Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate

The scientific community has become a bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of climate change and a pandemic. This is due to the creation of two enormous projects, the Carte du Ciel and the International Cloud Atlas, which allowed for intergovernmental collaboration and global observation networks. Lorraine Daston's book Rivals offers a fascinating and lively study of successful and unsuccessful scientific collaborations.

Format: Unspecified
Length: 160 pages
Publication date: 01 December 2023
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports

The scientific community has emerged as a bastion of consensus and concerted action, particularly in response to two global crises: catastrophic climate change and a deadly pandemic. How did this community come into existence, and why does it function so effectively?

Rivals: A Brief History of Scientific Collaboration from the Late Seventeenth to the Early Twenty-First Centuries is an attempt to answer these questions. The book explores the creation of two massive projects, the Carte du Ciel (the great star map) and the International Cloud Atlas, pioneered by the World Meteorological Organization after World War II. These new models of intergovernmental collaboration and global observation networks would later enable the mounting evidence of planetary phenomena like climate change to be possible.

Drawing upon original documents stored in Paris, Geneva, and Uppsala, historian of science Lorraine Daston offers a fascinating and lively study of successful and unsuccessful scientific collaborations. Rivals is indispensable as both history and guidance, providing valuable insights into the dynamics of scientific collaboration and its impact on our understanding of the world.

Dimension: 191 x 127 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9798987053560