David Bloor, <i>The Cambridge Cockpit and the Paradoxes of Fatigue, 1940–1977</i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. Pp. 320. ISBN 978-0-226-84234-9. $35.00 (paperback).

A founding figure of the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge, he shaped how a generation of scholars think about the social dimensions of science.In this new work, Bloor offers a meticulous study of pilot fatigue research conducted at the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory during and after the Second World War.The result is a book that sits comfortably alongside his earlier The Enigma of the Aerofoil (2011) in combining technical detail, archival depth and theoretical sophistication.The story begins in 1940, when Frederic Bartlett and his gifted young colleague Kenneth Craik installed a decommissioned Spitfire cockpit in the Cambridge psychology laboratory.They modified their "Cambridge cockpit" into a sophisticated flight simulator to study how fatigue affected pilot performance during long sorties.Using real RAF pilots as test subjects, they ran a series of experiments with their novel apparatus that appeared to demonstrate significant fatigue effects on skilled action.Yet, as Bloor shows, this apparently straightforward conclusion concealed theoretical gambles, interpretive puzzles and an uncomfortable anomaly that would shape British experimental psychology for decades.Bloor's reconstruction of the Cambridge experiments is exemplary.Drawing on previously unexploited archival material, he argues that Bartlett interpreted his fatigue results through the framework of the Victorian neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, whose hierarchical model of the nervous system held that higher centers normally inhibit lower ones.Fatigue, Bartlett argued, affected not the execution of skilled actions but their timing: a claim about the locus of control within a complex system.This theoretical commitment shaped how the Cambridge group designed their experiments, collected their data, and interpreted their results.The heart of the book is structured around a tension that emerged between the experimental findings and their practical relevance: what Bloor calls the 'landing-accident anomaly'.This arose because, contrary to the laboratory findings that emphasized the important impact of fatigue, field data from Bomber Command on actual landing accidents appeared to show that fatigue effects were actually operationally negligible.This empirical inconsistency, which proved remarkably resistant to resolution both during and after the war, works as the book's analytic hinge.It gives rise to what Bloor terms a series of 'paradoxes', wherein fatigue repeatedly behaved in ways that inverted the expectations that justified its study.