Session Q6: Invited Session: Pais Prize Lecture: Relations Between Physics and History of Physics

Abraham Pais Prize Talk: The Joy of History

Physicists and historians of physics share a common goal, the quest for understanding, but their objects are different: Physicists attempt to understand Nature, while historians attempt to understand the past, finding both the challenge and joy of history in exploring the contingencies of historical events, their dependence on scientific, biographical, sociopolitical, cultural, and other factors, and shaping them into a coherent narrative. My first example will focus on the history of the photon concept, in particular on the work of Arthur Holly Compton between 1916 and 1922 that led to his discovery of the Compton effect, whose understanding ultimately rested on a close examination of his laboratory notebooks. I will then turn to two episodes in the history of nuclear physics. The first deals with a controversy between 1922 and 1927 between Ernest Rutherford and James Chadwick at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and Hans Pettersson and Gerhard Kirsch at the Institute for Radium Research in Vienna that involved their fundamentally different experimental observations and theoretical interpretations of the artificial disintegration of nuclei whose resolution could only be understood after uncovering crucial correspondence between the protagonists. The second episode traces George Gamow's creation and development of the liquid-drop model of the nucleus in 1928 and 1929 and its subsequent development in two stages, first by Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizs\"{a}cker from 1933 to 1936, and second by Niels Bohr and Fritz Kalckar in 1936 and 1937, both of which merged in the minds of Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch at the end of 1938 to yield the correct interpretation of nuclear fission, an act of creation whose understanding rested on a detailed analysis of the published literature.   

How History Helped Einstein in Special Relativity

I will discuss how the German intellectual movement known as ``critical history'' motivated several physicists in the late 1900s to radically analyze the fundamental principles of mechanics, leading eventually to Einstein's special theory of relativity. Eugen Karl D\"{u}hring, Johann Bernhard Stallo, Ludwig Lange, and Ernst Mach wrote critical histories of mechanics, some of which emphasized notions of relativity and observation, in opposition to old metaphysical concepts that seemed to infect the foundations of physics. This strand of critical history included the ``genetic method'' of analyzing how concepts develop over time, in our minds, by way of ordinary experiences, which by 1904 was young Albert Einstein's favorite approach for examining fundamental notions. Thus I will discuss how history contributed in Einstein's path to relativity, as well as comment more generally on Einstein's views on history.   

How to make judicious use of current physics in reconstructing its history

Using three concrete examples, I illustrate both benefits and pitfalls of approaching the history of relativity and quantum theory with current textbook knowledge of these subjects. First, I show how knowing something about energy-momentum tensors in special relativity makes it easy to see that special relativity did not, as has been suggested, simply kill the program of Abraham and others at the beginning of the 20th century to reduce all of physics to electrodynamics, but co-opted key elements of it. Second, I show how knowing something about coordinate conditions in general relativity can be an obstacle to seeing why Einstein initially rejected field equations based on the Ricci tensor. Third, I show how knowing something about Hilbert space can be an obstacle to seeing the logic behind Jordan's statistical transformation theory. These three examples suggest that knowledge of modern physics is beneficial for historians, but only when used judiciously.