STS3301 Final essay

December, 2009, for STS 3301.

Position to argue: A fruitful science has required certain qualities in science education, including foresight, interdisciplinary work, care and precision, confidence-building, and mentoring. History offers examples of cases where any of these have been lacking.

Where has training gone wrong?

Stating that we make no hypothesis.

Claiming 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.

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, 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.

What have we learned about training?

In Kevles, Frayn, and Stanley, we see the struggle, between the wars, with the idea that science lacked enough consideration of ethics. 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 ethics sufficiently, if at all?

Boltzmann expresses his sense of introductory physics, as a traditionally decorated entry hall. 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 views with the servants at the entrance. But 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? Kevles retells Oppenheimer's youth, of his academic self-doubt. Here and there, we hear about Sommerfeld setting students straight, on the road to the most advanced physics. What was his skill?

(move this paragraph to the start?) The narrowing of possibilities 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. How much freedom of choice is left? Kistiakowski wrote that he went to Los Alamos "unwillingly," and Heisenberg painted himself cornered. 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.

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

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

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

Interdisciplinary work

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

On the one hand, the system 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, determined what kind of learning would happen. Pedagogues, along with researchers, have steered the course of physical science.

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 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?

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. (readings: Kevles, Seth, ... subjects:Sommerfeld, Copenhagen and Bohr, NRC/IRC fellowships, I. I. Rabi)

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.

A good teacher gives the student confidence to draw on new resources.

A good curriculum is synergistic with other fields.