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Why I am no longer a physicist, or, one person’s perspective on the relation of humanities
to science in our era |
I am often asked how I came to make
the transition from physics to classics.
As background, in the late 1970s the faculty appointment that I had had
in physics came to an end. (The details
need not concern us here.) At that time
I had two principal research interests, one in the commonly pursued area of
applying advanced mathematical systems to elementary particles, and the other
in an area not common among physicists (though extant), the history of
science. Given that I was determined to
continue a scholarly life, in principle I had the choice of pursuing the one or
the other or both. But in fact I
abandoned the theoretical physics project.
My pursuit of it had largely been for the purpose of forestalling
criticism of my spending time on humanities and on community affairs, and with
the end of my appointment I no longer had any appreciable incentive for
it. Indeed, any attraction it had for me
was obviated because I had come to believe that the discipline of physics was
inherently problematic.
I had originally become interested
in history of science as an undergraduate physics major. (This
interest was sparked by the late T. S. Kuhn, whose course I was able to take
when he was visiting at
But of course the real point in the
present context, and what I will attempt to explain here because I believe much
of it was of general interest and remains so today, is the alienation from the
profession in which I had been trained.
It had three aspects, which were respectively political, pedagogical,
and epistemological in nature. As to the
political, I will only say here that I came to believe that the profession was
an integral part of a political-economic-social system, the
As to pedagogy, many will agree that
the basic scientific education of the populace today in the
One might well doubt that today’s
physics profession itself is to blame for this situation, and indeed it is perhaps
understandable that the discipline along with others has retreated into the
proverbial ivory tower, and has confined the part of its educational role that
goes beyond training successors in its field to the enlightenment of those with
a modicum of intellectual background.
This has been carried out by such means as undergraduate education in
the Universities and writing articles for publications on the order of Scientific
American.
One would think this an honorable
enterprise, but the effort has succeeded no more than have the primary and
secondary schools in the basics, in my opinion because it has not been pursued
really seriously. When I taught physics
to general undergraduate students I found that the budgetary priority for this
enterprise was low in comparison with what went into training successors; that
almost all the students in such courses were there because of requirements for
their majors, so that they amounted to captive audiences; and, most
importantly, that there was little pedagogical tradition that would go beyond
teaching how to calculate the results of mathematical equations, which one
could build upon so as to inculcate a modicum of actual understanding of the
physical processes expressed by these equations. Moreover, I found that my concerns in this
area were little shared by my colleagues.
As for extra-curricular public
education, at least through the early 1980s (I have only glanced at the
situation sporadically since then) what physicists with access to the media
have carried out is a mixture of ex cathedra pronouncements of the
presumed workings of the world with failed attempts to cast these workings in
terms understandable by ordinary people.
That is to say, as to the first component, when addressing educated
people with whom they have some chance of communication, physicists speak of
“our” knowledge of the universe as if this knowledge were the property of
humankind, in spite of the circumstance that only a tiny fraction of humankind
has any inkling of it. Of course they
speak this way because this “we” is actually royal in
character, an expression of authority.
You are to take heed when you hear that “we” have discovered the quark
because the speaker represents what one 1970s New Left thinker called an icon
of a culture of expertise. You are not
supposed to understand what he (there is essentially no “she”) is talking
about; you are just supposed to believe it.
And of course you cannot understand it, in the sense of relating
the terms of the discourse to matters with which you are familiar, because
these terms are not devised with you as an audience in mind.
And then on the less common
occasions when physicists do attempt to relate their subject to familiar ideas,
they inevitably end in purveying false images.
The classic example is the idea of the atom as consisting of electrons,
visualized as spherical objects with defined boundaries, going around a
nucleus, like planets go around the sun.
In fact, as has now been known for a long time, electrons are in no way
objects with defined boundaries. (Rather, they are something like
diffuse packets of energy oscillating in the region of space corresponding to
the atom.)
In short, the physicists cannot
bring themselves to write accurately in Scientific American, or to speak
accurately when interviewed by the Tuesday science page of the New York
Times, whether because thinking of ways to do so is not a priority for
them, or because their community is so insular that its experience affords no
basis for such communication, or because they believe that a crude exposition
will suffice to keep the public happy and thus ensure continuation of funding
for their research.
So the pedagogy, and as to
epistemology, at the time of my separation I had come to believe that there was
a reason why the physicists could not explain what they were about. Namely, neither did they understand it
themselves. To be sure, they acted and
still act as if they do. (Granted, they
sometimes offer the proviso that “of course today’s theories may be altered by tomorrow’s.” But this
statement is an empty abstraction, issued in much the same manner as
astronomers telling us that eventually the sun will go cold: it has no
relevance to the here and now.) The
sycophantic science pages of the Times and the Washington Post
implicitly assure us that they do. But
can it really be said that the discourse of physicists refers to a world that
approaches the world we live in, in a way that an advanced and unprejudiced
visitor from, say, Alpha Centauri, could agree had meaningful content?
A parable. During the course of my humanities work I
have had occasion to look briefly at the ancient Indian Brāhmana
texts. In particular, the agnihotra
or sacred fire ritual involved making offerings to the fire god at sunrise, an
activity which seems to have been construed as the priests giving assistance to
the sunrise. The texts contain intricate
debates as to the exact proportions of the ritual elements, so that the matter
was pursued with care. The writers would
have been incredulous if a time-traveler from our era had told them that their
machinations had no more to do with the sunrise than the proverbial debate over
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
And of course no one from their own society was in a position to
criticize their belief system in terms they could appreciate since it was an
esoteric body of knowledge. (In large
measure the Upanishad literature arose as a rebellion against it, although that
is another story.)
I came to suspect that elementary
particle physics might be locked into a similar trap, as
follows. When I first got involved in the field everyone agreed that
an elementary particle was, among other things, something whose track you could
see in a variety of devices if it were electrically charged (see the spark
chamber discussion
on this site). Or if it were
electrically neutral, you could sometimes infer it from a gap between such
tracks made by charged examples. (That
is, the inference is that the neutral particle arose by being produced by the
charged particles at one end of the gap, and then decayed into the charged
particles at the other.) It all seemed
very obvious and believable.
In passing, in that context no less
a seemingly abstruse body of thought than Einstein’s special relativity theory
appeared to be borne out as correct in a clear fashion, and on a daily
basis. The theory predicts a
“time-dilation” effect, whereby clocks moving with speeds approaching that of
light appear to a stationary observer to be running slow, no matter what type
of clock is involved. Most of the
elementary particles are unstable, with a half-life characteristic of the type
of particle. That is, statistically
speaking about half of them have disappeared (to produce other particles) when
that amount of time has elapsed after their creation. Thus a collection of such particles functions
as a clock, which is accurate to the extent that their number is large enough
for statistical fluctuations to iron themselves out. Now when you produce a globule with a large
number of such objects of a given type at one of the national laboratories, and
make them travel at a high velocity, you in fact find that when measured by
time in the laboratory it takes longer for half of the objects to decay than
the half-life characteristic of that type.
Indeed, the discrepancy is by a quantitative amount which is precisely
what is calculated from the algebraic formula Einstein gave for the size of the
effect. How could anything be more
obviously related to the real world?
But then the definition of an
elementary particle changed. It was
proposed that certain esoteric phenomena that had previously been called
“resonances” also qualified as elementary particles, albeit of species whose
half-life was so short that they did not live long enough to make tracks in one
of the standard devices. The existence
of a given example had to be inferred from observations on the tracks of
particles which could be hypothesized as having been produced by it at
the end of its short life. The reason
for the proposal to elevate these phenomena to the status of elementary
particles was that they fit into certain theoretical schemes in much the same
way as did the longer-lived particles.
(To be precise, these theoretical schemes identified the particles with
the branch of advanced mathematics known as “group theory.” It was proposed, namely, that the various
species of one important set of elementary particles constituted the respective
members of a “representation” of a certain specific mathematical “group.” This group has certain properties, just as
the set of positive integers 1, 2, 3, etc., has certain properties; Euclidean
geometry has certain properties; and so on.
So the physicists said that the mutual relations of the given set of
elementary particles were determined by the properties of the specific group,
much as the tendency of objects in space to move in straight lines is
determined by the properties of Euclidean geometry.)
Of course science has made strides
on the basis of unseen phenomena in the past.
(In particular, one can now observe the actual contours of the larger
molecules with an electron microscope, something unimaginable when the concept
of “molecule” was first proposed.) The
correlation of phenomena previously thought distinct, such as the resonances
and longer lived particles in this case, certainly has precedent as well. (Think of Copernican astronomy’s realization
that the earth is just another planet.)
But I began to suspect the new order
of things when I realized that physicists were distorting the history of the
subject, and in a way which artificially enhanced the significance of theory as
compared with observation. As a good
example, in the 1950s an example of an elementary particle of a new type was
possibly detected in the natural, “cosmic” radiation coming to the earth. I say “possibly” because, in addition to
other uncertainties noted at the time by the physicists who reported the event,
the observation was made using the most primitive of the devices that detect
electrically charged particles by means of the tracks they leave, a technique
called “nuclear emulsion.” (This
technique utilized a stack of plates of the same type of material as is used to
make photographic negatives -- or was so used before the arrival of the digital
camera. Grains of the material were
produced around ion pairs made by charged particles traversing the device, and
could be fixed by a process similar to that used in developing photographic
negatives.) The technique was notorious
for the difficulty in analyzing its data and for its unreliability. Yet for all that, when theoretical physicists
were positing schemes around 1960 to collect the known types of elementary
particles into symmetric patterns, some of these schemes in fact included the
nuclear emulsion candidate, considered seriously if only for the sake of
argument. (I know this especially
because as a graduate student I happened to report on the state of these
schemes at a seminar held at the time.)
Then a few years later, the first
actually definite example of the particle in question was reported, having been
observed when created at one of the national laboratories. In a footnote the observers duly acknowledged
the possibility that the nuclear emulsion event had also been an example. That footnote notwithstanding, the new event
was promptly touted as a case of something being “discovered” after it was
first “predicted” by theory, forgetting the nuclear emulsion candidate. (That version of events found its way into
textbooks, and was still in them when I checked a few years ago, long after the
times of which I speak.) When pressed,
physicists would say that the nuclear emulsion event was not definite, and so
could not be judged to precede the theory.
Yet as a matter of chronicling events, theoreticians did take the
“indefinite” object to be something of interest as I have said, and did so
before the more definite object was observed.
(And we were all raised to believe that, while history cannot be reduced
to a chronicle of events, neither can it contradict this chronicle.) Thus, although generations of students have
been taught that theoretical physicists in this case posited the particular
particle through their imaginative, inspired, and (especially) isolated
conceptualizing, whereupon their dutiful (read: plodding) experimental
colleagues went to work and found the thing, this is not so. But the
received version of the history certainly bears out the relation between theory
and experiment as my former colleagues understand it.
Enter the quark. (The term was acknowledged at the time to
have been taken from the cries of seagulls in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,
and not from his more widely known Ulysses as one physics textbook later
put the matter.) The endpoint of the
theoretical considerations of the time was to posit that except for the
electron, the photon which makes up visible light and other electromagnetic
waves, and certain related objects, all the elementary particles including the
formerly-termed resonances were composites of more basic entities, called
“aces” or “quarks,” of which the latter designation caught on.
To be sure, there was something of a
problem. People looked for free quarks and
did not find them. But not to worry, the
picture was modified by a “quark-containment” mechanism: the theory of quantum
chromodynamics. Indeed, this theory has
nice properties from a theoretical standpoint.
(It is what is called “renormalizable,” whereas a number of alternative
theories one might conceivably posit are not.)
Most importantly, it does the job: it predicts that the quarks, while
existent, could never emerge as something observable in any normal manner. Only certain new systems that contain them
could be observed. Indeed, eventually
these were. (Here I am aware that in the
1990s, what was touted in media such as the Times
as having been “discovered,” or some such term, was the quarks themselves. However, some works written for experts in
the 2000s do verify that the objects that were actually observed on those
occasions, according to current criteria as to what constituted observation,
were in fact the more gross systems that theoretically contained the
quarks.) That is to say, theory had
successfully predicted observation. QED.
It is all very nice from the
perspective of the physicist, but for everyone else it has gotten so far away
from what is palpable that one must ask the following. Could the advanced visitor from Alpha Centauri
recognize elementary particle physics today as correlating a given number of
identifiable observed phenomena with a given number of identifiable mental
hypotheses? Could he or she then even
formulate the question of whether or not the relation of these given numbers
was reasonable, that is, if the physicists have truly explained the world in a
satisfactory way? Or to put it more
bluntly, would it be agreed that what elementary particle physicists call
“science” is really science?
Why humanities, then? In the first place it is natural to ask if we
terrestrial humans ourselves can answer these questions or at least formulate
them. If so, presumably something like
“philosophy of science” would be involved.
I am currently out of touch with the actual discipline of philosophy of
science, but at the time of my separation from physics it seemed to confine
itself to investigations on the order of clarifying what “observation”
constitutes which treated the entity synchronically. That might not help, since in practice what
physicists themselves meant by the concept seemed to change over the period of
time of my association with them. But
perhaps this approach could change.
(Indeed, it may well be that what is needed is to eschew the position
that elementary particle “physics” is actually a species of the discipline that
was practiced in the 17th and 18th centuries. That view is propagated by the physicists
themselves, but, as I have suggested above, they do not seem to understand
their history.)
To be sure, in recent years the
humanities, or if you prefer the social sciences, have indeed studied the
belief systems of scientists from a different angle than asking how cogent they
are. This is the movement known as
“sociology of science.” Philosophers of
science have a certain reluctance to second-guess the scientists, and so do the
sociologists of science. Thus their
guiding principle is not to ask whether or not scientific theories are actually
related to a posited real world, but to set that question aside, and to focus
instead on the possibility that these theories constitute a social construction
whether they are true or not. That is to
say, one asks if quarks and the like are as much a product of the human mind as
are gender roles, the criterion of race, and (most recently discussed) the
dichotomy between domestic and wild animals.
One asks if it is a product whose occasion one can at least hope to
understand from examination of its socio-economic-cultural-historical context.
I do not know whether or not this
movement as constituted is sound. In
passing, I feel sure that the functioning of artificial satellites and of the
probes to and upon Mars, whose pinpoint accuracy is calculable from a
combination of
But at the very least the
sociologists of science can offer an object lesson, given the defensive
reaction they have provoked beginning in the 1990s. There was namely a “good cop, bad cop”
response by the scientists. On the one
hand, in such public statements as they have made on the movement the
prestigious elementary particle physicists (who tend to be politically liberal)
have confined themselves to pooh-poohing its results as “obviously” faulty,
since “of course” there is progress in science.
Perhaps they also whisper more ad hominem arguments in their
corridors. (One recalls the old refrain:
“people do history of science because they can’t do physics.”) On the other, some solid-state physicists,
chemists, etc., (who tend more to the political right) have lobbied to cut off
funding to the supposed miscreants. In either case the scientists
deny the academic respectability of the field, as if it were less worthy than,
say, home economics.
All this came to a head in 1996 in
an episode where a certain physicist, a sort of intermediate cop, published an
article in a humanities journal. This
piece, entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” dropped the names both of several physics
theories and of several studies of them by humanities/social sciences people,
and appeared to give something approaching a deconstruction of something. Qua humanities article it seemed unfocussed,
brought in too many issues to be treated reasonably in a single article of
journal proportions, and in the last analysis did not
conclude with anything that looked like it bore on its nominal subject of
“quantum gravity.” Nonetheless it got
through whatever reviewing process was applied, and was published because,
according to a later statement by one of the editors of the journal in
question, it appeared to be an honest effort by one physicist to come to grips
with questions facing his field, even if it was a bit “hokey.” But at the same time the piece’s author
confided elsewhere that it was a joke.
His statement there was to the effect that he meant to expose the
fallaciousness of the science studies movement, whose members should stick to
deconstructing the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and leave serious discourse to
qualified people.
What is particularly telling about
this incident is what it says about our times.
If this person had gotten an article that was not seriously meant into a
physics journal, he surely would have been drummed out of the profession for
falsifying data. But of course his joke
was “only” on the humanities. At the
time, another of the journal’s editors wrote an Op-Ed in the Times in
which he pointed out that the dishonesty involved in the hoax reflected
unfavorably on all of academia. Still,
one suspects the response of most readers was that he was taking the matter too
seriously.
Two lessons to be learned from all
this are that, first, you cannot expect the “scientists” to be rational in
responding to any study of their endeavor that does not automatically endorse
its assumptions, even if it allows that these might be correct, and second,
that you had better watch your back if you embark on one. If one reads the criticisms of sociology of
science adduced by physicists, it is clear that they do not recognize the distinction
the latter carefully draw between bracketing a subject’s truth claims and
debunking them. I infer that this
failure is because the physicists simply view as equivalent any statement
whatsoever about their particular subject that does not recognize their own
absolute authority over these truth claims.
And if you wish to question this authority, be aware that we no longer
live in the times when “Renaissance Men” were taken seriously for humanities as
well as for their science.
I do not feel that I can contribute
to such modern science studies cogently at present (though I once contemplated
doing so eventually), but others might be motivated to pursue critical study of
science from a more normative stance than the sociologists of science have taken. Granted that the powerful in society will
largely ignore you, so that you will always be on the defensive, you might feel
that science is too important to be left to the persons called scientists. Even if few listen to you, at least you will
know.
In any case, as for the humanities
in general, if what I have suggested here is wrong and scientists are not
really ignorant about their own subject, as a rule they are ignorant about
others. And ignorance is particularly
dangerous when it accrues to persons with the prestige accorded to scientists
in our times. Someone should study the
other subjects, to keep them alive if for no other reason, while perhaps hoping
that a new Renaissance will eventually arrive.
E. F. Beall
December, 2006