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David Bloor is professor emeritus in the sociology of science at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Enigma of the Aerofoil: Rival Theories in Aerodynamics, 1909–1930 and Knowledge and Social Imagery and the coauthor of Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis, all published by the University of Chicago Press.“A fundamental investigation of considerable scholarly importance. No one is better positioned than Bloor to teach us the origins and importance of the attentive and fatigued subject in the Kenneth Craik’s Cambridge Cockpit experiments, a war story that explains why, in Bloor’s words, ‘all the world’s a cockpit and all the men and women merely pilots.’”
- David A. Mindell, author of “The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution”,
“This book tells the fascinating story of research on fatigue from the 1940s to the 1970s (briefly, even up to the 2020s). Although the narrative centers on groundbreaking work in the Cambridge Psychology Department and the role played by an early flight simulator, it also covers important related efforts in the United States and Germany. <i>The Cambridge Cockpit and the Paradoxes of Fatigue, 1940–1977</i> is an astonishing achievement: it manages to be brilliantly erudite and wonderfully accessible in equal measure, and it elegantly cuts across history, sociology, and philosophy of science. Strongly recommended!”
- Martin Kusch, author of “Relativism in the Philosophy of Science”,
During World War II, members of the Cambridge Psychology Laboratory were commissioned to study pilot fatigue. They set up a Spitfire cockpit in the laboratory, turned it into a piece of laboratory apparatus, and carried out a series of important experiments that appeared to dramatically confirm the dangers of fatigue. Historians of psychology are aware of this episode, but the experiments, the events surrounding them, and the scientific reasoning involved have never been studied in detail. By going into the episode in depth, and by looking behind the scenes at archival material, David Bloor offers an analysis that is both original and more penetrating than anything that has been said before on the topic.
Bloor describes the Cockpit experiments themselves before turning to the theoretical interpretation of the results and the intellectual resources that informed how they were viewed. Bloor then explains a major empirical and theoretical challenge to the Cambridge Cockpit work drawn from a field study of landing accidents apparently showing that fatigue-effects were operationally negligible. Bloor delves into the consequences of this challenge, and the Cambridge reaction to it, in the post-war years. The analysis is deepened by comparison with the corresponding wartime work on fatigue carried out both in Germany and the United States. As the author demonstrates, even today the Cambridge Cockpit experiments pose a challenge to the current understanding of pilot fatigue.
Introduction
1. The Cambridge Cockpit
2. A Cryptic Lecture and a Scientific Gamble
3. A Skeleton in the Cupboard?
4. The Landing-Accident Anomaly
5. Flying Neurosis, Radar, and Pavlov’s Dogs
6. Dismantling the Cockpit
7. Was There a German Cockpit?
8. Was There an American Cockpit?
9. A Journey in Retrospect and Prospect
10. Levels, Hierarchies, and the Locus of Control
Summary and Conclusions
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index