Matthew Soleiman

In the early to mid-1960s, Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed gate control theory, the most enduring theory of pain of the twentieth century. Challenging the notion of pain as a pure sensation of injury, Melzack and Wall refigured bodily experience as a dynamic state of the entire nervous system, including the higher levels of the brain. Within a decade, their neurophysiological model had become the conceptual foundation for the burgeoning and multidisciplinary field of pain medicine. This essay excavates the conditions of possibility for the invention of gate control theory. It shows how two intellectual cultures emerging across the postwar neuro and psy disciplines—namely, cognitivism and cybernetics—converged in a holistic understanding of patients’ reported experiences. In reframing gate control theory, this story reveals how postwar scientists were able to construct a vision of an integrated, post-Cartesian self.

Science is remarkably reliable. It puts people on the moon, performs laser eye surgery, tells us about ancient civilisations and species, and predicts the future of our climate. What underwrites this reliability? This book argues that the standard answers—the scientific method, rigour, and objectivity—are insufficient for the job. Here we propose a new model of science that places its products front and centre. This is the ‘Tangle of Science’. In this book we show how any reliable piece of science is underpinned by a vast, diverse, and thick network of other scientific products. In doing so we bring back into focus areas of science that have been long neglected, emphasising how every product, from the screws that hold the space shuttle together to ways of measuring the consumer price index to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, work together to support results we can trust.