About

Michael Gordin is a Professor of History and Associated Faculty in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences and the broader contexts of Russian, European, and American history. Gordin earned his A.B. in 1996 and his Ph.D. in 2001 from Harvard University, and he served at the Harvard Society of Fellows before joining Princeton in 2003. His research encompasses the introduction of science into Russia in the early 18th century, the history of biological warfare in the late Soviet period, and the relationship between Russian literature and science. He has extensively studied Dmitrii I. Mendeleev, authoring a cultural history of Mendeleev in the context of Imperial St. Petersburg, and has contributed to the understanding of nuclear weapons history, including the atomic bombings of Japan and nuclear intelligence during the Cold War. Gordin's work also explores the history of pseudoscience, the role of language in scientific development, and the impact of the Soviet Union's collapse on science. He has authored several books, including 'A Well-Ordered Thing,' 'Five Days in August,' 'Red Cloud at Dawn,' 'The Pseudoscience Wars,' 'How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind,' 'Scientific Babel,' 'Einstein in Bohemia,' and 'On the Fringe.' Currently, he is working on a history of the impact of the Soviet Union's collapse on science and maintains an interest in constructed languages. Gordin teaches courses on the history of modern and contemporary science, as well as seminars on pseudoscience, nuclear history, and the Soviet science system.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Computer Science
• Physics
• Mathematics
• History
• Theology
• Epistemology
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Biology
• Law
• Theoretical physics
• Literature
• Art
• Quantum mechanics

Selected publications

• Lancelot Hogben’s hybrid tongues

  Target International Journal of Translation Studies · 2024-12-31

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  Abstract Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975), a peripatetic and prolific mathematical geneticist and science populariser, occupies a special niche in the history of scientific communication and translation. Not only was he a trenchant observer of the increasing dominance of Global English in scientific publications, he also leveraged his command of the cosmopolitan scientific lexicon to offer an alternative: a constructed language he called ‘Interglossa’. His extensive attention to linguistic evolution and linguistic futures peaked during World War II, particularly as a result of his forced circumnavigation of the globe during the ‘Phoney War’ of 1940. Both political and linguistic disillusionments following the war pushed him inexorably to a grudging reconciliation with some form of English as the basis for scientific (and other) communication.

  PublisherDOI

• Controversy is inevitable

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-04-27

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  T chapter draws more general conclusions from the diversity of fringe doctrines regarding the conduct of mainstream science. Two features are important to understand both the ubiquity of “fringing” and the inevitability of controversies. First, the structure of science in the modern period is adversarial, meaning that every time there is an advance, there is also a doctrine that is discarded. These losing notions are the source of vestigial sciences. Second, science is a very expensive activity, and society has allocated a finite quantity of resources to conduct it. There will always be competition for access to those resources, and therefore scientists must make decisions about which ideas to pursue and which to abandon. This necessarily fringes out some ideas. Several examples are explored: polywater, water memory, cold fusion, and N-Rays, as well as allegations of scientific fraud (a related phenomenon).

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• Preface

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-04-27

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  Extract Pseudoscience is not a real thing. The term is a negative category, always ascribed to somebody else’s beliefs, not to characterize a doctrine one holds dear oneself. People who espouse fringe ideas never think of themselves as “pseudoscientists”; they think they are following the correct scientific doctrine, even if it is not mainstream. In that sense, there is no such thing as pseudoscience, just disagreements about what the right science is. This is a familiar phenomenon. No believer ever thinks she is a “heretic,” for example, or an artist that he produces “bad art.” Those are attacks lobbed by opponents. Yet pseudoscience is also real. The term of abuse is deployed quite frequently, sometimes even about ideas that are at the core of the scientific mainstream, and those labels have consequences. If the reputation of “pseudoscience” solidifies around a particular doctrine, then it is very hard for it to shed the bad reputation. The outcome is plenty of scorn and no legitimacy (or funding) to investigate one’s theories. In this, “pseudoscience” is a lot like “heresy”: if the label sticks, persecution follows.

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• Fighting “establishment” science

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-04-27

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  Some marginalized doctrines fight back against being called pseudosciences by mainstream scientists, or “the establishment.” They do so by creating parallel structures to those common in the sciences: specialized journals, conferences, and social organization. British phrenology in the early nineteenth century was one of the first to attempt this and managed fairly well, considering that the structures of professional science were being created at the same time and place. American creationism has been the most successful, given its superior financial and organizational resources. Other doctrines — cosmic catastrophism, ancient aliens theory, UFOlogy, cryptozoology (such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster) — have also tried this strategy to fight against demonization, with variable degrees of durability.

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• The Russian questions

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-04-27

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  This chapter explores two questions about the phenomenon of pseudoscience: Who is to blame for it, and what can be done about it? Each of these questions has sparked a variety of answers. Some blame has gone to corporations that have funded research designed to muddy the waters of the scientific consensus, a practice sometimes called “denialism,” most commonly associated with the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. Others blame failures of scientific literacy. The conclusion states that some degree of fringe science is inevitable, given the structure of our knowledge system, but also that not all of these doctrines are equally damaging to public health or the environment. Careful analysis can focus the scientific community’s efforts to responding to the more pressing epistemic crises.

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• Acknowledgments

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  This book has been a long time in the making and I have accrued many debts along the way.The first is to Stephen Kotkin, who inspired the questions at the heart of this project.He encouraged me to think big, pushed me to find the devil in the details, and believed

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• Afterword: hidden beauty

  Continuity and Change · 2023-04-28

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  People love a secret, as long as they are in on it. One might even argue that historians are more attracted to secrecy than the average scholar, or average individual, in that the tools we have for unearthing documentation from the past regularly trawl up long-dormant secrets. At one time, someone may have died to preserve this secret; for me, it is lying accessible in an archive. The challenge is not reading the secret – it is crafting an argument and a narrative that would make others care for this once tightly-held confidence. This fascination of access to privileged information, to being (whether licitly or not) in the know, and the rich texture that hidden material provides, partly explains the recurrent historiographical attention to secrecy. Historians get to have both secrecy and transparency at once, at least in many cases where the precious documents survive and are not still locked behind the classificatory walls of national-security states or profit-seeking megacorporations.

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• Vestigial sciences

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-04-27

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  “Vestigial sciences” are those doctrines that were once considered to be legitimate science, but have since fallen out of the mainstream, whether because they came to be considered empirically inadequate, theoretically misguided, or simply no longer relevant. If someone continues to advocate for such ideas after they have been rejected, that individual is frequently deemed a pseudoscientist. Most of the theories today considered pseudosciences have this vestigial quality. Two in particular, that were quite prominent in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, are examined here: astrology and alchemy. Astrology was at one point highly respectable and supported by states; alchemy, by contrast, always had elements of secrecy and disreputability, but was still a candidate for legitimate knowledge. The process of “fringing out,” by which such theories lose their currency, is discussed as a general phenomenon.

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• List of illustrations

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-04-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Subject History of Science and Technology Philosophy of Science Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge Intellectual History Series Very Short Introductions Collection: Very Short Introductions

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• The perfumer before Pasteur <b>Elixir: A Parisian Perfume House and the Quest for the Secret of Life</b> <i>Theresa Levitt</i> Harvard University Press, 2023. 320 pp.

  Science · 2023-04-13

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A historian recounts the odorous origins of the first evidence for molecular structure.

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Frequent coauthors

• Paul Erickson

  Wesleyan University

  18 shared

• Lorraine Daston

  University of Chicago

  18 shared

• Thomas Sturm

  Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats

  18 shared

• Judy L. Klein

  18 shared

• Howard Burton

  University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust

  13 shared

• Rebecca Lemov

  10 shared

• Paul Rebecca

  8 shared

• Karl Hall

  Central European University

  8 shared

Awards & honors

• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2011)
• Guggenheim Fellow