Colloquium: When History is too Important to be Left to Historians

This lecture uses the biography of Cold warrior and famous physicist John Wheeler to examine a series of crises of the Cold War US state and how they contributed to 1) the field of quantum technologies 2) the fields of history and philosophy of science, apart from history and philosophy proper and 3) the remaking of US scientific institutions in the subsequent two decades. It will first discuss the Cold War status quo, then the crises that emerged from the mid-60s to the 1970s. The responses to these crises paved the way for our present set of techno-economic ideologies and infrastructures. They force physicists like Wheeler to imagine physics and reality (with implications for how they imagine the past, history, and future). The crises also prompt the profession to reimagine the role of physics in politics, the economy, technology (especially computing), and history. 

These crises were experienced as a profound rupture by physicists and eventually a broader swath of elites. For physicists like Wheeler, this feeling of rupture inaugurated a new interest in history and in discovering ways of stabilizing and predicting the future, e.g., laws of techno-economic development. High tech’s ascendence reinforced the sense of rupture and rearranged power and produced new elite networks into which old elites like Wheeler were injected. This all led to a reimagining of the role of certain technologies as world historical i.e., the birth of a new progressivist-developmental ideology (e.g., Moore’s Law). Imagined quantum technologies are a solution to these crises and an articulation of the responses to them. They succeed at getting long-term funding because they fit neatly within the new ideology their proponents helped craft.

Susannah Glickman is an assistant professor of history at Stony Brook University. Glickman received her PhD in history from Columbia University in 2023. Her dissertation, titled Histories, Tech, and a New Central Planning, concerned how the politico-economic category of ‘tech’ demands the production of speculative institutions, narratives, histories and ideologies. Her research and teaching focus on the history and political economy of computation and information through the transformations of the Cold War state into the post-Cold War state.

She also writes about risk and uncertainty in other fields (for example, in the history of economics). Her current book project examines the infrastructures which make ever-improving semiconductors and quantum technologies possible historically, with particular attention to how ideology and other kinds of narratives get translated into policy and granular practices, and how reciprocally those material practices get translated back into ideology. She has a background in mathematics and anthropology and work between the fields of science and technology studies and history, mixing archival and oral history methods. Since graduating, Glickman has published widely for publications such as The American Prospect, AI Now, Phenomenal World, and The New York Review of Books.