Science & Society
The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America.
by Daniel J. Kevles.
Knopf. 489 pp. $15.95.
Daniel J. Kevles here provides the first general account of the role of physicists in American society from the period following the Civil War to the present. In addition to covering the development of the actual subject matter of physics over a century of research effort, the author describes the institutional structures which have evolved to organize that effort and analyzes the relation of physicists themselves to the larger society.
In the post-Civil War years, practicing physicists were a rarity in the United States, and the physics generally practiced was of an unimaginative, fact-gathering nature, inferior to the sophisticated mathematical science which had evolved in Europe. Only a very small number of Americans went to college in those days, and the few who did were given minimal exposure to scientific subjects. As the century progressed, however, a more professional spirit emerged, one more attuned to the idea of the university as an institution devoted to the advancement of knowledge. This approach led in 1876 to the founding of Johns Hopkins University, the first institution designed primarily with graduate education in mind. Henry A. Rowland, the most distinguished figure in 19th-century American physics, was appointed to the physics chair at the university. Rowland enunciated a doctrine of the worth of pure science, forthrightly endorsing the study of physics for its own sake.
Such a position struck a strange note in an America whose intellectual hero was Thomas A. Edison, an unschooled technological innovator of genius who developed inventions of the utmost practicality while boasting of his ignorance of mathematics. Yet a growing industrial sector, typified by the new electric-utility industry in which Edison himself played a founding role, was in fact demanding skills of its new engineers which required a formal grounding in physics rather than mere mechanical aptitude of the Edison variety. Even those who did not share Rowland’s purist mentality came increasingly to recognize the advantages of a scientific education.
Among this group were many who stood to benefit from a growing federal research establishment, which by now included the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Weather Service. Although these agencies were officially charged with strictly utilitarian ends, the scientists employed in them were able to perform basic scientific research without being called upon to justify themselves publicly—at least until the 1890’s, when a congressional coalition of anti-intellectual Populists and parsimonious conservatives decimated the federal research establishment and the scientists remaining were given orders not to indulge in research efforts other than of a strictly functional nature.
With the turn of the century, physics revived. The demands of industry for reliable standards resulted in the setting up of the National Bureau of Standards which, under Samuel W. Stratton, a physicist with considerable political flair, won for itself a constituency embracing both industry and consumers outraged at the proliferation of shoddy and misrepresented products. Industry too was establishing laboratories of its own, mostly to carry out applied research; some, however, notably the Bell Telephone Laboratories, would also develop into centers of basic research.
The growing population of physicists soon formed its own organization, the American Physical Society, and physicists were also represented prominently in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in the National Academy of Sciences. In addition, a number of Americans reached the forefront of world physics, including Albert Michelson, who won the 1907 Nobel Prize for his precise measurements of the velocity of light; Robert Millikan, who was later to win a Nobel Prize (in 1923) for his determination of the charge on the electron; and J. Willard Gibbs, who produced a highly original body of fundamental work in statistical mechanics.
World War I gave physicists an opportunity to demonstrate their usefulness to the nation, particularly in the development of sonic-detection devices to locate enemy submarines and artillery. The success of the professionals in this endeavor, especially when contrasted with the insignificant results achieved by a technical advisory group led by the revered Edison himself, encouraged the armed services to set up their own laboratories after the war. But scientists in general were not attracted by the prospects of working under direct military command.
In the 1920’s, American physics began the transition from adolescence to maturity. While society paid greater attention to technological inventions than to revolutionary developments in physical theory (even though the visiting Einstein was given movie-star treatment), a growing strength was developing in basic physics. Although ambitious and successful students still found it valuable to spend a period of study in Europe, most of the new Ph.D.’s were American-trained. By the 1930’s, American physics began to lead the world as native talent, both experimental (I. I. Rabi, Ernest O. Lawrence) and theoretical (J. Robert Oppenheimer, J. H. Van Vleck), was joined by a significant number of European refugees of the highest distinction, including Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, and Eugene Wigner.
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Thus was the groundwork laid for the massive efforts of World War II. Under the leadership of Vannevar Bush, a well-placed electrical engineer from MIT, the Office of Scientific Research and Development was established to coordinate the scientific contribution to the war effort. Physics played a major role in two vital wartime projects. The origins, performance, and aftermath of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, are well known. A lesser known but equally important project took place at the MIT Radiation Laboratory: the development of radar. While the advanced U.S. microwave radar equipment which was developed at MIT came too late to be of service in the defense of Britain against the German bomber offensive, it proved invaluable for anti-submarine warfare. Within a few months, the U-boat fleet, which had been operating with virtual impunity close to the U.S. coastline, was driven hundreds of miles away into the Atlantic. As one scientist expressed it: “The bomb only ended the war. Radar won it.”
After the war, the veterans of Cambridge and Los Alamos enjoyed a new status. The public was vividly aware of what science had achieved, and the advice of leading physicists was sought everywhere, particularly on questions of national security. Their newfound position at the head of the academic pecking order also enabled physicists to obtain a greater share of federal funding than other scientists. A large proportion of these funds were provided by the military—in particular, by the Office of Naval Research—yet were not earmarked for research on military needs, a fact which no doubt contributed to the complacency of the scientific community in accepting all this money. There was a general reluctance to ask awkward questions or to upset the arrangement by which esoteric research, involving the construction and use of massive and expensive machinery, was supported without the need for extensive public debate.
As a result perhaps of a bad conscience over the historically unprecedented affluence which the profession enjoyed until the mid-1960’s, physicists were unprepared to defend themselves or to protest effectively when government funds for research decreased abruptly in the Vietnam era. Today, even though a shortage of domestically produced energy suggests a powerful need for new research programs, the tap remains relatively closed. This fact, together with widespread public disillusion with science on the one hand, and the steadily increasing level of complexity and abstraction in theoretical physics on the other hand, has made physics less attractive to new students, so that right now the discipline appears to be living off its past capital.
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Kevles presents this multifaceted story with a wealth of illustrative detail. The reader is given a generally fascinating account of how physicists have actually gone about their tasks in a century of rapid change and in a society which has been sometimes adulatory of them, more often unsympathetic, and almost always uncomprehending of what it is they do. Perhaps of greatest interest are the individual biographical sketches, which reveal the diversity of personality types present among physicists. The hyper-intellectual J. Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, is captured in an atypical mood of tortured agony, doubting his ability to master quantum mechanics, while the master cyclotron builder, Lawrence, is seen rejecting an opportunity to join the prestigious Princeton faculty because his personal hunger for students is larger than the entire Princeton graduate school.
The one disappointment in the book is its failure to speculate about the sources of the differential appeal of physics. While we are supplied with statistical data about the fractions of Jews, Catholics, blacks, and women in the profession, little in the way of analysis is offered beyond tired generalizations—Jews have an intellectual tradition and also have suffered from anti-Semitism, women have been discouraged from studying science, Catholics until recently have been educated by an Irish-dominated priesthood with a siege mentality, etc. Similarly, in discussing the status appeal of physics, Kevles shows how the profession provided a route for bright boys to move upward in society, often through marriage to girls who became accessible to them because of their new status as scientists, and retails some horror stories of discrimination against women, but does not at all go into the social-psychological roots of the appeal of physics itself. What, for example, makes a person choose to study physics rather than mathematics or engineering?
The study of physics fills an intellectual need for a small but highly motivated group of persons. But because the truth of the perceptions arrived at by physicists has to be confirmed by testing and observation in the real world, it is an intellectual pursuit with potentially very large consequences for all the rest of us. In practice, a bargain has had to be struck between those engaging in research and experimentation and those who stand either to benefit or to suffer from the result of that research—which is to say, between physicists and society. Kevles appears to believe that this bargain has certain Faustian elements to it, and that, in allowing their work to be applied as it sometime has been, physicists have given up their souls. Yet on the evidence of his own book, it would be fairer to conclude that both parties to the deal have gotten exactly what they bargained for, and both have in fact done rather well.
