Models: The Third Dimension of Science (review)

This well-edited collection of essays provides a much-needed study of the making of 3D models arising from the practices of science, medicine and technology between the mid-18th and the mid-20th 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 3D objects that can be "grasped with. . . hands." There have been many studies of 2D representations of scientific knowledge, but not much attention given to 3D models. Here, an interesting variety of historical 3D models are discussed, including how they might have worked in the practice and teaching of their various disciplines.

The contributors to Models are mostly philosophers and historians interested in the production of scientific knowledge. Although there is limited use of academic jargon, the publication's readers will mostly be of the same academic ilk. However, as many of the authors discuss the wider implications of these 3D 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.

Three-dimensional 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. 3D 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, 3D models are an "incomplete concept." Models of this sort attempt to embody knowledge, to make knowledge graspable. 3D models can embody scientific theory (hypothesis), and in these cases the models are research tools, mediating between the mind, hands and eyes of the researcher. However, as many of the essayists note, these models often inadvertently become something else. For instance, it is argued that in different circumstances 3D mathematical models can represent an epistemic thing (on the road to new knowledge), an object (when used by surrealists), a flag signaling the reality of mathematics or simply the act of representation itself (Herbert Mehrtens, Mathematical Models).

When 3D models embody scientific results (succeeding where 2D models cannot), the construction of the work becomes difficult and might require collaboration with artists skilled in making. Occasionally, the artists became authors, giving them status within the scientific community. It was collaborations such as these that provoked much controversy surrounding the making and display of 3D models as discussed, for example, in the chapter "Monsters at the Crystal Palace," by James Secord. Some models, intended for education, were labeled by critics as mass entertainment and were said to only satisfy the visitors' thirst for spectacle. In contrast, late-19th-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 3D models, imagination confronted "fact," the visual confronted text, and museum scientists (for one) became concerned about authenticity. These concerns, as 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." 3D models had become a site for questioning the roles of artists, scientists and museums and their relationship to authenticity. These arguments are put in an interesting light by Morgan and Boumans in "The Economy as a Hydraulic Machine," in which they maintain that it is the nature of 3D models to interpret, make commitments and as thus they...