Science's imagined pasts

Science entails history-writing: scientists are continuously engaged in creating “imagined pasts” for their own specialisms, both on the small scale of the ubiquitous literature-review, and on a much broader scale. This aspect of science has been considered in very different ways in decades-old, yet largely neglected, contributions by Kuhn, Brannigan, and Schaffer. Inspired by these pieces and by the missing dialogue between them, I argue that their concealment is itself an instance, on the broadest possible scale, of the power of “imagined pasts” – in this case the imagined continuity, inscribed in the very name of our discipline, between Newton and ourselves.