Session C40: Pais Prize Session

Abraham Pais Prize Lecture: Shifting Problems and Boundaries in the History of Modern Physics

A long established category of study in the history of science is the ``history of physical sciences.'' It is a category that immediately begs the question of disciplinary boundaries for the problems and subjects addressed in historical inquiry. As a historian of the physical sciences, I often have puzzled over disciplinary boundaries and the means used to create or justify them. Scientists most often have been professionally identified with specific institutionalized fields since the late 19th century, but the questions they ask and the problems they solve are not neatly carved up by disciplinary perimeters. Like institutional departments or professorships, the Nobel Prizes in the 20th century often have delineated the scope of ``Physics'' or ``Chemistry'' (and ``Physiology or Medicine''), but the Prizes do not reflect disciplinary rigidity, despite some standard core subjects. In this paper I examine trends in Nobel Prize awards that indicate shifts in problem solving and in boundaries in twentieth century physics, tying those developments to changing themes in the history of physics and physical science in recent decades.   

Is Seeing Believing? Direct and Indirect Observation in Physics

In their recent paper announcing the observation of gravity waves the LIGO collaboration stated, ``This is the first \textit{direct} detection of gravitational waves\textellipsis . .'' This was to distinguish their result from those of Taylor, Hulse, and Weisberg and Taylor in which the decrease in the period of a binary pulsar was used to ``\textellipsis establish, with a high degree of confidence the existence of gravitational radiation as predicted by general relativity.'' The implication by LIGO was that the latter results were not a direct observation. This raises several interesting questions. One might ask how one can distinguish between direct and indirect observation and whether that distinction is exemplified in the practice of science. One might also ask whether a direct observation has more epistemic weight than an indirect observation? In this talk I will briefly discuss several episodes from the history of modern physics in an attempt to answer those questions. These episodes will include the discovery of the neutrino, of the positron, and of the Higgs boson.   

The metamorphoses of relativity

This talk will explore the ways that problems shifted and disciplinary boundaries changed around physicists’ engagement with relational physics and relativistic thought, first in research dealing with physiology, psychology and geometry in the late nineteenth century and then (a better-known story) moving between physics, mathematics and geometry in the twentieth century. I hope to develop a richer approach for understanding the disciplinary and political significance of relativity, especially by considering in one framework the work of Engels, Mach, Einstein and Planck.   

From the Old to the New World of Nuclear Physics

Physicists passed from the Old to the New World of Nuclear Physics in the two decades between the first and second world wars. The transition occurred against the background of the Great War, the postwar hyperinflation in Germany and Austria, and the greatest intellection migrations in history after the Nazi Civil Service law of 1933, the \textit{Anschluss }of Austria in March 1938, and the Fascist anti-Semitic laws that fall. It involved Rutherford's discovery of artificial disintegration, Pettersson and Kirsch's challenge of it, and the concomitant rise and fall of Rutherford's satellite model of the nucleus; Gamow's quantum-mechanical theory of alpha decay and his liquid-drop model of the nucleus; the discoveries of deuterium and the deuteron, neutron, and positron, and the inventions of the Cockcroft-Walton accelerator and the cyclotron; the influence of the seventh Solvay Conference; Joliot and Curie's discovery of artificial radioactivity; Pauli's neutrino hypothesis, Fermi's theory of beta decay, and his discovery of the efficacy of slow neutrons in producing nuclear reactions; Bohr's theory of the compound nucleus and Breit and Wigner's theory of neutron-nucleus resonances; and the discovery of nuclear fission, Meitner and Frisch's interpretation of it, and Bohr and Fermi revelation of both in America.