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Fun with Wikipedia

I mentioned a while ago that I was thinking of rewriting the Wikipedia page on the History of Physics from scratch. And I did. (Archived copy here, in case you’re reading this post from this blog’s archives). Now, there are a lot of complaints to be made about Wikipedia articles. In the history of science, they can be almost painfully Whiggish. In this case, I felt justified because the prior version of the History of Physics article was not only methodologically suspect, but, really, more or less unreadable, and it was clear that piecemeal amendment would not be a useful path and that no one else was going to undertake the project.

So, if an academically-trained historian is going to just swoop in and do this kind of thing, what ought to be taken into account? I feel Wikipedia is an opportunity not only to correct inadequate views, but to create a resource that can serve as both a primer on a topic, as well as a guide to various levels of literature (popular, scholarly overview, detailed scholarly work, etc…). This can be done, I think, with judicious use of documentation.

I don’t think my take on the history of physics required many references by academic standards, but the Wikipedians can be persnickety about this kind of thing. The Master of Physics Articles on Wikipedia, known as “Headbomb”, reverted my edit earlier this month, because I hadn’t yet put in new documentation and pictures. That’s fixed. I now have used the “Further Reading” section to suggest some general overviews for interested readers, while the “References” section basically serves as a “books about this

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Looking Further Afield

What the heck is this stuff!? — What the!?

It seems like only yesterday that it was time to do the biannual roundup of physics-related articles for the AIP Center for History of Physics newsletter. Last time I did that, I fell privy to Harry Collins’ and Rob Evans’ exciting work in the sociological problem of expertise, and we’re hopefully revisiting that in September. This time, I was prompted to take a broader perspective on things because it struck me just how foreign a lot of what I was looking at was to my historiographical sensibilities. Specifically, I started considering the real need for this blog to look further afield for new ways for it to attack its mission of finding new and better ways to write history. Christopher’s posts will be of interest in this respect, because he spends a lot of time reading intellectual history as well as European and American history, and those perspective will show up as he continues to develop his historiographical world view in this space. My philosophy is: a little bit of an unabashedly good thing demands more.

Setting an agenda for future series of posts, I’ve been thinking about how much my work here is hampered by my own really very limited perspective on science studies from the HSS mainstream. Taking a skeptical

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Primer: Deutsche Physik

Our inaugural post in the Hump-Day History series is a subject that is a touchstone to those who have studied the history of physics, but that does not feature in the top tier of popular knowledge of the history of science. This is a short-lived but stinging moment in the history of physics in Germany from the 1930s known in English as “Aryan physics” but in German as deutsche Physik, or “German physics”. The reason “Aryan” tends to be used is because “deutsche” had a very ethnic connotation that served to distinguish this style of physics from what the proponents of deutsche Physik considered to be “Jewish” physics, by which they meant relativity and quantum mechanics, the subjects that had over the prior two decades catapulted German physics to a clear position at the forefront of the profession.

Philipp Lenard receives an honorary degree from Heidelberg University. Credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection

Deutsche Physik proponents were generally physicists who sought to benefit from the takeover of the Nazi Party in 1933. They were led by Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard (Nobel, 1905) and Johannes Stark (1919). After the Nazis took power, new civil service laws banned most Jews from government service, which included research posts in universities and important institutions like the Kaiser Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institutes. By painting the highly abstract and philosophically unintuitive nature of recent physical theory as characteristically Jewish, Lenard et al attempted to tar non-Jewish physicists who had been a part of the new wave

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Cowboys, Scientists, and Curators

Will has been reminding me of my inactive presence on this blog so I finally decided to get my act together and contribute something more history of science-ish.

Having been inspired by Will’s numerous reviews on the recent Isis from June 2008, I thought I would tackle Jeremy Vetter’s essay (in the same issue) “Cowboys, Scientists, and Fossils,” which underscores several history of science questions about the tensions between local collaborators and experts from the “outside,” including professional collectors, scientists, and museum curators. While American paleontology in the early 20th century is not exactly a specialized interest of mine, it does, however, dovetail into some of the similar challenges faced by European geologists in the early 19th century (some of whom I do study). I did read the work of Robert Kohler a long time ago whose books Lords of the Fly and Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology stimulated my scholarly curiosity about how contestations in the field affected the bigger picture of making science and whose concepts are echoed in Vetter’s ideas about the status of the field site as a place of contentious negotiation. The intervention of

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Announcing: Hump-Day History

Here at Ether Wave Propaganda, we usually tackle obscure topics, which will primarily interest those people familiar with the history of science profession and its literature. Because the role of pop history has become a topic in the blogosphere, and because we’ve now been kindly linked to from some science blogs, starting next Wednesday we’re going to be posting weekly “Hump-Day History Lessons”: accessible vignettes from the history of science to help get regular non-historian visitors through the thick part of the week.

Historians tend to hear simple statements that have great interest to scientists and science enthusiasts, say “Joseph Fourier discovered global warming”, and suddenly, for unclear reasons, we get all excited and start dancing around, chanting bizarre things like “whig! whig! teleological claim!” (On Fourier and his link to climate science, click here). But we’re also interested in refreshing ourselves on the basics, and communicating what we view as “good history” to larger audiences. So, be sure and check in next Wednesday when we’ll start our new experiment with a discussion of “Aryan physics”, a concept pushed by antisemitic Nobel-Prize-winners during the Nazi era.

Isis Round-Up, Pt. 2

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of scholars, including Steven Shapin, Martin Rudwick, Mario Biagioli, and Raine Daston, demonstrated the clear and powerful links between scientific methods of argumentation and the moral economy in which those arguments took place. That is, scientific arguments obey rules of etiquette (initially derived from courtly and gentlemanly culture) that dictated who could make what kinds of claims and in what manner. Turning this mirror away from science and on ourselves in the history biz, it’s worth asking what our moral economy of argumentation looks like. What follows is speculative.

I’d suggest that our moral economy is heavily influenced by the history of science’s location at an absurdly busy crossroads, through which sociology; philosophy; anthropology; art, architecture, literary, and media studies; gender, race, and colonial history; the history of technology; not to mention scientific practice, science journalism, science heritage, and popular science pass. This confluence of fields provides an enormous richness of argumentative style from which historians may draw. But it also presents some

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Isis Round-Up, Pt. 1

In the intro to this last Isis focus section, Jane Maienschein and George Smith wrote that they intended for the section to be “a start for what we hope will be a continuing and lively conversation.” Outside of niche areas, I’m not 100% sure what the last big conversation in our profession was, at least a conversation with more than one side. If there is to be such a conversation, the existential one about the use of our profession is a well-chosen place to begin.

The first problem is: how can such a conversation take place? Ben Cohen at World’s Fair wondered about just this point; John Lynch (who co-wrote the piece on science and education) replied in the comments that there was some thoughts to creating online fora, or maybe an HSS session, but that it seems to be “down to the blogs”. (John also asked the crucial question at Stranger Fruit: who in the history of science is blogging? which seems to have led, among other things, to much higher hit counts back here). Unsurprisingly, I’m a big supporter of the blog option. To me, a blogging community is sort of like a laboratory of culture and methodology. It’s less formal and less final than a journal or a conference. It’s harder to let points drop on account of the fact that any replies will be months-off. It’s more inclusive to any who are interested in participating. It can also support different rules of argumentation (more on this soon).

A community of science blogs took up the Focus section heartily, with discussion revolving primarily around to what extent the history of science can provide valuable context and a sense of motivation to scientific work, especially in scientific education, to help them see science as more than a collection of facts to memorize. See A Blog Around the Clock, “Hopeful Monster” at Chance and Necessity, David Ng at World’s Fair, and Brian Switek at Laelaps, and the comments section in all. All of these basically deal with the need for perspective on what it means to do science,

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Quantum blog tunneling

In quantum mechanics, there’s this phenomenon called quantum tunneling, where a particle behind a barrier can spontaneously reappear on the other side of the barrier in the same way radioactive material can spontaneously emit radiation. While I’ve been away on an informative-but-tiring interview trip, this blog seems to have tunneled into new sectors of the history of science community and the science blogosphere thanks to the recent Isis series.

So, some reflection on the series and a round-up of internet reactions to the Isis Focus Series is forthcoming, but probably not until later this weekend. New visitors, welcome and we hope you stick around.

History in Perspective (Isis Pt. 6)

What I enjoyed most about Zuoyue Wang and Naomi Oreskes’ “History of Science and American Science Policy” is its sense of perspective and frankness about the place of history in science policy-making. They begin with a well-chosen 1986 quote from Richard Neustadt and Ernest R. May from a study on the “uses of history”: “…despite themselves Washington decision-makers actually used history in their decisions … whether they knew it or not.” I think this is true: action is based on tradition and our understanding of decisions made in the past. Therefore, a proper understanding of past events is helpful in making decisions. So, the historian should be actively involved, yes? Wang and Oreskes go on to quote John Heilbron, also from 1986: absolutely, we should “build the channels through which relevant and relevantly packaged research results of historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science and technology may flow to policy makers. … Let us come to the aid of our perplexed bretheren in the sciences.”

Not so fast. While Wang and Oreskes remain upbeat, they urge caution: “opportunities for direct involvement in science policy have remained scarce. Experience further suggests that historians who have taken up the demand have struggled to balance subtlety with clarity, nuanced appraisal with straight talk. Authentic policy-relevant history is not an oxymoron, but it is a challenge.” While it is true that historical lessons are frequently mis-interpreted (Wang presents evidence from his research on scientists who advised the President), the idea of historians of science themselves intervening is not so straight-forward as providing more informed interpretations.

Typically, Wang shows us, whenever historians have intervened in the political process, they have tried to strike an independent stance from both scientists and policymakers, but their testimony is usually called upon to take a side on pre-determined but clashing points of view. For example,

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Historians as Mediators (Isis Pt. 5)

I just didn’t get Katherine Pandora and Karen Rader’s “Science in the Everyday World: Why Perspectives from the History of Science Matter”. I don’t want to be too hard on the article, because I think it really is just a symptom of a malady that’s plaguing our profession, which I’d describe as an unwitting disciplinary arrogance. It’s hard to define, but it relates to us somehow thinking that we are the only people who really think about science and its place in society. Or at least there seems to be an implicit assumption that we’re unusually good at it. And this is common. In my look at the last focus section of Isis, for example, I responded to some of Galison’s questions about science and technology policy and ethics by wondering whether or not historians had any special perspective on the issues he mentioned (see #5, #6, and #10) versus other professions and discplines.

Here Pandora and Rader base their claims on the notion that there is a need to bridge the “scientist/nonscientist” divide, an argument that is pretty much a direct echo of C. P. Snow’s 1959 “two cultures” argument, which was bogus then, and is five times as wrong now. Basically, Pandora and Rader pretend as though “scientists” occasionally leave their “temple” to engage with “modern ‘publics'” (through popular presentations, through museums, and through educational offerings, like “Mr. Science” TV shows), and that this pretty-well unmoderated interchange can be clumsy and could benefit from some “humanistic knowledge”. We historians might have something to say—nay, our work “provides a crucial resource for professional scientists”—concerning public science issues, um, because we’ve

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