nological front of laboratory equipment and tools of observation and meas-
urement.
The chief dynamism of scientific discovery, as Derek Price (1986: 237–253)
suggests, is driven by laboratory technology rather than by theories. The
scientific takeoff of the 1600s is exemplified by Galileo’s use of the telescope
to discover new phenomena in astronomy. Galileo adopted or invented tech-
nologies: a pendulum for measuring time, lenses for telescope and microscope.
His followers invented barometers and thermometers and vacuum pumps.
There followed a wave of imitation of Galileo’s method: using new instruments
to make discoveries. Modifications of the telescope led to the microscope, hence
to discoveries in other arenas far removed from Galileo in mechanics and
astronomy. The general notion of trying out new apparatus for experiments
led to Galileo’s own work on mechanics using ramps; application of exist-
ing pumps led to new instruments and discoveries regarding pressure and
temperature.
Technologies evolve by tinkering. Earlier machines are modified, adapted
to new circumstances, combined with other lineages of technology. Hence they
may be conceived of as networks—indeed as genealogies—in their own right;
there is a crucial connection from machine to machine, and not merely from
person to person.^10 Technology usually exists in a historical stream of its own
before it is picked up by an intellectual network; thus lenses go back to
eyeglasses in the 1200s before being adapted to scientific purposes by Galileo’s
generation, and Boyle and Guericke adopted pumps from mining to scientific
experiment. In the non-intellectual world of practical activity, a technology is
not usually a subject of experimentation and change. When the intellectual
network organizes itself around research equipment, however, it begins to
tinker with the technology in order to generate phenomena which its members
can use in their arguments, their struggle for attention. Research technology is
not an embodied theory but is embodied accumulated practices; the lab equip-
ment on the research forefront is an embodiment of the generations of past
tinkering. Scientific theories are the ideologies—the socially negotiated inter-
pretations—which legitimate this genealogy of tinkering.
Why should this change philosophy into science? That is, why should
research technology create a fast-moving research front, with agreement behind
the edge of the front? Technology is not necessarily fast-changing when left to
the non-intellectual world;^11 it is intellectual competition which speeds it up.
How then does research equipment result in resolving intellectual rivalries,
overcoming the law of small numbers which prevails in philosophy?
Research equipment is easy to monopolize, especially if it is constantly
changing on a fast-moving forefront. Discoveries can be made rather predict-
ably by tinkering with equipment used in previous discoveries. “Normal sci-
536 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths