Science in the making

Bruno Latour’s Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society is built around the insight that science is a Janus, one face “ready-made science” with its apparently closed black boxes and the other the face of “science in the making” where we see how boxes get closed, or almost closed. He describes the procedure of his book by imagining a comic strip:

“We start with a textbook sentence which is devoid of any trace of fabrication, construction or ownership; we then put it in quotation marks, and surround it with a bubble, place it in the mouth of someone who speaks; then we add to this speaking character another character to whom it is speaking; then we place all of them in a specific situation, somewhere in time and space, surrounded by equipment, machines, colleagues; then when the controversy heats up a bit we look at where the disputing people go and what sort of new elements they fetch, recruit or seduce in order to convince their colleagues; then, we see how the people being convinced stop discussing with one another; situations, localisations, even people start being erased; on the last picture we see a new sentence, without any quotation marks, written in a text book similar to the first one we started with in the first picture.”

This is the process of “science in the making,” moving toward the status of “ready-made science.”