In the aftermath of the English Civil War, as people were groping for new forms of political order, Robert Boyle built an air-pump to do exper-iments. Does the story of Roundheads and Restoration have something to do with the origins of experimental sci-ence? Schaffer and Shapin believed it does. Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that "solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order." Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.

史蒂文·夏平（Steven Shapin,1943-），当代著名科学知识社会学家、科学史家。爱丁堡学派的主要成员之一。历任英国爱丁堡大学科学研究部讲师、高级讲师，加州大学圣地亚哥分校社会学教授，哈佛大学科学史教授。代表作有《利维坦与空气泵：霍布斯、玻意耳与实验生活》（1985）、《真理的社会史：十七世纪英格兰的文明与科学》（1994）以及《科学革命》（1996）。

西蒙·谢弗（Simon Schaffer, 1955-），剑桥大学科学史与科学哲学教授，剑桥大学达尔文学院研究员，曾执教于伦敦大学帝国理工学院、加州大学洛杉矶分校，合著有《利用实验：对自然科学的研究》（1989）、《启蒙欧洲的科学》（1999）等。