Living with, learning from and managing scientific failure

Abstract

This issue of Notes and Records is characteristically heterogeneous in content, its papers covering topics such as phonetics, scientific naturalism, chemistry and biomedicine in the seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But one theme that is touched upon throughout, obliquely or directly, in all the research papers is ‘failure’. It is not, on the face of it, surprising that historians of science, technology and medicine have hardly lavished attention on failed, transitory or marginal projects of the past. Incoherence is hard to write about coherently; the roads not taken, one might think, are harder still to learn from. Yet historians have in fact learned much from investigating apparently marginal, transitory and bizarre ventures; and to explore the richness of science's past culture requires the historian to delve into the discussions and practices behind and beneath failed activities as well as successful ones. Follow the actors, however circuitous, vertiginous or truncated their paths might be. The first paper fuses …