The Birth of Industrial-Geophysical Reason A Historical Epistemology of the Subsurface

Abstract

At the 1937 Annual Meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, a physicist, Lewis Mott-Smith, accused an eccentric and industrious inventor, Frank Rieber, of violating classical wave theory with his new seismic analyzer, the ‘Geo-Sonograph’. Despite these critiques—and despite the limited early successes of geophysical methods in discovering oil—exploration geophysics would come to play a foundational role in the advancement of 20th-century geoscience. This triumph cannot be explained simply as the result of technical efficacy. What also must be examined is how and why these instruments helped cultivate quantitative abstraction as a new epistemic need. In other words, it was not any pre-existing desire to quantify the subsurface that occasioned the adoption of geophysical instruments; rather, the use of geophysical instruments reshaped what about the subsurface was observed and how it needed to be rationalized. This culminated in industrial-geophysical reason: a cognitive structure that prioritized the quantitative analysis of abstract geophysical data to overcome two encroaching limits in oil-finding—the observational limits of geology and the formal-theoretical limits of classical geophysics. A materialist history of oil prospecting can in turn help show how geophysical instruments did not just extend the reach of scientific knowledge underground but reconfigured what counts as a scientific problem in conjunction with the commercial drive to find more oil.

Keywords: History of Geology, History of Geophysics, Subsurface, Oil Prospecting, Historical Epistemology