STS3301 Paper Week 11

Response to readings, week 11, The Forman Thesis, for STS 3301

Response

What makes physicists
do the crazy things they do?
Social craziness?

These are all challenging readings. I want to follow the physics, the social meaning, and the complex arguments of the authors all at once. A word, a sentence, a page, and a section take multiple looks before I can subsume the meanings into the larger picture, or before I can compare the style and content to another author.

Reading Forman, I recall the discussion of statistik in Prussia, the difference between its summative numbers and England's averaging numbers, in our readings on Quetelet and Farr, through Hacking and others. Forman calls in a romantic ideal of the individual, and notices the German theorists forcing it onto statistical quantum mechanics. Maybe instead of seeing it from our view, it might be more historical to see such action as retaining the individual as an indivisible and important part of a summation rather than in the norm.

So, what is there to debate in Forman's thesis that 1920s physicists were pressured culturally to make certain claims about their theories? Forman's evidence for forced re-characterization of quantum physics as anschaulich was the clearest of his three sections, with such central figures as Born and Heisenberg shown to be taking a middle tack and a radical bifurcation, respectively. Wise seems to take Forman's thesis very far, but using a selection rather than an influence model, showing Jordan selecting Führer-ideas to guide him through all his work, at every scale from acausal atoms to organisms to states.

Forman's thesis is visible in Seth's account of Sommerfeld; the theorist sees fit to steer the race away from mechanical models. But Sommerfeld's world was a bit different than the younger quantum physicists, his was a more industrial one, and his industry was pedagogical, reproductive. Sommerfeld could escort quantum physics away from models like Bohr's, but only because Sommerfeld had the attractive tools of numerical-puzzle-craft.

To get to quantum theory, Sommerfeld still must build bridges for the classicists, and Seth shows one bridge to be the Kepler analogy. So, a great classical physicist was attracted to number puzzles, it should not upset the classicists that we can be like Kepler but for the atom.

Seth shows Sommerfeld drawing on cultural resources to create a school of thought, with resistance from the non-Munichers. Like Forman's claim that his thesis is only for meta-meta statements, Sommerfeld makes a shift in talking about the technik even as he undergoes continuous puzzle-solving over the history of Bohr's model from Nagaoka's planets to non-picture-able quantum states. The written evidence for Sommerfeld's view of his work is made very clear in Crafting the Quantum, but in reading I remain unclear on whether Sommerfeld was forced, by his own work, to give up modellmässig, or if he was looking to give it up, or if that's a false dichotomy. I suppose I would want to look more at his "craft" and see if, inasmuch as he's carrying the baton passed to him, he steers the race as he can, as he sees fit, and as he is trained, all at once, inseparably.

After reading Hendry, to make Forman's thesis serviceable again it seems necessary to me to see a duality between the smudge of continuous evolution of participation in culture and physics of physicists, with the localized events of certain physicists' actions. In the latter, we don't have the holistic picture offered by the former, despite precise evidence. In the former, we can't untangle the bits of evidence satisfactorily, but we're happier that the whole picture seems more consistent. This is my indeterminacy principle of historiography.

Hendry points out that participation in culture didn't necessarily force the content of physics, but Forman's disclaimer about his thesis being about statements about physics not the content of physics, covers this. Hendry also dismisses Forman's arguments about causality as befuddled by the physicists themselves, (p. 169), but from the little bit of Forman we read this week Forman seems to have covered that by promising only plausibility, not dominance, of his interpretation. Hendry claims that Forman's argument would collapse under any of several inquiries into more German physicists, or comparisons with physicists in other countries or with the general populace. But Hendry himself doesn't provide the evidence from such inquiries, so I don't understand why such a guillotine for Forman yet.

Notes on references

Seth on Sommerfeld<bibref f="default.bib">Seth

2008</bibref>

Forman on Causality, Intuitiveness, and Individuality

Born found a middle way by giving Schrödinger's waves a place in space and time, a less stark breach of classicism than Heisenberg's.

German physicists were predisposed to pursue theories departing from determinism. (p. 338)

Wise on Jordan

Hendry on Weimar Culture and Quantum Causality

References

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