Prestige Asymmetry in American Physics: Aspirations, Applications, and the Purloined Letter Effect

Science in Context 30 (4):475-506 (2017)
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Abstract

Why do similar scientific enterprises garner unequal public approbation? High energy physics attracted considerable attention in the late-twentieth-century United States, whereas condensed matter physics – which occupied the greater proportion of US physicists – remained little known to the public, despite its relevance to ubiquitous consumer technologies. This paper supplements existing accounts of this much remarked-upon prestige asymmetry by showing that popular emphasis on the mundane technological offshoots of condensed matter physics and its focus on human-scale phenomena have rendered it more recondite than its better-known sibling field. News reports about high energy physics emphasize intellectual achievement; reporting on condensed matter physics focuses on technology. And whereas frontier-oriented rhetoric of high energy physics communicates ideals of human potential, discoveries that smack of the mundane highlight human limitations and fail to resonate with the widespread aspirational vision of science – a consequence I call “the purloined letter effect.”

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Joseph D. Martin
Durham University

References found in this work

Human nature and the limits of science.John Dupré - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning.Mary Midgley - 1992 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 34 (3):185-187.

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