STS3301 Paper Week 10

Responses to Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré's Maps by Peter Galison for STS 3301.

These haiku are forced.
But everything is forces,
there is no free will.

Suffering upright,
revolution unasked for,
walk a middle plank.

To the theorists,
blessed are the peacemakers
and the go-betweens.

Einstein on Planck:
A splendid fellow,
careful incrementalist,
imperialist.

While Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity by Kuhn starts out with a description of how Kuhn arrived at his book, then how the black-body formulae were developed as in the theoretical work of Boltzmann and Stefan, Heilbron starts with biographical chit-chat then jumps into the social inputs to black-body theory, such as the instrumentation.

In all of Kuhn's book, the 1978 first edition, he had very little to say about Mach, all in endnotes, mostly that Planck and Kuhn were of the same view concerning experience as the proof of the second law of thermodynamics. It's interesting to note that Heilbron's bibliography lists Kuhn's 1978 edition, not the 1987 edition. Suman noted that this is because Heilbron wrote the Kuhn part for the first edition before Kuhn's revision

Perhaps there is a continuum, along which physicists historically have slid, between strict experiential constructivism, empiricism, empirical theory, and unrestricted theory. Thus, Planck may have slid a bit as he watched atomism repeatedly force itself into physics from his student years to the Bohr years.

Atomism, however, from Heilbron's picture of Planck, was a temporary physical hypothesis, just like Maxwell's. Heilbron makes the case of Planck repeatedly seeing the use of such a physical hypothesis in chemistry. Heilbron places Mach on the bitter end of this spectrum. Planck's "opposition" to Mach may be seen as a difference in the ability to slide along the spectrum. Or, as in Heilbron's chapter 2, Planck praises reductionism as a permanent progression towards truth, while Mach sees reductionism as a human endeavor towards its own end, economical activity for self-preservation, not towards any external truth.

In discussing the first Solvay conference, Heilbron raises the question, how much of Planck's reticence was due to his perception of his own isolation? Heilbron's discussion of Planck's influence as a pedagogue leads me to a question for my own thesis: Where there several competing pedagogies and curricula when the current one was selected around 100 years ago? If so, how did the attrition of the competitors come about, or how have they survived as underdogs?

According to Heilbron, at least in regard to Planck, unification required reductionism. [p. 45]

Heilbron's two paragraphs on the same descriptionism as in his 1982 paper seems like an idea cut short here. [p. 58, 59]

Kragh retells an episode of science where experiment outran any hard hypothesis, the first x-ray experiments. But for Kragh's story of electrons specifically, one might see a system of competing interpretations of what we now know as all about the same electrons.

It seems both Heilbron's and Kragh's histories, while rich in detail, lack a breadth that would include contemporary philosophy and other cultural factors, but this is only a guess until someone tries to tell a longer story of this era of rapid discovery. I would like to see a historical attempt at relating the burgeoning of the field to the rapidity of the discoveries as well as the diversification.

It's interesting to see Einstein and Planck painted as invalids who craft their own crutches, using mathematical hypotheses. How does the quantum theory bootstrap itself from Boltzmann, Stefan, and Wien? Does the use of Boltzmann's atomistic and probablistic work necessarily determine such an outcome?

Why does Kragh rely mostly on others' translations of german sources?