Session M11: History of Physics from Pythagoras to Higgs

Value Added: History of Physics in a "Science, Technology, and Society" General Education Undergraduate Course

In thirty years of teaching a capstone “Science, Technology, and Society” course to undergraduate students of all majors, I have found that, upon entering STS, to most of them the Manhattan Project seems about as remote as the Civil War; few can describe the difference between nuclear and large non-nuclear weapons. With similar lack of awareness, many students seem to think the Big Bang was dreamed up by science sorcerers. One might suppose that a basic mental picture of weapons that held entire populations hostage should be part of informed citizenship. One might also suppose that questions about origins, as they are put to nature through evidence-based reasoning, should be integral to a culture’s identity. Over the years I have found the history of physics to be an effective tool for bringing such subjects to life for STS students. Upon hearing some of the history behind (for example) nuclear weapons and big bang cosmology, these students can better imagine themselves called upon to help in a Manhattan Project, or see themselves sleuthing about in a forensic science like cosmology. In this talk I share sample student responses to our class discussions on nuclear weapons, and on cosmology. The history of physics is too engaging to be appreciated only by physicists.   

The Curious Ontology of a Light Higgs Boson

When the Superconducting Super Collider was being contemplated and designed in the mid-1980s, few high-energy physicists considered it likely that a light Higgs boson, as was eventually discovered at the Large Hadron Collider, would exist. Most theorists expected that the Higgs boson would occur at a mass near the TeV scale, and accelerator physicists designed the Super Collider accordingly. The possibility of a light Higgs boson with a mass less than 200 GeV began to be taken seriously during the 1990s, especially after the 1995 Fermilab discovery of the top quark near 175 GeV, but it was too late to influence the SSC design. With a peak collision energy of 40 TeV, this collider was guaranteed to discover the Higgs boson --- or whatever other mass-generating phenomenon might be occurring in the Standard Model~--- even if it were to appear at masses or energies up to 2 TeV. As it turned out, therefore, the SSC was overdesigned for its principal physics goal. A substantially smaller Fermilab project known as the Dedicated Collider, which never made it beyond the drawing boards, could probably have allowed the 125 GeV Higgs boson to be discovered at least a decade earlier than it occurred at the LHC.   

Revisiting Einstein's Happiest Thought: On Ernst Mach and the Early History of Relativity

This paper argues we should distinguish three phases in the formation of relativity. The first involved relational approaches to perception, and physiological and geometrical space and time in the 1860s and 70s. The second concerned electrodynamics and mechanics (special relativity). The third concerned mechanics, gravitation, and physical and geometrical space and time. Mach’s early work on the Doppler effect, together with studies of visual and motor perception linked physiology, physics and psychology, and offered new approaches to physiological space and time. These informed the critical conceptual attacks on Newtonian absolutes that Mach famously outlined in The Science of Mechanics. Subsequently Mach identified a growing group of “relativists,” and his critiques helped form a foundation for later work in electrodynamics (in which he did not participate). Revisiting Mach’s early work will suggest he was still more important to the development of new approaches to inertia and gravitation than has been commonly appreciated. In addition to what Einstein later called “Mach’s principle,” I will argue that a thought experiment on falling bodies in Mach’s Science of Mechanics also provided a point of inspiration for the happy thought that led Einstein to the equivalence principle.   

Sommerfeld's influence on Einstein's evaluation of Minkowski, 1908 to 1916.

Einstein (E.), who had begun entirely hostile to Minkowski's (M.'s) space-time view of relativity in 1908, completely reversed himself by March 1916, saying in the second sentence of his major article on General Relativity (G.R.) in Ann. d. Phys.: ``The generalization of the theory of relativity was greatly facilitated through the form that the special theory of relativity was given by Minkowski, the mathematician who first made clear the formal equivalence of the spatial coordinates and the time coordinate and made it practically useable for the construction of the theory." Two major steps in this evolution exhibit E.'s respect for Sommerfeld's (S.'s) knowledge and judgment. At a meeting in Salzburg, Sept., 1909, they discussed and disagreed strongly about the value of M.'s contributions, but by the Feb., 1910, Part 2 of a survey paper E. had come to follow S. in accepting fully M.'s space-time and its coordinate $x_{4}=ict$. Step 2 followed S.'s June, 1915, publication of a 1907 lecture on relativity by M., doctoring it slightly to influence E. Unknown is whatever else S. communicated to E. at that time, but S.'s unrivalled knowledge of the implications of M.'s 4-vector algebra and analysis were at E.'s disposal. There soon followed both a paper by E. in Feb., 1916, adapting to the needs of G.R. a covariant form of Maxwell's equations discovered by M., and then E.'s handsome acknowledgement in March. The importance of early personality issues between M. and E. and of S.'s later diplomatic interventions will be explored.   

James Franck and the Experimental Discovery of Metastable States

In 1913 and 1914, James Franck and Gustav Hertz published their experiments on inelastic collisions of slow electrons with helium and mercury vapor atoms. Famously, they thought they were measuring ionization energies, and not, as we understand it today, excitation energies. Franck and Hertz shortly found themselves in the army, and neither resumed experimental work until after the Great War. Nevertheless, these questions were cleared up over the course of the war, primarily through the work of experimentalists in North America, who remeasured the ionization energy of mercury and showed that Franck and Hertz had not detected ionization. After the war, Franck returned to experiments on and theoretical analyses of the collisions of slow electrons with helium atoms, in competition with others in England and America. This time, Franck and his associates were able to measure the ionization energy, and, in the process, to throw new light on the non-combining singlet and “doublet” (later found to be triplet) spectral series in helium. They also proposed for the first time the existence of metastable states, first in helium, and later in mercury and other elements, at a time when selection rules and theories of transition probabilities were in their infancy.   

The Quest for the Primary Substance of Matter

What are things made of and what are the properties of matter? These are still the most fundamental and difficult questions of science. In an attempt to discover the roots of science and understand the quest for the primary substance of matter as a series of logical progressions, this presentation surveys the most important scientific theories of notable pre-Socratic natural philosophers from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, including Pythagoras and Democritus. These pre-Socratics developed a robust program of natural inquiry that (1) will be reconstructed and (2) will be compared with modern frontiers of physical analysis. It is argued not only that their conceptual breakthroughs anticipated much of later science but that scientists of the twenty-first century are still grappling with the fundamental problems raised twenty-five hundred years ago.   

Proprietary Manned Space Flight Proposals, 1973 to 2013, plus !

In 1973 a concept for a manned space flight experiment was submitted to NASA as an unsolicited proprietary proposal.$^{\mathrm{1,\ast \thinspace }}$In 1998$^{\mathrm{\ast }}$, 2004$^{\mathrm{\ast }}$, and 2013$^{\mathrm{\ast }}$ proposals successively more details were provided. An abbreviation of the 1998 proposal was published.$^{\mathrm{2}}$ By 2013 the five technical variables of 1998 had increased to over ten. Some technical and management details of the proposals will be presented and updated. The first flight of two could use some hardware now being developed. The experiment seems superior to any mission publicly advocated by NASA, so this talk's purpose is to encourage NASA to delay landing humans on Mars until the first spacecraft can be developed and activated. $^{\mathrm{1}}$P. C. Fisher, The Large Space Telescope as a Unique Opportunity (1973). $^{\mathrm{2}}$P. C. Fisher, Reentering the Gravitational Fringe Field of the Solar System, ASP Conf. Series \textbf{194}, 373 (1999). $^{\mathrm{\ast }}$Complete proposals are in the Philip C. Fisher papers, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics (available one year after author's death). !Work after 1982 supported by successive forms of Ruffner Associates.