What’s in the bottle?

Donald MacKenzie

• The One Culture? A Conversation about Science edited by Jay Labinger and Harry Collins
  Chicago, 329 pp, £41.00, August 2001, ISBN 0 226 46722 8

For nearly a decade, heated debates about science have split academia and sometimes spilled onto the pages of newspapers. Although the ‘science wars’ were well underway by 1996, they came to wider attention in that year when Alan Sokal succeeded in publishing his brilliant pastiche in Social Text. Sokal’s hoax implicitly condemned – and a fair number of further books and articles raged against, often, alas, without Sokal’s wit – views of science akin to the following: modern science ‘resembles much more a stock-market speculation than a search for the truth about nature’; scientists ‘do not find order in nature, they put it there’; ‘the picture of the scientist as a man with an open mind, someone who weighs the evidence for and against, is a lot of baloney’; ‘modern physics is based on some intrinsic acts of faith’; ‘at any historical moment, what pass as acceptable scientific explanations have both social determinants and social functions.’