STS3301 Final essay

December, 2009, for STS 3301.

What style(s) of historiography are best for studying training in science?

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?

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)