Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2022
Volume 67, Number 6
Saturday–Tuesday, April 9–12, 2022; New York
Session W05: History and Philosophy of PhysicsRecordings Available Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: FHPP Chair: Paul Halpern, University of the Sciences Room: Astor |
Monday, April 11, 2022 5:45PM - 5:57PM |
W05.00001: A Book by and about Women in Astronomy Virginia Trimble It was not originally my idea, but that of David Weintraub of Vanderbilt University, and he already had a suitabley high-profile publisher lined up (Princeton U. Press). The idea was to colled, edit, and publish autobiographical chapters by successful women astronomers, from as wide a range of generations, nations, sub-disciplines, and other sub-communities as could be fit into a reasonable number of pages. They invited me, as a female astronomer, bo be alphabettically first editor. As the project developed, we recruited authors from a wider range of countries, and women of color, but failed to fill some other niches. There are introductory and concluding chapters, taking PhD women astronomers back into the late 19th century and bringing in special cases, like Caroline Herschel, Elizabeth Hevelius, and Margaret Huggines, and the "computers." "Successful" means that every author earned a PhD (1963 to recent), and everybody has a job more or less in the field or is retired from one. The chapter authors have had some remarkable adventures, experiences both rewards and the opposite (not infrequently connected with gender or even sex). We hope to see "light of print" in late spring 2022 (but you can order teh book now), and, in anaticipation of a 2nd volume or expanded online version, ask to hear from or about women who should have been included but weren't. |
Monday, April 11, 2022 5:57PM - 6:09PM |
W05.00002: Mach's Principle as a Driving Force for Gravitational Inquiry Paul H Halpern In an attempt to explain how the local concept of inertia might arise from a universal mass distribution on a cosmological scale, Einstein coined the term "Mach's Principle," based on earlier suggestions by Ernst Mach. In this talk, I'll show how the notion drove not just Einstein, but also many other theorists throughout the 20th century, from Carl Brans and Robert Dicke to Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar, to develop alternative gravitational theories, and proposed tests to distingush them from standard general relativity. |
Monday, April 11, 2022 6:09PM - 6:21PM |
W05.00003: From Verifiability Theories to Confined Quarks: History of Physics Informing Philosophy of Science Pedagogy Dwight E Neuenschwander We all invoke the history of physics when teaching physics courses. The history of physics also offers a powerful asset when teaching courses in philosophy. Given our unit’s recent name change from Forum on the History of Physics to Forum on the History and Philosophy of Physics, here I celebrate this expansion by sharing “sound bites” from an undergraduate Philosophy of Science course that a philosophy professor* and I have team-taught six times. As the resident physicist on the teaching team, my role quickly evolved into illustrating the philosophy of science issue of the day by relating events and developments from the history of physics. Although my physics history examples will be familiar to this session’s audience, I offer this presentation as evidence that, when it comes to physics, history and philosophy go together. [*with gratitude to Dr. Brint Montgomery] |
Monday, April 11, 2022 6:21PM - 6:33PM |
W05.00004: Why Trust Physics? The Discovery and Acceptance of Quarks, 1968-1979 Michael Riordan In her 2019 book, Why Trust Science?, Harvard University historian of science Naomi Oreskes argues that the credibility of a scientific result or theory is established largely through a complex social process in which a skeptical, diverse scientific community reaches consensus on a subject — for her, anthropogenic climate change. I examine this proposition in the context of the discovery of quarks during the 1970s and their acceptance by essentially the entire physics community by the end of that decade, a topic about which I wrote in my 1987 book, The Hunting of the Quark. In so doing, I address the social constructivist picture of this process, and the nature and role of scientific consensus in establishing the “reality” of a new “object.” |
Monday, April 11, 2022 6:33PM - 6:45PM |
W05.00005: The Van Allen Radiation Belts: How their discovery worried lay scientists hungry for human spaceflight Andrew J Porwitzky Few twentieth century technological advances captivated the public’s attention as much as the advent of spaceflight. In the 1950s, popular science fiction magazines in the United States featured regular science essays from dual scientists and science popularizers such as Willy Ley covering all cutting-edge aspects of orbital mechanics and astrophysics. The discovery of the Earth’s radiation belts, enabled by the Explorer 1 satellite, caused a stir among the lay scientific community; Could a human survive a trip through these radiation belts to reach the stars, or was humanity trapped on Earth? We’ll look at the coverage in the media and genre magazines of the discovery of the Van Allen belts circa 1958, and see how such an obscure topic captivated a fandom hungry for human spaceflight. |
Monday, April 11, 2022 6:45PM - 6:57PM |
W05.00006: What does "problem" mean in David Chalmers' "hard problem of consiousness"? Roland E Allen, Suzanne Lidstrom The physics of consciousness has become a respectable topic in recent years [1,2,3], at the interface between experimental studies [4] and theoretical constraints [5]. Here we address a problem in the philosophy of physics which is perhaps as central as the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it is a question that the Austrian and Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might have asked: In David Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness" [6], what meaning can be assigned to the word "problem"? We argue that it is neither a scientific problem, because science is essentially just a map of the reality of Nature, nor a philosophical problem, since modern philosophy is essentially just a more profound version of clear thinking. It is instead a problem that in principle could be solved only through the combination of physics at the deepest level and a trans-human consciousness that is able to directly sample all the relevant aspects of that physics. In other words, the "hard problem" really is a problem and really is hard. |
Monday, April 11, 2022 6:57PM - 7:09PM |
W05.00007: Relationship between Science and Application in the 1 Million Year History of Artificial Lighting James T Dakin Applications sometimes occur in advance of the underlying scientific understanding, sometimes they proceed in tandem, and in some cases the applications are inspired by the science. The 1 million year history of artificial lighting provides excellent examples of all three cases, although the tandem development is arguably the most common. Examples are drawn from controlled fire, early oil lamps and candles, gas lighting, traditional electric lighting (incandescent, high-intensity discharge, and fluorescent), lasers, and light emitting diodes (LEDs). Controlled fire has been in use since before our ancestral homo sapiens evolved. Some fire application advances occurred in tandem with early science, but the role of oxygen was not known until the 18th century. The seeds of traditional electric lighting were planted by science in the early 19th century, but the key applications and the underlying science advanced in tandem during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Development of the more recent laser and the LED were inspired by the underlying 20th century science, with application advances occurring in tandem with refinement of the science. Through this history the science has become more recognizably mature, and its application has continued to require engineering methods. |
Monday, April 11, 2022 7:09PM - 7:21PM |
W05.00008: A Brief Astronomical History and Analysis of Saturn’s Rings Benjamin H Meleton There is no other planet in our solar system quite as dazzling nor stunning than that of Saturn. Specifically, our eyes are drawn to the incredible rings whose nature is both chaotic, yet representative of pattern. For centuries, Saturn’s Rings have baffled astronomers as to their formation, the spectrum of their colors, or even the identification of what they are exactly. The rings of Saturn offer viewers on Earth a chance to study cosmic disk phenomena; such as those in which planets form. Although many bodies posses ring systems, Saturn’s was the first observed and studied by astronomers. |
Monday, April 11, 2022 7:21PM - 7:33PM |
W05.00009: When theory-guidance walks hand-in-hand with experimental exploration: the case of Beyond the Standard Model searches at the LHC Pierre-Hugues Beauchemin, Kent Staley One way to search for new physics at the Large Hadron Collider is to look, not for signs of specific particles predicted by particular models, but for signatures that have features distinctive of a wide variety of Beyond Standard Model physics models, and that may even reflect new physics not included in any model thus far proposed. These Signature Based Model Independent (SBMI) searches are the subject of this talk. Although in many ways SBMI searches have characteristics associated with exploratory experiments (as described by Steinle and extended by Karaca), we will describe how they involve theoretical assumptions and theory guidance at every level, all the way down to the identification within the data of signatures associated with Standard Model ontology, such as electrons. Our line of analysis invites a restructuring of the epistemology of experimental physics along pragmatist lines. Instead of distinguishing exploratory from other types of experimentation, we distinguish experimental tasks (e.g., testing a hypothesis or exploring through parameter variation) that can be combined with other tasks (calibration, correction, etc.) in the pursuit of epistemic objectives. From this point of view, theory consists in a pool of resources available to an inquiry to help reach its objectives. |
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