Making theory: I. Producing physics and physicists in postwar America. II. Post-inflation reheating in an expanding universe

Details Making theory: I. Producing physics and physicists in postwar America. II. Post-inflation reheating in an expanding universe Making theory: I. Producing physics and physicists in postwar America. II. Post-inflation reheating in an expanding universe

Nov 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000phdt.........3k&link_type=abstract

Thesis (PhD). HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Source DAI-A 61/05, p. 2010, Nov 2000, 868 pages.

Physics

Scientific paper

This dissertation examines the reinvention of theoretical physics in the United States through pedagogical means after World War II. Physics graduate student enrollments ballooned immediately after the war. The unprecedented enrollments forced questions of procedures and standards for graduate training as never before. At the same time, the crush of numbers spurred an increased bureaucratization and, at least some American physicists feared, a different system of values than what had prevailed during the quieter interwar period. Out of these new bureaucratic and pedagogical developments, theoretical physics became a recognized specialty within American physics, surrounded by new ideas about what theory was for and how students should be trained to do it. Two case studies focus on developments within theoretical physics after the war, using pedagogy as a lens through which to understand the links between practices and practitioners. Within nuclear and particle physics, as Part II discusses, young graduate students and postdoctoral fellows puzzled over how to calculate with, and how to interpret, the simple line-drawings introduced by Richard Feynman in 1948. The number of distinct pictorial forms, calculational roles, and attributed meanings for the simple stick-figures quickly multiplied: rather than commanding a single use or interpretation, the diagrams came to be used for a wide variety of distinct tasks. Some theorists clung to the diagrams even as they declared the original theoretical framework from which the diagrams had sprung to be ``sterile'' and ``dead.'' These young theorists drew the diagrams much the same way as Feynman had, yet read content into them which had no correlate in the older approaches. Part III uses pedagogy to make sense of a similar series of changes within the long-dormant field of gravitational physics. Einstein's gravitational field equations proved to be no more obvious or auto-interpreting than Feynman's diagrams had been. Physicists after the war crafted new theoretical practices with which to approach questions within gravitational theory. During the middle decades of this century, American graduate students in physics learned to treat Einstein's famous theory in ways which would have been totally unrecognizable to Einstein himself-even as these new recruits were being trained to ``do'' gravitational physics.

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