Investigative Pathways: Patterns and Stages in the Careers of Experimental Scientists (review)

In the preface to this thoughtful volume, Frederic L. Holmes recalls that when he began his scholarly career History of Science was "preeminently a history of scientific thought," exploring, as one of its central tasks, "the origins of the great discoveries on which the modern sciences were established" (p. x). He pursued that task in a series of fine-grained studies of experimentalists across three centuries (Lavoisier, Bernard, Krebs, Meselson and Stahl, and Benzer) that explored not only particular discoveries, but the nature and dynamics of scientific creativity. In the course of those studies, he developed the metaphor of the "investigative pathway," which captures his resolutely historical, anti-Whig view that the investigator does not advance by a straight line toward a preordained conclusion, but rather creates his or her path while proceeding "step by step, each step guided by those taken previously and by uncertain intimations about what lies ahead" (p. xvi). Completed shortly before Holmes's death in 2003, Investigative Pathways is a meditation on this process, based upon his own research and that of other scholars who have grappled with the various historical artifacts of experimentalists' journeys—particularly, but not exclusively, with laboratory notebooks.

As Holmes explains in the book's first section, "Interpretations of Scientific Discovery and Creativity," the investigative pathway is an "expression of the distinctiveness and continuity of the individual scientific personality" (p. xx) as it develops during an individual's training and sustained encounter with nature. (For Holmes, an unabashed realist, both the investigator and nature have "agency"—a word, one senses, that he rather dislikes.) Like human history in general, the individual pathway can be examined at various scales of resolution, each illuminating and obscuring different aspects of the whole. For an individual scientist, the counterpart of Braudel's "longue durée" is the "slow growth of a point of view" (pp. 11–12), within which are nestled shorter episodes (for example, five years of research on a particular problem) and, finally, the much more ephemeral "stream of thought."

In succeeding sections, Holmes discusses the dynamics of the pathway in his characteristically lucid, detailed, and reflective style. His reasoning is nuanced and dialectical, with attention to both pattern and variation that invariably reveals the interpenetration and context-dependence of apparent polarities. In "Phases of the Lifetime Career" he examines the passage from apprenticeship to independence, the process and consequences of mastering a domain, the achievement and conferral of distinction, and the dilemmas facing the mature scientist. In "Episodic Rhythms within an Investigative Life," he complicates the pathway metaphor through discussion of such subjects as the interpenetration of investigative goal and contingency, and of continuity and discontinuity in experimentalists' work. In "The Fine Structure of Experimental Operation," he explores the relationship between thought and practice, and between long-maturing perspectives and "Eureka moments."

For Holmes, the scientific enterprise, like the individual pathway, is both historically specific and continuous. He appreciates "the many personal differences of method, approach, and style that mark each scientist as both a unique individual and a participant in a unique period of time"—yet he also insists upon "some deeper underlying commonalities that link them as participants in the same grand quest" (p. xxi).

All research trails involve choices that create absences as well as presences, which is also true of this product of Holmes's scholarly journey. His volume offers no systematic discussion of the relationship of broader context to the research pathway; as in his monographs, various contextual elements enter his analysis as they reveal themselves in the ideas and practices of the individual scientific personality at work. Similarly, Holmes is concerned here with the individual investigator—his own special domain—and not with groups such as the research school or the collective laboratory enterprise that, as he readily acknowledged, constitutes yet another important complication of the pathway metaphor.

This volume reminds us forcefully that...