Models: The Third Dimension of Science (review)

This book concerns three-dimensional (3-D) models produced in the sciences of Europe and North America between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Sixteen articles by a distinguished list of museum researchers and historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science examine a stunning variety of models and their uses: wooden ships and extinct monsters rebuilt in bricks and mortar, casts of diseases, displays of stuffed animals and perspex models of a Keynesian economy, monuments in cork and mathematics in plaster, wax embryos and plastic molecules, and many others. Although all of these models embodied and displayed knowledge, their manner of doing so varied enormously over time and circumstance. The term "model" persisted throughout the period covered in this volume, but its meaning evolved greatly.

Recent studies of representation in scientific practice have shown how scientific tools and instruments and the engravings, traces, and printouts that they produce are fundamental to the scientists' tasks of convincing colleagues, training students, and winning public support. Yet these studies have been almost entirely concerned with the two- dimensional (2-D) flat surface, and have neglected 3-D. This volume restores models to their rightful place among the basic materials of knowledge production. Several essays emphasize the varieties of structural details that could not be conceived any other way. Hopwood shows, for example, how late nineteenth-century wax embryological models, which could be seen from all sides and even "dissected" with hot wires, were more important than printed works, since they made features of development—which could not be grasped in words, images, or equations—perceptible.

Like images and texts, models routinely ventured between private places of discovery and public venues of display. Some models, like the Phillips model of the economy, mediated between words and worlds. Other models, such as those of buildings, inventions, or displays of stuffed animals or dinosaurs, interceded between patrons, producers, and publics. Models representing natural or technological objects often performed political work. Simon Schaffer shows that Enlightenment entrepreneurs displayed models of everything from electric fish to ships to show how both nature and society could be brought under rational control. Christoph Meinel argues that chemical models developed in the late nineteenth century promoted the power of the new synthetic chemistry by showing how a new world could be built out of new materials. Molecular biological models displayed at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair promoted what Chadarevian calls a "physics of life" over a "physics of death" in the hot phase of the Cold War.

Material models usually required enormous care and labor to construct. What justified the trouble to make these models for scientific purposes? Taxidermy, plaster casts, blown glass, museum dioramas, perspex models, and computer programs often represented state of the art skill and technique in different media. According to Ludmilla Jordanova, models brought diverse forms of pleasure by virtue of their changes in scale, their tactile verisimilitude, or their promise of bringing something new into being. Like the dancing, preaching, and gauging that Baxandall famously used to understand fifteenth-century Italian paintings, scientific models can be instructively juxtaposed with a variety of cultural practices and artifacts to reconstruct historical specificities.¹ As Herbert Mehrtens reports, surrealist artists like Man Ray perfectly understood that mathematical models turned into unruly objects when set in unfamiliar contexts.

One of the lessons that emerges repeatedly in these essays is that models engaged the human body in cognitive activities in ways that other forms of representation could not. Moulages gave medics an intimacy with diseases that word and image could not. Mathematical, chemical, and economic models could be taken apart or altered to show process or variations of configuration, and to train the mind's eye to grasp these variations. Dioramas of animal groups—extinct or existing—gave emotional charge to the natural world. James Griesemer observes that these 3-D models are frequently not only models of but also models for; their dimensionality invites a "gestural heuristics" that...