Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)
TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management
evolutionary triumphalism - underwritten by references to expert authority. And although lip service is paid to the social construction of objects, it normally falls to scientists and technologists, rather than to social historians or historians of knowledge, to tell visitors what to make of scientific controversies and categories. The museum's dilemma is made worse by the fact that modern science teaching, enhanced by interactives, is conducted largely outside a historical framework material. During the last ten years, some science teachers have begun to use the history in physics educcation, using facsimile historical experiments. Some science museums are helping. Bernard Finn, for example, once performed a splendid demonstration of Desaguliers air pump of 1742, showing the limitations of the technology and its influence on his understanding of electricity. 23 Science teachers in Britain and Italy replicate classic experiments by Hooke and Boyle, and reveal much about the assumptions underlying socalled theory-neutral demonstrations. 24 But whatever insights these "replication experiments" offer into the logic of scientific discovery, and however much they reveal of the underside of scientific belief, few enquire into the reasons why given experiments were chosen and valorised, the social relations they embraced, or the role of aesthetics, religion, or spiritual models in defining their interpretations of observed events. The theoryladenness of observations is well established in philosophical circles, but It is rarely illustrated in the classroom, and less advertised in the science museum. In Australia, the Powerhouse and the Australian Museum in Sydney and "Science Works" in Melbourne find historians attempting to join forces with scientists. Perhaps a new tribe may emerge. But at present, such curators, like most museums, find themselves like the man in Robert Frost's poem, come to a point in the yellow wood where two roads diverge. Some will choose the well-worn path, some will venture anew. To appeal for change inevitably becomes an appeal for interdisciplinarity, and that, in turn, for power-sharing. Unfortunately, disciplinary demarcations within museums have imitated the worst forms of compartmentalisation among the universities. Moreover, science museums vie with art museums in seeking to belong to what Kenneth Hudson calls the "Establishment". "Museums of Influence", the title of his influential book, is the name of their game. 25 They are largely influenced in their policy by the second false god against which Bacon warned - the idol of the theatre. Pressures to conform to "mission statements" are obliging curators and directors to rething their role in a republic of science, in which visitors vote with their feet, and sponsors demand their heads. "Science Museum, Enterprises", reads the legend above the modern Solomon's House.
