Many of the most transformative scientific and technological advancements of the 20th century – nuclear fission, radar, space travel, and even the microwave oven – were the result of war or preparations for war.
What can we learn from this history in 2021? What can past technologies developed during wartime – like the use of early computational systems in the Vietnam War – teach us about the battlefield applications of new and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence? And with nationalism and militarism once again becoming powerful forces, clashing with the notion of a collaborative international scientific community, how can scientists resist the militarization of peaceful technologies?
Join Perry World House for this edition of The World Today, as Susan Lindee, the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science discusses her new book, Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War to answer these questions and more.
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SPEAKER
M. Susan Lindee is the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Lindee has been Visiting Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Visiting Professor, Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation (IDEC), Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan; Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences; Department Chair, and Chair of the Board of the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, which successfully matched its NEH challenge grant under her chairmanship and which has a new endowment. She is Diversity Search Adviser for the Social Sciences in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences. In November 2017 she was Ship’s Historian for a Lindblad Cruise of the Galapagos Islands, and she returned to the Galapagos in June 2019 to present lectures as a participant in Penn’s Galapagos Alliance. Her new book, Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War, appeared from Harvard University Press in Fall 2020. Her new edited volume with Warwick Anderson, “Pacific Biologies: How Humans Become Genetic,” appeared in December 2020 in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences.
