{"id":10737,"date":"2012-11-10T03:27:20","date_gmt":"2012-11-10T07:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=10737"},"modified":"2012-11-10T03:27:20","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T07:27:20","slug":"book-review-david-cassidys-short-history-of-physics-in-the-american-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2012\/11\/10\/book-review-david-cassidys-short-history-of-physics-in-the-american-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: David Cassidy’s Short History of Physics in the American Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following book review appears<\/a> in Isis<\/em> 103 (September 2012): 614-615.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 2012 by The History of Science Society, and reprinted here according to the guidelines<\/a> of the University of Chicago Press. \u00a0In-text links have been added by the author, and were not included in the original text.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

David C. Cassidy.\u00a0A Short History of Physics in the American Century. (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine.) 211 pp., tables, app., index. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. $29.95 (cloth).<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

William Thomas<\/p>\n

David Cassidy styles this book \u201ca very brief introductory synthesis of the history of twentieth-century American physics for students and the general public.\u201d As such, it \u201cis not intended to offer a new analysis of that history or to argue a newly constructed thesis.\u201d Nor does it \u201cdrift far from the standard, often currently definitive literature on its subject\u2014as far as that literature goes\u201d (p. 5).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This last phrase might be read to suggest that that literature has not come very far since the last such synthesis, Daniel Kevles’s\u00a0The Physicists<\/i>\u00a0(Knopf, 1977). If so, it would not be off the mark. This book begins promisingly enough, with a discussion of the strong connections between physics and industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, from mention of Henry Rowland’s \u201cPlea for Pure Science\u201d<\/a> onward, the narrative is informed by shopworn tensions, such as those between basic and applied research and between scientists’ intellectual independence and their financial dependence. Such blunt tools make for awkward synthesis: the physics community seems to lose and regain its political innocence several times over the course of the century. But, despite decades of industrious research, historians have not effectively established more satisfactory frameworks.<\/p>\n

Like some other recent synthetic histories aimed at nonhistorians, this book also cloaks itself in a discomfiting historiographical mythology<\/a>. Cassidy alleges that scientists’ accounts of their own work are mainly triumphalist narratives informed by a self-interested \u201cideology of pure science\u201d (p. 163). Fortunately, we are told, professional historians can transcend this ideology. (In fact, Paul Forman actually appears\u00a0inside the historical narrative<\/i>\u00a0as an important iconoclast.) But the posture belies the fact that the history here traffics in commonplaces from influential scientists’ journals, such as the\u00a0Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/i>. Moreover, the book fails to escape the clich\u00e9s that often do inhabit scientists’ accounts. Cassidy’s discussions of scientific and technological work mainly rehearse such famous episodes as the development of accelerators, the Standard Model, transistors, and lasers.<\/p>\n

Regrettably, even as a digest of standard accounts, it is difficult to recommend this book over the latest edition<\/a> of\u00a0The Physicists\u00a0<\/i>(Harvard, 1995). New material on the last third of the century and industrial physics is barely wedged into a narrative dominated by familiar stories from the century’s first six decades. Thus, while detailed attention is paid to the biography of Robert Oppenheimer and the history of the Manhattan Project, there is no account of any physics research done in the 1980s. Happily, significant attention is paid throughout to the shifting demographics of the physics community.<\/p>\n

The book’s utility is undermined by indifferent organization and editing. In places the text swings radically back and forth through decades, while sixty pages (of a 169-page book) separate the problem of the infinities in perturbative quantum electrodynamics (QED) from the introduction of renormalization. Despite its brevity, the narrative is repetitive: Spencer Weart is quoted remarking that the physics community no longer resembled a village on page 107 and again on page 138.<\/p>\n

There are also too many contradictions and factual errors. For example, Melba Phillips is described as Oppenheimer’s first doctoral student; two sentences later she joins a group of students working under him. Carl Anderson is depicted as having discovered the positron with Oppenheimer (presumably the \u201cmesotron\u201d discovery is meant). Freeman Dyson’s contributions to QED are portrayed as extending to the strong and weak forces. The Frisch-Peierls memorandum<\/a> is conflated with the MAUD report<\/a>. A \u201cbreeder\u201d reactor is built at Hanford during the war.<\/p>\n

We need more scholarly syntheses along these lines, but collectively we also need to elevate the craftsmanship of the genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following book review appears in Isis 103 (September 2012): 614-615. \u00a9 2012 by The History of Science Society, and reprinted here according to the guidelines of the University of Chicago Press. \u00a0In-text links have been added by the author, and were not included in the original text. David C. Cassidy.\u00a0A Short History of Physics<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Book Review: David Cassidy’s Short History of Physics in the American Century<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,286,298,473,608,681,1063,1161,1364],"class_list":["post-10737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ewp-book-club","tag-carl-anderson","tag-daniel-kevles","tag-david-cassidy","tag-freeman-dyson","tag-henry-rowland","tag-j-robert-oppenheimer","tag-melba-phillips","tag-paul-forman","tag-spencer-weart"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}