Steven Shapin is Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books on the history and sociology of science include Leviathan and the Air-Pump (with Simon Schaffer, 1985), A Social History of Truth (1994), and The Scientific Life (2008).
The invisibility of embedded science is an apparently paradoxical, but reliable, index of the significance of science for everyday life—for government, for commerce, and, not least, for our sense of self.