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Gravity's Rainbow is an award winning novel from 1973 and in this Spectrum Radio interview on books, Professor David Mindell from MIT discusses the impact this book had on him and his work. Gravity's Rainbow, which tells the story of the design, manufacture, and use of the German V-2 rockets in World War II, uses rockets as a metaphor for larger issues in the age of large technological systems.
Dr. Mindell, whose own work is in the undersea archeology and the history of technology, enjoyed both the technical detail of the story as well as the symbolic nature of the rocket as the human aspiration to rise above the world. He also likes the aggregate view of technology, that any complex product is the frozen representation of many people's knowledge and skills.
Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and won the National Book Award in 1974.
David A. Mindell is Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, and Professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is founder and director of MIT's "DeepArch" research group in technology, archaeology, and the deep sea. His research interests include the history of automation in the military, the history of electronics and computing, theories of engineering systems, deep ocean robotic archaeology, and the history of space exploration. His book War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor was published in April, 2000 by Johns Hopkins University Press and won the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology for the best book in the field accessible to a broad audience. His second book, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics was published in the Spring of 2002, also by Johns Hopkins. Mindell is currently completing a book, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (MIT Press, 2008). He is also co-leading a 10-year collaborative project with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutional and the Greek Ministry of Culture to explore the deep Aegean sea for ancient and bronze-age shipwrecks using autonomous underwater vehicles.
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