Lorraine Daston is director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and a visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. Her many books, authored, coauthored, and edited, include Objectivity (with Peter Galison, 2007), How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (with Paul Erickson et al., 2014), and Science in the Archives (2016). This essay is adapted from one part of her Page-Barbour Lectures, delivered at the University of Virginia in 2016.
This was the nightmare of scientific progress: The truths of today would become the falsehoods—or at least the errors—of tomorrow.