STS3301 Final essay

December, 2009, for STS 3301.

On the sand storm of change to a traditionalist

A breath of fresh air,
to a traditionalist,
may seem a simoom.

On the necessity of fresh air through education

That aspiration
in science education
lays the foundations.

Michael Scott, fictional regional manager in NBC's "The Office," alluding to the US Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1975, http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm , on change

New ideas are fine
but they are also illegal
because they are a form of ageism.

Position to argue

Studying the most important natural philosophers and physicists of the modern era has taught us some things about training, although there are limits to what history has shown us and could possibly show us:

1. We have seen that a fruitful science has required certain qualities in science education, including foresight, interdisciplinary work, care and precision, confidence-building, and social mentoring. History offers examples of cases where any of these have been lacking.
2. The limit to studying history of training has been partly due to preferences and partly due to evidential limits. Historians, at least in what I've read so far, largely have not as rigorously shown how scientists are trained to act as they've shown how scientists work. While I begin to uncover how the historian can identify good or bad training in this essay, to ask whether historians can comprehensively critique education would require more research on education.
3. The structure of raising trainees in physics has been developed as a limited meritocracy, maintaining hierarchies but opening and widening pathways to physics for trainees.
4. The tension between maintaining traditional power and creating novel power has allowed students to best their trainers. In such power struggles, either a normal science us usurped by its progeny, or a science has multiplied its effects through alliances with other powers. Decapitation or capitalization happens; these are the noteworthy happenings in history. Excessive recapitulation is not. Scientific advancement may or may not mean an incommensurable paradigm shift requiring a statement of falsification or redaction of an item in a textbook, as posited by Kuhn.<bibref>Kuhn:1962</bibref> Either way, the normal science or the paradigm is established both in the content and in the training.
5. When leaving social issues out of the physics curriculum, insisting only on the one-way street of inserting physics issues into social philosophy, physicists have left something important and beneficial out of their curriculum.

The most important and basic lesson of this essay is that training physicists is part of directing physics. This is a lesson both for physicists and for historians.

How can historians study training in science?

What have we learned about training?

Instead of looking at methods, the traditional focus of physics education research, I will focus on what we've learned about the content in training. [why these selections?]

In his Leipzig address of 1900, Ludwig Boltzmann expresses his sense of introductory physics as a traditionally decorated entry hall.<bibref>McGuiness:1974</bibref> He depicts "a vast and imposing edifice of theoretical physics" as having a gate of "analytical mechanics" to step through to get there. In my mind he creates a picture of a narrowing of possibilities, a narrow hall, before students are allowed into the widening tabernacle of advanced physics. That widening tabernacle, based more on empiricism and statistics is leaving mechanistic over-interpretation with the servants at the entrance, yet keeping those mechanistic principles useful to reasoning. To remain at the threshold, to stay too abstracted, too clear, principled mechanics "makes fools of us" says Boltzmann.(p. 137) He asks us not to fear a mechanical world-view as death to the muses, but as a tool to link thought and experience, not to "impair higher endeavours and ideals."(p. 146) [elaborate on structure of physics curriculum at Leipzig, so why it's important.]

At the same time, Cambridge middle mathematicians are enlarging the doors, giving younger students a taste of the most rigorous, most advanced of the mechanistic views. Who built the bridge between the height of mechanics and advanced physics? The peacemakers of the age did, leaders like Boltzmann, Planck, later Sommerfeld, echoing earlier peacemakers like Maxwell. Peacemakers in physics are those who struggle with self-doubt, come out stronger having reconciled advancing theories and advancing practices. Kevles retells Oppenheimer's youth, of his academic self-doubt in 1925 at Cambridge: Bohr asks Oppenheimer what the problem is, math or physics: Oppenheimer replies "I don't know." Studying quantum mechanics in Germany straightened him out.(Kevles,<bibref>Kevles:1995</bibref> p. 217) Here and there, we hear about Sommerfeld setting students straight, on the road to the most advanced physics. In "A ride to Albequerque," Dyson reconciles Schwinger and Feynman approaches in a summer of traveling.<bibref>Dyson:1979</bibref>

The narrowing of possibilities [change this to a story, not a nominization of an action] echoes in the historical inquiries about why scientists acted the way they did. Start with a person with infinite possibilities; introduce all their knowable background; apply their influences, their forced situations, their geographical limitations, their demanding mentors, the social and regulatory structure of their organizations and governments; limit their funding; prevent cooperation due to wars, nationalism, bigotry, class-distinctions; put clouds above their telescopes and corrode their cables; drown or gas their children; give them a jealous superior or an irrelevant job; pester them about the religion of their grandparents; base their prestige not on their accomplishments but on the priority of them; determine a rank on tests of separated skills then assign them to an industrialized position. How much freedom of choice is left?

Kistiakowski wrote that he went to Los Alamos "unwillingly," and Heisenberg painted himself cornered.(K. quoted in Rhodes<bibref>Rhodes:1986</bibref>, p. 542) We study the great ones, the ones that overcome our expectations or overshoot their bounds. Surely Kistiakowski and Heisenberg retained some control, and if so, some great responsibility. Despite all the limits of their personal histories, by ranking high, they had serious navigational choices.

So, how may a successful scientist extend their work beyond the sea of limitations, but do good in society? We have seen several qualities:

Foresight, as in John Wheeler's concerns about fission-poisoning isotopes. (Rhodes, p. 560)

Precision, as in Augustus Rowland's gratings allowing for discovery of fine structure of spectra.

Interdisciplinary work, as in William Thomson applying an analysis of work done to the question of the state of forces between charged bodies.<bibref>Wise:1989</bibref>

Social awareness, as in the work of Poincaré and the graduates of les Grandes Ecoles in the 19th century. For Poincaré and his peers, polytechnic work meant combining the primacy of mechanical mathematics with the needs of the state. Although Rowland decried stamping engineering inventions as science, it was mathematical engineering that gave physical science much of its power. Peter Galison writes that, according to Poincaré, "action inncoulated" his peers against the melancholy of abstracted science.(Galison,<bibref>Galison:2003Einsteins-clockAA</bibref> p. 49)

Recognition and advancement of such qualities should be a part of a good curriculum in physics. The last two are most important to our argument. The multiple approaches, emboldened by the freedom of choice in solutions Poincaré embraced, of interdisciplinary work, allowed physicists to tackle more of the myriad problems of society. (Galison, pp. 80-81)

Is studying the top of the hierarchy good enough?

The history we've read in our course is that of the most important natural philosophers and physicists. In lecture, Professor Seth described the beginnings of American history of science as a study of Great Scientists of Europe plus Ben Franklin, there having been almost no one considered a Great Scientist in America before 1920. Are we allowed to say anything about the field as a whole based only on the top of the field?

Maybe. Consider that most often the top philosophers also have been at research universities or in other teaching positions. Not only have they been respected by researchers in their field, they have been respected by the educators in their field. Thus, scientific leaders have been educational leaders. Not necessarily the best teachers, they have been an important part of educational decision-making.

What top physicists have lacked, however, is explicit research and soul-searching in physics education. H.A. Rowland of Johns Hopkins, in "A Plea for Pure Science," addressed the general structure of physics education in 1883, but left statements about pedagogy vague:

That teaching is important, goes without saying. A successful teacher is to be respected; but if he does not lead his scholars to that which is highest, [advanced research,] is he not blameworthy? We are, then, to look to the colleges and universities of the land for most of the work in pure science which is done.(p. 244)<bibref>Rowland:1883</bibref>

Rowland suggests that educators should be the advanced scientist that they want their students to be. Where does this leave the introductory educators, high school teachers and freshman lecturers? Historians need to identify whether what Rowland called mediocre curricula served an important purpose in science. Have we gone too far in making physics departments built on research prestige at the expense of considering teaching prestige?

An inspiring list of those we've studied who led education and science both. For most of these, we haven't read how they teach.

• Ludwig Boltzmann
• Vannevar Bush
• Augustin-Louis Cauchy
• Richard Feynman
• Philipp Lenard
• James Clerk Maxwell
• Albert Abraham Michelson
• Robert A. Millikan
• J. Robert Oppenheimer
• Max Planck
• Henri Poincaré
• Isidor Isaac Rabi
• Henry Augustus Rowland
• Arnold Sommerfeld
• Peter Guthrie Tait
• Joseph John Thomson
• William Thomson
• Wilhelm Wien

Historians should ask if the influence of these top scientist/educators was limited to their own top-tier students. Is PhD-level education, top-tier or not, affecting introductory level education? Yes, if their pronouncements are respected. Take, for example Ludwig Boltzmann. In his address to incoming Leipzig students, he acknowledged the importance of mechanical physics to the introductory courses. But, although he lauded the achievements of the mechanical world-view, he may have subtly questioned the connection between the vanguard of the field and its mechanical base. His authority was that he was one of the best philosophers to reconcile new movements in physics to the mechanical base. Making such a connection, be it delicate, allowed for a hierarchical sequence of learning leading to his theoretical core studies, appropriate for a welcoming speech at a research university.

Are historians approaching training as well as they are approaching the generation of theories and experiments?

We have seen Crosbie and Wise identify the resources scientists have selected to inspire or to buttress their work.<bibref>Wise:1989</bibref> A scientist might draw on poetry, industry, or the bible. But how do scientists learn to do this? A mentor may impress on a student the importance of thinking over a problem on a stroll (Bohr), considering a machine (Thomson), exercising the body to keep the wits sharp (Maxwell and "mathletes").The way that educators show their students how to draw on social resources and the way they demonstrate to their students which selections from their milieu are proper and acceptable are probably not well documented. If so, then some very important part of training is lost to the historian.

Conversely, scientists affect the popular realm often through invention and interpretation. How has that been taught, or can historians find out? What made William Thomson such a popular engineer and inventor? When it is assumed that good scientists make good inventors or good professors, and they turn out not to be so, is that a failure of training or a presumptuous expectation?

If historians cover training better, they will have better arguments for explaining the generation of theories and experiments. They would do well to study feedback cycles between training and practice.

How can the historian identify good or bad training?

Ken Alder, in "A Social Epistemology of Enlightenment Engineering," identifies the paradoxical combination of allegiances "to corporate service and to individual preferment" in the engineering schools of France before and after the Revolution. This combination, rewarding conformist merit with formative power, allowed a large group of students to form a social class powerful enough yet detached enough to withstand revolution. If good training is making good engineers (or scientists), then such professionalization created good training.<bibref>Alder:1997</bibref> Alder compares the special loyalty of French bridge-engineers to their American counterparts, as partially explaining the superior build-quality of French bridges.

In late Victorian middle mathematics, Warwick identified training as good when it regenerated more top wranglers, and measured a trainer by the historical measure of the length of their tenure. By these measures, Edward Routh "was probably the most influential math teacher of all time."(Warwick:2003<bibref>Warwick:2003</bibref>, pp. 231, 233) Warwick also measured Routh as using careful timetables, small group rigorous work, pre-organized regimens, yet unpublished and advanced methods. Routh was the very be-like-me coach that Augustus Rowland was calling for. Routh and Cambridge math trainers were determining what was researchable, not merely how to approach research. (p. 246)

Where has training gone wrong?

A mistake repeated over and over again by mentors from Boyle and Newton was stating that we make no hypothesis. Boyle claimed to produce "only facts," not a hypothetical vacuum, but if he farmed out most of his experiments, he most certainly was interpreting facts as results came to his desk. What these leaders might have more appropriately stated is that they didn't want to over-hypothesize, to stray too far from accepted theories.

Another mistake has been to claim that science lies apart from society. The truth we care about is the truth we seek, and that seeking is mostly inseparable from society. That's a good thing, because scientists are appreciated for working on questions society cares about. During great wars, war and peace are what society cares about. The Superconducting Super Collider was not well-connected to broader and durable norms in America, so the characterization of it as a cement-filled boondoggle was too difficult to mitigate.

Good training may separate strands of study for students, then show how to re-weave those strands with the other pursuits of society. Sometimes students experience that separation into disciplines, but then break off or break out before learning how to do the re-integration. Frayn shows Heisenberg as a protégé of Bohr's who broke out of re-integration due to his own grandiosity but also due to the implosion of normal relations during the war. In the play, a war-time Heisenberg suggests Bohr could go skiing again with him, mindless of the seriousness of the implosion, the importance not lost on the Bohr's.

Training should be more self-aware, explicitly. Students should hear from the scientists they study how those scientists' training affected their work. One problem in training is making explicit the effects of society on science.

In Kevles, Frayn, and Stanley, we see the struggle, between the wars, with the idea that science lacked enough consideration of ethics.<bibref>Kevles:1995</bibref><bibref>Frayn:2002</bibref><bibref>Stanley:2003</bibref> As scientists were claiming wartime and or industrial powers, they often, at least in perception, overshot society's bounds of acceptability. The humanists muttered "I told you so" at every sign of hubris from the scientists. Meanwhile, science sometimes was a scapegoat for problems of urbanization, social unrest, the fog of war, and other issues. Was it a gross oversight in the pedagogy of physics in the early 20th century that it did not address the effect of society on its work sufficiently, if at all?

Where has training gone right?

Ken Alder refers to a "middle epistemology," a learning of a meld of theory and craft to create novel engineering feats.<bibref>Alder:1997</bibref> By incorporating this style into their training, using math and class to control input and public service and loyalty to measure output, les Grandes Ecoles bolstered a meritocracy that would survive the Revolution.

The industrialization of learning involved assigning rank to students and thus to ranked careers. Alder writes that the narrowing but codifying of this system in French engineering schools, a step away from traditional gentry, allowed the system to survive the Revolution.<bibref>Alder:1997</bibref> Andrew Warwick writes that group study and individual coaching are an important variable in the success of the creation of a large cadre of mathematicians at Cambridge University in the Victorian era.<bibref>Warwick:2003</bibref>

What learning existed before this industrialization, and has any of that survived? The patronage in Glaswegian academics, for example, placed William Thomson as the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.<bibref>Wise:1990</bibref> We have studied the gentility of scientific pursuit, from the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment to the end of the individual tripos at Cambridge. A century after the French Revolution, Augustus Rowland called for a hierarchical feudalism of pure scientists (lords), resting on a foundation of technical scientists (vassals) like him, who managed then the work of technicians and marketers (fiefs).<bibref>Rowland:1883</bibref> The training system emergent from these two movements was a combination of the Rowlandian hierarchy with the industrialization of the appointment in the ranks. Kevles traces the arc of this ascendancy, and prefaces his 1995 edition with the end of that arc in the implosion of the SSC program, in The Physicists.<bibref>Kevles:1995</bibref> We are still sorting out the history before we can say which facets of post-WWII physics are cases of training gone right and which training gone wrong.

What evidence is missing?

We cannot make arguments for physics education much beyond the purposes of the physics education we have studied. If we have only identified the success of training mainstream, Nobel-laureate-level physicists, then perhaps we have very little to say about training the general public in physics.

We most often do not know why changes were made to the curriculum. We have identified large movements, such as Deutsche Physik, but we have not seen the documentation for much of the decisions on specific scope and sequence questions.

What is the role of physics educators in the history of science?

Systems of education at Cambridge University determined what kind of teaching could be successful. On the other hand, engineering teachers in revolution-era France, in altering the curriculum, controlled what kind of learning would happen. Pedagogues, along with researchers, have steered the course of physical science, yet often buffeted by winds of change they could not control.

How much have physicists, or even the general public, been able to steer the course of physical science using the schools? How much of the change in natural philosophy over time is attributable to the rendered curriculum, and how much of that change can be attributed to foresight of those in power?

Or, to the contrary, how much has the canonization (cementing) of the curriculum prevented progress in physical understanding?

Consider Ludwig Boltzmann. By the end of the 19th century, to Boltzmann and many other leading physicists, the mechanical world view was the canon. Pushing on one side away from the canon, physicists were considering a Mach-inspired direction towards discarding uneconomical hypotheses about metaphysics, and in another direction physicists were considering fields and electrodynamics as alternatives. Boltzmann would defend the mechanical world-view, but in reconciliation aid the early quantum work with his statistical methods. He would maintain that wherever physics led around the Fin-de-Siècle, it needed its mechanical roots, its tradition, as an important guide.

Advanced as he was, did Boltzmann embody a reluctance to change in world view that prevented him from continuing to further the field? He passed the baton to Born and Sommerfeld and their younger students, and ducked out of the question, unfortunately, through suicide.

What constitutes evidence of a good teacher? a good curriculum?

Much positive outcome seems to be attributed in the historical record to international exchanges of scientists and students. Kevles writes of the NRC and IRC fellowships; many scientists take a hajj to Copenhagen or to the Solvay Conferences in Brussels. Oppenheimer, Rowland, Maupertuis tour England (and Germany); I. I. Rabi takes two years away from New York under Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, and Stern. The fresh air seems to be an important part of the curriculum.

A good teacher must resist canonization. Consider Sommerfeld's 'magic' and it's critics. Good training introduces student to the field without limiting the students' ability to push the boundaries of the field in fruitful directions. Magic and mystery are important to many of the quantum theorists especially. Rhodes reported that I. I. Rabi thought the expanse of physics was lost on students who were intent on technique; Rabi valued "the mystery of it" and its depth, rather than the predictability and reduction of knowledge.(<bib>Rhodes:1986</bib>, 279-280)

A good teacher gives the student confidence to draw on new resources. Then the student might be shown how to repeatedly re-integrate their work with social needs and norms. Good training should teach students to ferry between popular support and social innovation. Writing about popularizers, Greg Myers states that "the need to appeal for popular support for the discipline may account for some of the physicists' emphasis on the moral and social relevance of physics..." <bibref>Myers:1989</bibref> Physics education needs this emphasis just as much as popularization. Innovation, even dominance in innovation, in the Superconducting Super Collider didn't survive without popular support. Physics students should not be led to believe that they are learning just for learning's sake, that they are learning to follow wherever physical phenomena lead. This is partly because physical phenomena may lead to destruction, and partly because their professional survival will depend on popular support.

Has training been mostly reproduction and emulation, with a haphazard touch of freedom in the hopes of creativity? Evidence to answer this question is lacking. Textbooks, as developed in Revolution-era French artillery schools, have largely trained students to apply reduced theories to engineering questions. But has the role of the professor been partly to add interpretive freedom to the curriculum? In future historical studies, we will have to search harder for that evidence.

A good trainer should identify and bring to the surface more and more tacit knowledge. A good curriculum should acknowledge an develop tacit knowledge. Working with instruments is only part of this task; appreciating the range of possibilities in a study is also part of tacit knowledge. Consider Faraday, Bohr, Joule. Seth, in "Crafting the Quantum," describes how Sommerfeld explicitly trained young quantum physicists in the craft so that they could examine Einstein's (and presumably Bohr's and others') philosophy.<bibref>Seth:2008</bibref> Sommerfeld uses number-craft successfully to steer away from early atomic models, but overshoots in his first edition of Atombau, as criticized by Born. In the 1920s, Sommerfeld taught this same craft, the results of which were then interpreted in multiple ways, as well as being rejected in part by unsympathetic parties. But criticism seemed to embolden him to further abandon the model-based theories, after 1922, according to Seth, for 'half-empirical' ones. Like Maxwell, Sommerfeld taught physicists to forge ahead with work middling between theory and practice, accepting empirical results then pushing from there forward with a new kind of model that isn't limited by its own physicality. For Maxwell, differential calculus was the tool to push those limits; for Sommerfeld it was combining quantum statistics and symmetry. Sommerfeld identified the tacit skills of his craft in the third edition of Atombau: "It must not be imagined that the combination of the lines into series and their resolution into two terms is a mere trifle. Rather it demands special experience and ingenuity." He goes on to describe the iterative process of teasing out the series in the spectra.<bibref>Sommerfeld:1923</bibref>

In focusing on Pascual Jordan, Wise addressed the Forman Thesis, pointing out that "subtle shifts in interpretation," rather than Weimar social pressures, allowed interpretations to run the gamut from liberalism to Naziism, those shifts not being internal to the total theory but in selection.<bibref>Wise:1994</bibref> So, we should not judge quantum theory by the politics of Jordan. put bluntly, A Nazi can learn and create good physics. How then is a historian to judge curriculum? Judgement may be made about what educators call the "null curriculum," what is not taught, what is left out of the curriculum. A proposal in physics education is to teach physics in its relationship to society. Most calls so far have been to make this connection for non-physicists who take an occasional course in physics, at least so that the general populace has an appreciation for physics. The radical call, mine, would be to have physics majors, PhDs, professionals, learn the connections better.

Conclusion

Physicists who used an elitist approach to attempt to keep physics pure or independent did so not for the sake of purity but for the sake of power. But, by gathering power, physicists changed the course of history, including their own; in fact, they interwove physics with social power. In education, leaders should realize the workings of change, learn to accept change and perhaps skip the elitism. If advancement we seek, discipline must be tempered by choice, choice by rigor. As Boltzmann would say, don't overshoot in either direction. As in Kuhn's structures, practice, precision, and rigor in normal science will lead to novel science. But it needs a guide if the advancement is to be morally valuable.

Good social power can be nurtured in physics education by teaching peace-seeking foresight and social-serving interdisciplinary work, confidence-building, and multi-faceted mentoring. The best researchers and educators applied these principles both to their studies and to their teaching. Historians can measure the impact of these facets of training in the change they bring to physics and the larger society.

Just as historians have, a good curriculum in physics should avoid the exclusion of social considerations. The power of scientists over workings of change, and the reciprocal power, should be explicitly included in physics education.

The historical argument for such reforms is not that these ideas were wholly lacking. On the contrary, I have identified these very ideas in the historical record, and its interpretations; they are associated with the best, most compelling stories in natural philosophy and physics.

References

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