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Notes
The distinction was Forman’s. “As today with the “ecology” fad, he wrote, so also in the Weimar period, it was the biologist who could most easily adapt his ideology and values to those of his intellectual milieu.” (126)
Wise offered what remains the definitive critique of the Forman thesis in a talk first delivered in 1988. The paper is reproduced here, with some modifications, as “Forman Reformed, Again.” Forman’s “capitulation model,” Wise writes, “is not social enough; it does not portray physicists as interactive social beings embedded in their culture.” (423) What is needed instead is a “localist” history, the task of which “is not to derive the physics from the society in which it participates, but to understand the physics within the society and, in part, to draw the physics out of the society in terms of the resources available to its practitioners.” (429)
John Hendry drew attention to this issue in 1980, when he suggested that such “semi-popular addresses” could only provide evidence of an “accommodation of values.” To find evidence for an accommodation of content, one would need to look at private correspondence and published technical papers (Hendry 1980).
As a result, Jacobsen tends to offer a corrective to an earlier argument by Silvan Schweber, who had suggested that the turn away from philosophy was a function of quantum mechanics’ move from Europe to the more “pragmatic” United States (Schweber 1986). Here, the pragmatists are British and European.
For a superb cultural history of these and other debates, see Coen (2011).
The quote is from a letter from Forman to Dupree, 22 December, 1981. Cited by Heilbron on 10. “It was not smooth sailing, however,” Heilbron writes, “with the passionate Dupree, a former Naval officer who would have liked to try the leaders of FSM for mutiny. Paul and Karl Hufbauer, then Dupree’s teaching assistant, were sympathetic to FSM.”
Heilbron’s essay does an extra service in making clear that the internal/external divide meant two rather different things in Forman’s work. One meaning is familiar: The internal marked the intellectual space where scientists engaged with the natural world, without reference to issues beyond it. The external was the world of society, culture, and politics. Questions “internal” to physics (and physics was ‘special’ here) had no relation to questions “external” to it. It is precisely the existence of such a clearly marked boundary that cultural historians now deny. Yet, Forman also used the internal/external divide in a more consistently social sense, where the boundary was that between a discipline and the environment in which it functioned. Disciplines had traditions and ideals that were, as human products, no less “social” than were ideals in a broader milieu. If disciplinary norms were not timeless and ahistorical, however, they were also not to be thrown over in pursuit of the latest cultural trend. Disciplinary time moved slower than social time, and membership in a discipline meant that one had duties and responsibilities to its most fundamental tenets. Hence, the fact that all of the heroes of Forman’s various theses are disciplinary conservatives, whatever their political allegiances might be. Heilbron’s affectionate biography is littered with theological metaphors—appropriately, given how many such metaphors populate Forman and Heilbron’s work. For Forman, it becomes clear, both science and history are callings, and those who would abandon time-honored beliefs to chase after (or capitulate to) what is currently popular are weak-willed betrayers of a deeper faith.
References
Bloor, D. 1990. Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Coen, D.R. 2011. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Forman, P. 1970. Alfred Landé and the anomalous Zeeman effect, 1919–1921. Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 2: 153–261.
Heilbron, J.L. 1988. The earliest missionaries of the Copenhagen spirit. In Science in Reflection: The Israel Colloquium, ed. E. Ullmann-Margalit, 201–233. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hendry, J. 1980. Weimar culture and quantum causality. History of Science 18: 155–180.
Schweber, S.S. 1986. The empiricist temper regnant: Theoretical physics in the United States 1920–1950. Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 17: 55–98.
Wise, M.N. 1994. Pascual Jordan: Quantum mechanics, psychology, and National Socialism. In Science, Technology, and National Socialism, ed. M. Renneberg and M. Walker, 224–254. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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My thanks to Theodore Arabatzis, David Kaiser, and Norton Wise for comments and to Cathryn Carson, Helmut Trischler, and Alexei Kojevnikov for the invitation to participate in the conference from which this volume emerged.
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Seth, S. Forman at forty: New perspectives on “Weimar culture and quantum mechanics”. Metascience 22, 567–574 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-013-9789-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-013-9789-z