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," referring 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. To ask whether historians can 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.

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 overinterpretation with the servants at the entrance, yet keeping those mechanistic principles useful to reasoning. 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 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? 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.

Recognition and advancement of these qualities should be a part of a good curriculum in physics.

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 over teaching prestige?

A list of leaders of both education and science we've studied

• 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
• Isidor Isaac Rabi
• Henry Augustus Rowland
• Arnold Sommerfeld
• Peter Guthrie Tait
• Joseph John Thomson
• William Thomson
• Wilhelm Wien

Is the influence of these top scientist/educators limited to PhD students? Is PhD-level education, top-tier or not, affecting introductory level education? Boltzmann, in his address to incoming Leipzig students, 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.

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?

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.

How has Warwick identified good or bad training in late Victorian middle mathematics?

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?

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>

Ideas travel with objects

The Torricelli tube and the barometer, in manifesting enlightenment, carried social status also. Boyle and fellow philosophers and the gentry created a feedback cycle of social status, allowing the instruments to cross between studying the nature of the atmosphere and the social meaning of the atmosphere. By making the instruments important in both these pursuits, philosophers and instrument-makers may have at the same time maintained the high esteem of philosophy while making its pursuit more socially acceptable. [Is this right? check Golinsky]

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.

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. 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.

A good curriculum is synergistic with other fields. William Thomson brought lab work with engines and electricity into communion with energy physics, allowing engines and electricity to begin to synergistically improve each other. [delete this if not improved]

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.

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.

References

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