Models: The Third Dimension of Science

by Soraya De Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood, Editors
Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, USA, 2004
488 pp., illus. 103 b/w. Trade, $65.00; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-8047-3971-4; ISBN: 0-8047-3972-2.

Reviewed by Craig Hilton
Unitec, New Zealand,
Mt Albert, Auckland, New Zealand

chilton@unitec.ac.nz

This well edited collection of essays provides a much needed study of the making of 3-Dimensional models arising from the practices of science, medicine, and technology, between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. While the editors acknowledge the importance of abstract theoretical models, they have intentionally limited this discussion to those occasions when scientists, technicians, and physicians "insisted on making and displaying" material 3-D objects that can be "grasped with . . . hands". There have been many studies of 2-D representations of scientific knowledge with not much attention to 3-D models. Here, an interesting variety of historical 3-D models are discussed including how they might have worked in the practice and teaching of their various disciplines.

The contributors of Models are mostly philosophers and historians interested in the production of scientific knowledge. Although there is limited use of academic jargon, the publication’s audience will mostly be of the same academic ilk. However, as many of the authors discuss the wider implications of these 3-D models, this book should also appeal to those interested in the relationships between representation, knowledge, art, and science. In addition, despite the variety of models and disciplines discussed, thematic patterns emerge, unifying the book as a whole, which is helped by a thoughtful introduction and additional commentaries encompassing the main body of work.

3-D technical and scientific models are often intended as some sort of mediator: between patron and client, lecturer and audience, researcher and colleagues, maker and consumer. 3-D models mediate by representing something, by making visible the abstract, the small, the distant, or the yet to be made. In Ludmilla Jordanova’s words, 3-D models are an "incomplete concept". Models of this sort attempt to embody knowledge, to make knowledge graspable. 3-D models can embody scientific theory (hypothesis), and in these cases the models are research tools, mediating between the mind and the hands and eyes of the researcher. However, as many of the essayists noted, these models often inadvertently become something else. For instance, it is argued that in different circumstances 3-D mathematical models can represent an epistemic thing (on the road to new knowledge), an object (when used by surrealists), a flag signalling the reality of mathematics, or simply the act of representation itself (Herbert Mehrtens, Mathematical Models).

When 3-D models embody scientific results (succeeding where 2-D models can not), the publication of the work becomes difficult and might require collaboration with artists skilled in making. Occasionally, the artists themselves became authors giving them status within the scientific community. It was these collaborations that provoked much controversy surrounding the making and display of 3-D models as discussed, for example, in the chapter, "Monsters at the Crystal Palace" by James Secord. Some models, intended for education, were labelled by critics as mass entertainment and said to only satisfy the visitors’ thirst for spectacle. In contrast, late-nineteenth-century educational psychologists argued that in order for true understanding to occur, firstly, imagination and emotions needed to be stimulated through visual impression. Other advocates of these experiments in visual education pointed to the value of tactile learning, where hands and eyes need to coordinate.

As artists became more involved in the making of 3-D models, imagination confronted "fact", the visual confronted text, and museum scientists (for one) became concerned about authenticity. These concerns, Lynn Nyhart in "Science, Art, and Authenticity in Natural History Displays" comments, mirrored "larger bourgeois anxieties about the manipulability of nature’s truths in an age of mass culture and artificial reproduction". 3-D models had become a site for questioning the roles of artists, scientists, and museums and their relationship to authenticity. These arguments are put into an interesting light by Morgan and Boumans in "The Economy as a Hydraulic Machine", who maintain that it is the nature of 3-D models to interpret, make commitments and as thus they become less flexible. In contrast, the authors note, metaphors (1-D model) do not constrict our imagination. Higher dimensional models are good for teaching because they are more tangible, but also have more potential to be wrong. It is for this reason that these models so easily became relics, collector’s items and now a subject for study by philosophers and historians. However, Morgan and Boumans are pragmatic in their analysis when they say "these elements [inherent errors] do not necessarily cause difficulties in learning from the model- we willingly suspend disbelief in order to focus on the demonstrative power of those parts which do represent". Models, whether art or science, attempt to say, This is how the world could be but don’t look too closely.