Shifting Perspectives: Holography and the Emergence of Technical Communities

Abstract

In November 1964, a bemused magazine journalist recorded this scene in a crowded Boston hotel suite:A few dozen normally sedate scientists and engineers were playing with a toy locomotive, a toy train-conductor and other such items.The train wasn't really there at all.But if you stood in exactly the right place and looked into a piece of equipment you would have seen it, real as life.The toys had been "reconstructed" by a technique that looks simple, yet is one of the most sophisticated developments in modern science.The "reconstruction" was done with a gas laser made by Perkin-Elmer Corp., and a "hologram," a special photographic plate made by researchers at the University of Michigan. 1 The hotel gathering mirrored the surprise of optical specialists at a remarkable paper given at a conference in Washington, D.C., eight months earlier.As the paper's coauthor, Emmett Leith, recalled of that first demonstration: "There was a big exodus of people from the meeting room. . . .We went up and found a line that stretched down the hall as far as you could see.They would look at the hologram, and even though most of them were optical scientists, they did not understand what was going on.They assumed it was Dr. Johnston is senior lecturer in science studies at the University of Glasgow Crichton Campus.He acknowledges with gratitude the financial support of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland

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