The Cambridge Cockpit and the Paradoxes of Fatigue, 1940–1977

“A fundamental investigation of considerable scholarly importance. No one is better positioned than Bloor to teach us the origins and importance of the attentive and fatigued subject in the Kenneth Craik’s Cambridge Cockpit experiments, a war story that explains why, in Bloor’s words, ‘all the world’s a cockpit and all the men and women merely pilots.’” -- David A. Mindell, author of “The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution” “This book tells the fascinating story of research on fatigue from the 1940s to the 1970s (briefly, even up to the 2020s). Although the narrative centers on groundbreaking work in the Cambridge Psychology Department and the role played by an early flight simulator, it also covers important related efforts in the United States and Germany. The Cambridge Cockpit and the Paradoxes of Fatigue, 1940–1977 is an astonishing achievement: it manages to be brilliantly erudite and wonderfully accessible in equal measure, and it elegantly cuts across history, sociology, and philosophy of science. Strongly recommended!” -- Martin Kusch, author of “Relativism in the Philosophy of Science”