current research highlights how equally local the debates were at the same time in the US, France and Germany.
Conclusion
To promote engagement with an exhibit, a museum display needs to be not just factually accurate but also emotionally resonant and culturally responsive. I have suggested that there are considerable difficulties in meeting these criteria drawing on the history of science as it has evolved in academic settings. However, a museum can meet both the requirements of academic rigour and engagement with the concerns of popular culture.
We do not need to choose between reproducing or competing with academic accounts of scientific change, or disputing the status of the ‘hero’. Rather, the museum can engage directly with lay interest in, and worries about, the standing, nature and practice of science. Even if academic historians have not traditionally been concerned with issues such as lay trust in the institutions of science, awe and fear in the face of scientific power, and belief in scientific findings, in ways that are useful to curators, these are not new topics for sociologists or philosophers (Stengers, 2018). Addressing them would provide an appropriate history for visitors and an appropriate topic for the museum as a medium. Objects can serve as key resources, exposing historical developments, conflicts and convergences, even if they cannot constitute the entirety of modern multimedia exhibitions. The anxieties caused by particular experiences in particular localities will require further research before museums can address these topics effectively. As my study of applied science has shown, science may be international, but its interpretation, even within Europe, has often been local. Therefore, museums must conduct more applied research addressing their interesting problems before investing in such exhibits.
This article has deliberately considered a wide range of actors and issues: objects, audiences, sponsors, philosophy and the public interest. Yet this scope has been necessary. I have sought to identify topics suitable for exhibits and the underlying applied research requirements, which come from the fundamental needs of the time, as well as the problems besetting curators in historical science museums.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Tim Boon, Roger Highfield, Kate Steiner and the issue's editors and referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Robert Bud is Emeritus Keeper at the Science Museum in London. With a PhD in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania, he served the Science Museum in a variety of roles, including curator of industrial chemistry, keeper of science and medicine and head of curatorial research for four decades.