Research
Below are just a few of the research projects I've worked on or been working on. Some of them have been turned into papers to be delivered at workshops or conferences. The descriptions and images are just meant to give them a little more context than their titles give alone, and should not necessarily be taken as perfect representations of the paper contents or my finalized thoughts on any of these topics. They are in roughly chronological order, with the most recent work at top (though I return to old projects regularly). This is not an exhaustive list and does not include papers that are still in their first drafts. Information about my in-progress dissertation, Knowledge and the bomb, can be found here.
|
|
"Patenting the bomb: Nuclear weapons, intellectual property, and technological control."
The Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons during World War II, was not only one of the largest governmental research and development endeavors of all time, it also included one of the largest and most aggressive patenting programs of all time. Thousands of inventions were reviewed for potential patentability by a large staff of project lawyers, and in the end patents were filed in 493 different subject fields covering everything "from the ore as mined to the atomic bomb," and the program was aggressively supported and championed by such top-level players as Vannevar Bush, General Leslie Groves, and even Franklin D. Roosevelt. But why patent the atomic bomb in the first place? Aren't patents supposed to be openly viewable, and aren't nuclear weapons supposed to be kept secret? Answering the basic questions about this long-neglected part of Manhattan Project history requires a careful look at the wartime patenting practices as well as, I argue, a re-thinking of the inherent openness of patents and inherent secrecy of nuclear weapons.
Top and middle: Images from "Low impedance switch" by Donald Hornig, U.S. Patent 3,956,658, application filed in 1945 and kept in secret until it was granted in 1976. It describes a firing switch for an implosion-style nuclear weapon. Bottom: Image from "Pressure sensitive switch" by Alan Ayers, U.S. Patent #3,358,605 (filed 1946, granted 1967), which shows the distinctive harness of the Trinity/Nagasaki bombs. The patent is for the barometric arming switch used in the "Fat Man" weapon. |
  
|
|
|
"Drawing blood: Cartographic representations of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Scientists have been attempting to find useful ways to represent graphically the concept of race since at least the early 19th century, though most of the methods attempted—skulls, blood, and color—have been extensively criticized and many of them abandoned completely. But cartographic representation of human difference have been a staple of scientific and pseudoscientific literature on race from the 1850s through the present. This paper looks at the ways in which different conceptions of "race" are expressed visually as maps, the varieties of methodologies and aesthetic approaches used, and the connection between "race" and geographical "space" from the 1870s to the 1990s in order to demonstrate the interplay of visual style and intuitive theories in these icons of 19th and 20th century racial science.
Top: "Map of the Distribution of the Principal Modifications of Mankind" by Thomas H. Huxley, 1870. Bottom: Computer-generated map of human genetic diversity by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, et al, 1994. Despite being separated by over a century and being created with radically different visual methods and in very different ideological and scientific contexts, the two maps bear an uncanny similarity to each other. |
  |
|
|
"A certain uncertainty: Random number generation from Karl Pearson to the Monte Carlo method."
Most narratives about the history of statistics view it as being fundamentally defined by a bringing of order to a natural world which appears disorderly to the human eye. One activity which specifically went against this trend, though, was the attempt to generate "randomness," usually for the purposes of statistical experimentation or simulation. This paper traces out the ways in which "randomness" moved from being a vaguely defined intuitive concept into a statistical tool, primarily through the creation and criticism of lists of "random" digits, in the form of three distinct phases of thought about "randomness" over the mid- to late-twentieth century. In the first, a list of "random" digits was created in 1927 under the auspices of Karl Pearson by selecting an appropriately "random" method of number generation. Their claims to being "random" were judged by their performance in certain statistical experiments. In the second, coming at the end of the 1930s, "randomness" became more instrumental: the lists were still created using a "random" method, but their veracity was checked by means of statistical tests specifically created to evaluate the "randomness" of the sample. The last phase, coming in the mid-1940s and eventually dominating the actual practice of creating "random" digits, was that of pseudo-randomness (and later, quasi-randomness), by which the creation of the "random" digits could be regulated to entirely deterministic algorithms so long as they could be validated by ever more complicated tests for "randomness."
Top: Detail of a page from L.H.C. Tippett's Random Sampling Numbers (1927), the first published list of "random" digits, created under the guidance of Karl Pearson. If you look closely, you can see that they were written in by hand. Bottom: Detail of a page from the RAND Corporation's A Million Random Digits and 100,000 Normal Deviates (1955), the last major list of "random" digits created without the use of pseudo-random algorithms.
|
  |
|
|
"Diagrams of destruction: Secrecy, style, and the drawing of nuclear weapons."
Ever since their dramatic and very public debut, nuclear weapons have been symbols of military and political power, and part of this power has been reinforced by the alleged secrecy of their methods of production, their individual mechanisms, and their designs. But the few "official" depictions of their internal workings, the "physics package" which arranges their fission and fusion reactions, have been tight-lipped, relegating the majority of all image-making to the private sector, outside the circle of "classification." Attempts to graphically depict the internal mechanisms of nuclear weapons have been fraught with epistemological anxiety, with no possibility of recourse to "the thing itself," and yet held forth the promise of understanding "secret" and forbidden knowledge. No other technical artifact has had quite this amount of power and uncertainty in the same space. This paper explores the history of diagrams of nuclear weapons as a lens through which to understand the unique epistemological problems created by classification and secrecy, and the intersections of power and knowledge in visual representation and visual tropes that occur with such literally and figuratively explosive subject matter, with the hope of shedding light on how those of us "outside the fence" of classification interact with forbidden knowledge.
Top: Drawing of the "atomic bomb itself" by David Greenglass, entered into evidence against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 and the first diagram of an implosion bomb ever declassified. Bottom: Detail of a diagram of the "Fat Man" nuclear weapon drawn by Mike Wagnon and included in Chuck Hansen's U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History (1988). Wagnon, in explaining to me how he and Hansen created the diagram, explained that the image and other similar ones in the book "advertise an accuracy they do not have."
|
  |
|
|
"The organization of compulsory sterilization in California, 1909-1951."
Between 1907 and the early 1960s, over 65,000 developmentally disabled and mentally ill patients were sterilized in the United States under state compulsory sterilization laws. California sterilized by far the most of any participating state, performing almost one third of the total sterilization operations in the entire country. Generally this has been understood within the context of the history of eugenics, the attempt to use the science of heredity to justify often coercive policies to increase the number of the designated "fit" in the population and decrease the number of "unfit." Much of the work on this subject focuses primarily on the ideology of sterilization, looking towards prominent eugenicists who have left the most visible historical record. In contrast to this, my work attempts to re-locate the sterilization practices within their institutional framework, looking closer at the ways in which the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure of the state mental hospitals shaped sterilization practices in California (especially by contrast to other states). This approach helps to bring satisfactory answers to the long-standing questions of why California was so significantly more enthusiastic about sterilization than other U.S. states, why California's sterilization rates abruptly dropped to almost nothing in the early 1950s without any obvious reason, and a more comprehensive understanding of the exact relation of the California sterilization program to the sterilization programs of Nazi Germany, to which they are often directly compared in ideology but not in practice.
Top: A postcard of Stockton State Hospital, postmarked 1908, the year that California's first sterilization law came into effect (but still two years before they would start sterilizing at Stockton, which would come to be the second-largest site of sterilization in the state). Middle: Dr. Frederick Winslow Hatch, Jr., Secretary of the California State Lunacy Commission, and later General Superintendent of State Hospitals, who helped to draft California's first compulsory sterilization law in 1909. Bottom: A detail from the California standardized sterilization form, showing some of the criteria under which state hospital patients could be sterilized by the late 1940s: mental disease thought to be inherited, "feeble-mindedness," "perversion," or "disease of a syphilitic nature." The detail also shows the bureaucratic banality which surrounded such issues as whether or not the patient had given consent for the sterilization procedure.
|
  
|
|
|
