research equipment; though scientific entities have an intellectual side, they also
have a non-intellectual side, phenomena which arise from the ways in which
this equipment behaves.
Both of these links to banal reality of human-sized material experience
extend outward in time; both have generations of predecessors, and both carry
along the prior experience of past generations; both imply what practices will
work again in the future. This is particularly strong in the equipment geneal-
ogy; research technologies have been manipulated and modified just so that
they give repeatable results. The stability of scientific entities is the counterpart
on the intellectual plane of the stability which has been created in practice in
the equipment of research. One can regard this as stability in the interaction
between the bodies of experimenters and the equipment. The perfection of the
equipment, and the stabilization of a theoretical entity (an electron, let us say),
rests on the way in which the genealogy of equipment has become successively
easier to manipulate. This reaches a very high degree when the standardized
equipment, or some offspring of it, is shipped out of the laboratory; electric
circuits become wiring manipulated by millions of people in everyday life;
electromagnetic wave detectors become radio receivers. When this occurs, the
human social network which hosts the theoretical entity gives it a seemingly
irreproachable reality. The specialized intellectual network, prone to creating
the esoterica of the non-ordinary world, fades from presence; electricity be-
comes so closely tied to the unquestionable realities of human bodies and the
human-sized things that surround them that it comes to seem continuous with
ordinary reality.
And indeed in a sense it is. Although we are rarely conscious of the fact,
the electric switches, batteries, wave detectors, and so forth are the current
generation of a long trail of previous equipment whose youth was spent in the
genealogies of laboratories. It is this long train, extending backwards and
forwards through time, that makes some scientific entities so obdurate; they
are so tightly and multiply linked to ordinary reality that it is hard to separate
them from it.
The obdurate reality acquired by some entities of science comes more from
their material grounding in equipment than from their theoretical conceptuali-
zation. Electricity has had a widespread practical reality since about 1850,^9
while its theoretical interpretation within the core of the research network
has changed several times. In the same way, modern conceptions of the ele-
mentary components of chemistry and physics have changed over the genera-
tions from atoms to electron orbits to successive reorderings of families of
subatomic particles and anti-particles to strings; an examination of the stand-
ard textbooks at intervals of 30 years suggests a pattern of ongoing evolution
and no reason to suppose that today’s entities will be accepted as more than
872 •^ Meta-reflections