Physics Laboratories and the Victorian Country House

Abstract

In a culture of science parks and the green field sites of sunrise industries, it seems apt to consider laboratories’ pastoral settings. Scholarly pastoralism has a complex history. Historians have well charted the shift from the urban, urbane scholars of medieval universities to the courtly, courteous humanists of the Renaissance campagna (Le Goff, 1993: 161–6); analysed the imagery of solitude in the architecture of the astronomical revolution and in the sociability of early modern natural philosophy (Hannaway, 1986; Shapin, 1991); and pointed to the well-populated retreats where savants secluded themselves during the Terror (Outram, 1983). The tell-tale term ‘campus’ beloved of academic planners is, in its scholarly sense, a relatively recent, eighteenth-century, coinage (Turner, 1984: 21). The putatively tranquil and remote sites of contemporary physics include such places as the Marshall Islands atoll stocked with hydrophones, radar and sensors where missile performance has been tested by US military scientists since the early 1960s (Mackenzie, 1990: 347–8). Sharon Traweek observes that ‘almost all of the high energy physics national laboratories in the United States... have lovely settings‘. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center incorporates ‘a carefully landscaped approximation of the surrounding natural environment.... By creating an English green lawn in an environment of golden dry savannahs’, she claims, ‘the lab demonstrates the authority of its own vision of nature’ (Traweek, 1988: 18–24).

A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958)