The knowledge of a given phenomenon that has been acquired from study with a repeatable method or technique; also, often, the methods or techniques themselves (see METHODOLOGY). A bias in usage tends to reserve the term only for practices (and knowledge) insofar as these remain consensually veridical: old, bad, or wrong “science” tends not to be considered “science” in a satisfactory sense. Given that science has come to be conceived as a wholly progressive, accumulative, and auto-obsoleting enterprise, the unease about the scientific status of all past science leads to a number of paradoxes and obscurities (see PROGRESS). Science typically refers to knowledge that is positive, or fact-based, rather than normative, or value-based. Indeed, this conception is of such overwhelming importance that it may be no longer coherent to speak of value-based “knowledge” at all. In the middle ages, science spanned virtually every kind of inquiry then in existence, from grammar, rhetoric, and logic to arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy; in the Renaissance, it narrowed to something like “philosophy” (i.e., the set of principles or axioms from which one could deduce the foundation for inquiry into nature or culture); only in the Enlightenment did science begin to stand for empirical inquiry as such, especially that inquiry which is addressed to subsystems of discrete or pseudo-discrete natural phenomena (as in physics, chemistry, and biology) or cultural phenomena (as in politics and economics). Nevertheless, it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that science became modern (see KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION). Under the watchful eye of the National Science Foundation, science has grown to military-industrial maturity. In order to understand why the NSF and the marketplace are so entwined, one must consider the origins of the NSF itself. It emerged from the Office of Scientific Research and Development (1941–47), which mobilized scientists (within and without the academy) for the production of weapons during the Second World War. The OSRD’s chief triumph was an invention called the proximity fuse: unlike earlier iterations of the same device, the proximity fuse did not detonate upon colliding with the earth (the contact fuse), or upon the expiration of an allotted time (the timed fuse), but upon coming suitably close to its target. Declassified documents attest that the efforts of the OSRD were instrumental in the Battle of Britain. With this newfound capacity to detonate explosives in the mere vicinity of inflight objects, the vulnerable coalition demonstrated advanced accuracy and lethality in intercepting oncoming planes and rockets.
It was inevitable that the United States would marshal the extraordinary success of wartime invention and prioritize scientific research in the postwar period. Vannevar Bush, interwar director of the OSRD, was promoted president of the fledgling National Science Foundation in 1950; his chief objective was to design an agency that would be autonomous within the federal government. Bush’s NSF would be unbeholden to the whims of a populace that suffered on occasion from bouts of anti-war sentiment: the prerogative of experts in fields like physics and chemistry (rather than lawmakers or voters), the NSF was for a time able to research the “pure” science that mattered so much to Bush. As proselytized in his plan, Science—The Endless Frontier, the NSF would promote “disinterest” in the name of scientific progress, and it would divide that project into three categories: basic research, applied research, and development. But because the NSF was decentralized, it encouraged competition for access to its considerable largesse. In order to win government contracts, businesses and universities had to build and maintain cutting-edge technology, hire the best scientists, and attract the brightest students. As Bush wrote in the preface to a history of the OSRD, “The contracting system which it developed […] brought to being a pattern of administration which aptly met a new and unique need and which stands as a richly suggestive guide for other undertakings.” And it was suggestive indeed: when college radicalism tested the will of the private and public sectors in the late 1960s and early 70s, it was the departments closely affiliated with the NSF (especially physics and chemistry) that sustained administrative ties to the military-industral complex; and when tax dollars vanished amid prolonged stagnation in the mid-70s, it was those same departments that proffered a template for the university to survive in the globalized economy. That template was simple: the NSF would approach university scientists with problems that emerged from the marketplace and subsidize their basic research in hopes that it would lead to applications that industrial labs and technology firms could monetize. Thanks to this private-public monopoly on scientific research, society enjoys superconductivity, optoelectronics, and deep-sea drilling. This successful “pattern of administration,” however, was so successful that the NSF gradually dissolved into yet another organ of late capitalism. Max Weber believed that science was the vocation, peculiar to modernity, that did not know the meaning of the problems it set for itself. Weber’s hypothesis still holds, with this exception: science no longer sets them.